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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!

The first thing most people over the age of twenty-five think of when you ask them to name a song about wine is probably UB40’s Red Red Wine, which is ironic because they’re all totally drinking beer in the vid for that tune.

In a similarly ironic case of music-meets-wine creative worlds colliding, the band I’ve been playing in for… well… for a long time (some of you will remember us as the dudes who recorded a rock version of the Snow Miser/Heat Miser song, and a reggae/dub take on the Oompa Loompa Theme – we’re kinda into the holidays), has just released a video (available for your viewing pleasure below, after the jump) for a tune titled Wine Kissing Days.

The ironic part: the song is about the social pleasures of sharing wine (a near-constant theme among these virtual pages), was filmed in part at local PA producer Chaddsford Winery (which has been profiled here) BUT… apart from playing bass on the tune I had nothing whatsoever to do with it. More on that in a minute or two. Also, since we know that the music played during wine tasting impacts the qualities that people recall about the wine, if I were a tasting room manager I’d buy a few copies (you know, like, 10,000 or so) of this song. Just sayin’.

Anyway, you can hit up iTunes to grab the tune (and the album from which it comes, “Tricky, Seabass & the Hun” – and damn, it sure makes me feel old to even talk about the conceit of an album at this point), but I’m giving away a copy of the new Steve Liberace Band CD (another near-ancient conceit!) to three lucky randomly-selected commenters!…

Back to the irony:

Wine Kissing Days has lyrics that evoke a wine-tasting note (“tobacco, & leather, & pepper I’ve found”) but I had zero lyrical responsibility for the tune – our head-honcho-singer-songwriter Steve Liberace happens to live about one mile as-the-crow-flies from Chaddsford Winery in PA.

The band has played events at Chaddsford before, and Steve has done his fair share of hanging out there drinking vino (and hanging out at his home drinking their vino), and basically the song is about the general life-lovin’ positive vibes you feel when getting buzzed on good wine with good friends (for more on Chaddsford, check out my interview with winemaker Eric Miller, and the feature on PA’s vintage-of-a-lifetime 2007 reds; for more SL Band, check out the vid for “When You Turn Blue” which is a slightly darker song, being about drowning someone and all that).

The vid for Wine Kissing Days was produced, filmed and directed by the intrepid team at AverageEnthusiast.com and features portions captured on-location (during a rare November snowstorm) at Chaddsford Winery as well as some live action of the band “rocking out” as my daughter likes to term it. For more of the band-meets-wine thang, check out my Summer Solstice music festival field-test of boxed wine, and the 20-year Merlot retrospective and on-the-back-patio gig at Peconic Bay Winery in Long Island). While I’m pretty sure that the tee-shirt-over-long-sleeves fashion choice will eventually come back to haunt us, I’m also pretty sure that the MTD bass guitar I’m playing will always look better than I will.

As for the giveaway:

Leave a comment telling us about your favorite wine-related or wine-inspired tune, and in one week I will randomly select three winning comments at random whose authors will each receive a CD copy of Tricky, Seabass & the Hun.  Enjoy the vid – bonus points if you can find the lady heading to the ladies room behind the band in the live shots…

Cheers!