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HiYa! If you're new here, you may want to Sign Up to get all the latest wine coolness delivered to your virtual doorstep. I've also got short, easily-digestible mini wine reviews and some educational, entertaining wine vids. If you're looking to up your wine tasting IQ, check out my book How to Taste Like a Wine Geek: A practical guide to tasting, enjoying, and learning about the world's greatest beverage. Cheers!

This week, I’m teaming up with NobleWorksCards.com to give away a set of ten wine-themed cards (valued at around $30)!

As will surprise none of you who know me, several of the cards push the envelope (ha!… okay… sorry…) on safe-for-workness, all are wine-themed, and all of them are amusing. The pack includes handfuls of funny birthday cards, humorous get-well-soon cards and a smattering of cards that could be used for Valentine’s Day or as greeting cards. Basically, you’ll find something in the pack that fits the bill for one (or more) of your wine-geeky friends or family.

The entire Card Pack can be viewed at the following links: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 (yes, I know those are small, but I wanted to squeeze them in without making the post two thousand words; look, do you want a chance to win something or not?!?).

Here’s how the giveaway will work:

• Check out the cards using the links above, and let us know in the comments which is your fave (and why).
• On Tuesday, April 30 at 8PM ET (5PM PT), I will randomly choose a winner from the commenters.

It’s that simple; but you also need to be a fully-evolved home sapiens living in the continental U.S. who is of legal drinking age to be eligible to win (sorry, Cro-Magnons)!.

As for my fave to kick this off (and no, I’m not eligible to win): it’s a bit crude of me (ah, you expected nothing less!), but I’ve got to go with this one as my personal favorite (there’s just a part of it that, deep down, actually rings poignantly true… in a sick sort of way).

Cheers – and good luck!

So, like, what is this stuff, anyway?
I taste a bunch-o-wine (technical term for more than most people). So each week, I share some of my wine reviews (mostly from samples) and tasting notes with you via twitter (limited to 140 characters). They are meant to be quirky, fun, and easily-digestible reviews of currently available wines. Below is a wrap-up of those twitter wine reviews from the past week (click here for the skinny on how to read them), along with links to help you find these wines, so that you can try them for yourself. Cheers!

• 04 Ferrari Perle (Trento): So… do you like apples? How about we serve them with toast and almonds, howd'ya like them apples? $35 B+ >>find this wine<<
• 10 Schloss Schonborn Erbacher Marcobrunn Riesling Kabinett (Rheingau): Limelight, lime bright! First lime I see tonight, ohh yeah… $21 B+ >>find this wine<<
• 09 Chateau de Bel Bordeaux Superieur (Bordeaux Superieur): Grilled-food ready, and evoking the gravelly subsoil from which it sprang. $15 B >>find this wine<<
• 09 Finca el Origen PHI (Vista Flores): Deliciously broad, sweetly generous, kindly willing to dry rub herbs all over your steaks. $70 A- >>find this wine<<
• 10 Finca el Origen Gran Reserva Malbec (Uco Valley): Toasty smoke clears, revealing an artistic scaffolding that's built to last. $25 B+ >>find this wine<<
• 11 Finca el Origen Reserva Cabernet Sauvignon (Uco Valley): Shaking off the dust of Bordeaux Superieur from its tart, lively boots. $10 B >>find this wine<<
• 12 Finca el Origen Reserva Malbec (Uco Valley): Gritty, but fresh, showdown at the OK Corral, but with violets in the shop windows. $11 B >>find this wine<<
• 12 Finca el Origen Reserva Torrontes (Cafayate): A pungent, floral ride with an extended grapefruit pith vs. mineral photo finish. $12 B >>find this wine<<
• 12 Finca el Origen Viognier (Uco Valley): Like a hippo ballerina, able to execute a tart, tropical pirouette practically on a dime. $13 B >>find this wine<<
• 12 Vietti Moscato d'Asti Cascinetta (Moscato d'Asti): Yeah, it's a bit cloying, but it's also so damn loveable, floral, and friendly. $15 B >>find this wine<<
• 05 Bibi Graetz Colore (Toscana): Ripe and rich as they come, yet dancing happily and lithely on its own spicy, juicy, electric energy $700 A >>find this wine<<
• 07 Royal Tokaji 5 Puttonyos Red Label (Tokaji): As much orange as you'll get outside FL, as much honey as you'll get outside a hive. $43 A- >>find this wine<<
• 10 Bex Riesling (Mosel): A short burst of late spring and early summer, tucked neatly into a glass and served up on the cheap. $10 B- >>find this wine<<
• 11 Blue Fish Original Riesling (Pfalz): Might perk up a simple meal, but ultimately too simple to perk up much of your interest. $10 C+ >>find this wine<<

One of the interesting things to which the Wines of Argentina folks subject you as a judge in the Argentina Wine Awards (aside from tasting enough tannic Malbecs in one blind awards flight that you can no longer feel your gums, or taking you horse-wrangling in the Andes) is a seminar in which you’re one of the featured speakers.

For the 2013 AWAs, the seminar topic was “Wines for the Next Generation” (speaking largely about Millennials, in this case), and our group of international judges was asked to choose a wine that we felt represented what the next gen wine consumers are drinking in our respective markets. And so we sat on stage in panels of two or three judges, with an Argentine winemaker chairing the discussion as we talked about the wines, and our markets.

I want to tell you about each of the wines that my fellow judges and I picked (a task with which some of you helped me, by the way!). But before I do that, I want to tell you what the majority of our group of judges said about wines that appeal to Millennials.

And it’s easy to do, despite the fact that as judges we hailed from a somewhat dizzying array of backgrounds (new and traditional media, wine service, winemaking, and other fields), and despite the fact that as an ensemble we hailed from Italy, Brazil, the UK, Australia, Spain, Korea, China, Canada, Mexico, the U.S. and Switzerland. Not exactly people all cut from the same cloth – wine had brought us together, and the love of it was the only common denominator between we hailed (aside form us all being humans, I mean).

It’s easy to do because we almost all said exactly the same thing. When the last of us to speak at the seminar, UK Master Sommelier Laura Rhys, presented a summary slide titled “What The New Generation Wants From A Wine” it echoed so closely the previous sentiments of 90% of our collective speeches and presentations that I later asked her if she’d authored it on the fly after seeing the rest of us speak (only because that’s precisely what I would’ve done myself). “No!” she exclaimed, I think taking my question incorrectly at first as an accusation instead of an expression of how impressed I was by her slide deck. “I wrote that up ages ago!”

If accomplished professionals in an area of business, hailing from totally different backgrounds, separately converge to similar conclusions on a topic, then you probably ought to listen to what they have to say if you’re at all interested in that same business (in this case, selling vino)…

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One of the reasons that I’ve been scaling back a bit here on 1WD (less than I’d like to, actually… because I just can’t help myself… curse you, beguiling wines, CURSE YOU!!!) is that I’ve got more paying gigs competing for my time. Which sounds great superficially, but quickly turns into an oh-crap-I’ve-got-a-term-paper-due-this-week! feeling for me, particularly when I’ve got a loooooong list of stories and wines that I want to share here.

But paying gigs, well, pay, and what’s published here on 1WD is more like a spurt of free passion [ insert your own inappropriate jokes about passion spurts here ] than it is a money-making endeavor (a lot more, actually). And so it’s the free stuff that has to make room when the paying stuff comes to call, since I’ve got mouths to feed (two of which won’t or can’t take wine as regular sustenance). So…

I’m pleased to announce that there’s a new item now taking up space on my growing To Do list. I’m now the resident wine expert (whatever that means!) for Answers.com. While this is a bit of an odd gig for me, in that I’m not being paid to be my odd writing self (i.e., it involves writing wine material aimed mostly at beginners, and using a second-person narrative, without references to douchebags or deep tracks from late 1980s progressive rock albums), I’m excited to try something new and different. Yes, it will take some time away from 1WD, but I’ll still be posting here regularly (just not quite as regularly as some of you might be used to; see, I’m so worked up over all of this that I’m ending sentences with prepositions!). 1WD remains where I share the things that touch me most deeply, the things I really, really, really want to share with you all. I don’t see that ever changing.

I’m also a bit intimidated by the new gig; my Holy Crap! moment came when I saw these stats on Answers.com’s reach:

Yikes!…

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