Category Archives: $20 – $30

This Wine is For The Working Girl

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A to Z Pinot Noir
Oregon

Producer: A to Z Wineworks
Importer: N/A
Year: 2008
Price: $21.99

She steps into the apartment and closes the door with a heavy sigh, leaning against it to kick off first one treacherous heel, and then the other. What the hell had she been thinking wearing heels that day? No matter. The apartment is empty and quiet, the first room she has entered that day without an immediate ambush of questions, demands, or issues with the storyboards. The storyboards! They are a million miles away as she makes her way to the kitchen, opens the fridge, and mentally calculates if any dish can be created out of cereal, ketchup, and cottage cheese… Some “Man vs. Wild” makeshift version of lasagna, perhaps?

Another sigh. No, no. She won’t go there. She will order sushi. Retracing her steps to the living room, she reaches for a glass and a bottle she has been saving for just this kind of day. The kind where everything was against her – clients, executives, assistants, the guy at Starbucks, the CTA… But she moved here for a reason. She worked her way up the proverbial ladder, against the proverbial grain. And for all the negatives, her outlook is eternally positive. Yes, she will order sushi, and she will persevere. She will continue to cross her T’s, dot her I’s, mind her P’s and Q’s, and enjoy her A to Z.

This Wine is For Sunday Blues

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Foris Pinot Noir
Oregon

Producer: Foris
Importer: n/a
Year: 2008
Price: $18.99

Ruby. Bright. Balanced and semi-chewy. This wine is the cure for a case of the end-of-the-weekend blues. It is classier than your current mood, but doesn’t mind keeping you company while you dwell on the looming prospect of the week ahead, the disconnect between your dreams and reality. After allowing some time for that pity party, it subtly reminds you that there is more to work than the cubicle awaiting your arrival tomorrow morning, more to life than the grande Pike you will methodically pick up on the way in, and more to you than the defeated outlook you are about to boldly shake off…

This Wine is For Your Franco-Bistro Fantasy

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Newton Claret
Napa

Producer: Newton Vineyard
Importer: N/A
Vintage: 2007
Price: $25.00

How very American, to take a French wine (Bordeaux) and an English term (Claret) and create something that is best enjoyed here. Glasses clink and silverware rattles on trays carried by dark strangers who snake their way through the maze of diners. When your very dashing date dashes off to the restroom, you take the moment to indulge your Franco-bistro fantasy…

Alone at the table, you are a fatalistic, emotionally beleaguered artist, thinking deeply and wearing a beret, your eyes alighting on all things beautiful among your surroundings – the glint of a diamond on a well-heeled socialite’s finger, the smile exchanged between two lovers in the corner booth, the story of a work mishap that has all colleagues roaring with laughter. In this bustling scene, it is almost as if you have somehow stumbled into a colorful Renoir masterpiece… And yet, the greatest realization is that this moment is real.

Lost in reflection, you recline in your seat, one hand absentmindedly tracing the pattern of the tablecloth, the other raising the glass to your lips, which have curled in a subtle, charmed, almost Parisian smile.