Wine Blogging Wednesday! I remember when I made the logo that is currently in use for the monthly topical wine tasting event. The logomark was an obvious riff off of the one used here, with two wine stains indicating, well, more than one person drinking some wine. And from the look of things there were over 40 plus wine drinkers swirling and sniffing and spitting and drinking for the past WBW.

Over at Lenndevours, the next installment of WBW is not only #48, but the 4 year anniversary of what I actually believe was the first successful wine social network, no matter how informal or how loosely ran. And the best part was that it was created without a platform, a VC play, a “path to revenue” It was a bunch of wine bloggers and a great idea. So my congratulations to everyone that has participated over the years to make this thing pretty fuckin’ cool.

Ok, so the topic of #48 is “back to your roots” Now this ins’t a discussion on terroir, or hair color, or even ancestry. It a suggestion to go back to that first wine you drank. And not the stuff you shoulder-tapped out of the mini mart on the corner where your Uncle bought his smokes. We aren’t talking the “fortified wine varietal” here. No Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill, although that is probably what accounted for one of my earliest hangovers, and another reason I tend to avoid Modesto, from whence the liquid evil is brewed. We are talking REAL wine, like in the kind with a cork and maybe even some history behind it. And with this in mind, I bring you the Chianti!

Who hasn’t drank from the mouth of the wickerman, at a beach party, or a spaghetti dinner back in our misspent youth and thought “EYE-Talian wine is very good?” I remember collecting the finished bottles and pluggin the neck with those cheap dime store candles to get that “Creature Features” drippy wax action going. Sharp to the taste, easy on the wallet, the wicker basket chianti was always a staple in my early forays into buying wine for Crazy Sauce spaghetti nights in school. It wasn’t until much later in my life that I realized that Chianti came in a “regular” wine bottle and could cost more than I made that day washing dishes at the local diner. And then of course it took a flesh eating psychologist to catapult the Chianti into the lexicon of often repeated phrases from pop movies, and made me wonder “what the fuck is a father bean?” It must be noted however that in the book of the same, Dr. Lecter says “I ate his liver with some fava beans and a big Amarone”. Guess the pedestrian American film market just couldn’t wrap their heads around pairing a big-bodied, dry Italian wine with a census taker.

So, for WBW #48 I plan on revisiting the old wicker bottle, and then a bottle of an Amarone for bonus points, and see if indeed, it would have made the movie any better. Links to WBW #48 will be posted on the internets August 13th over at Lenn’s blog.