Happy Holidays, beeeeaaatches!!!

This is how *real* rock stars do the holidays, folks.

Take whatever holiday wine drinking advice you read with a serious heaping of salt grains (yes, even mine), and then drink whatever you want… just make sure it’s good stuff (to you), okay?

Hug your SO/loved ones/dogs/cats/gerbils/nutria. Be kind. Be generous. Be merry.

Oh, and embedded below, there’s a little ditty from the Steve Liberace Band (partially pictured above) to get you into the holiday spirit.

Cheers!

Quick, get ready to freak out; I am about to talk about a wine that was not a sample, but for which I paid using my very own hard-earned cash! The atom might destabilize!!

It’s true. About the wine being purchased, I mean, not about the atom (I think).

The short version of the story is that at 1WD HQ, I tend to do a pre-Thanksgiving Thanksgiving meal, in which we indulge in home cooking, and focus on healthier versions of the Turkey Day classics, paired up with lots of wines from the sample pool.

Only this time, I found myself in desperate need of more than the usual pick-me-up, and decided to break into a bottle that I’d picked up on my lonesome, and have been not-so-patiently waiting for an excuse to crack open and enjoy.

As you will see from the inset pic and details below, much of what we drank – including that self-procured vino – are slightly different takes on wine world staples…

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Ah, holiday wine pairing articles.

I know, most of you hate ‘em.

Trouble is, when it comes to wine drinkers, that vitriol puts us squarely in the minority. Many, many drinkers search for this kind of thing at pretty much every holiday, so it’s up to wine-writer-folk-types to try to make the dreaded duty of holiday wine matchups interesting (a daunting task, when so much of it has been done already that you always run the risk of the article being staler than a box of Capt’n Crunch left open for a month at a Jersey Shore beach house).

I’m happy to report that my Winter holiday installment this year has been made engaging courtesy of the visual wunderkinds over at Fix.com. Titled “Festive Wines Yule Love: Celebrate the Season With Our Holiday Wine Guide,” they’ve put quite impressive visuals onto my overviews of the unsung wines that deserve an airing when the weather gets chillier and the snow starts falling (of course, that’s already happened to us in mid-Autumn… ok, whatever…). Take a gander at how they visualize the “what to expect” aspect of the wines’ aromas and flavors – it’s just freakin’ cool, maaaaaaan!

Below is an embed of the infographic for your viewing pleasure, and so that you can flame me for not including your personal favorite holiday go-to vino in my list…

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