Sassy Sidenote: Let's Blend Our Wine-Hyperdecanting!

I enjoy wine.
A nice, chilled, white on a summer day or a yummy red with an equally yummy meal-yes, please. And thank you.

That being said I don't really know what to look for when choosing a wine as far as quality is concerned. I do know that the older, the better- but those wines are expensive...so I mainly just choose wine by the label which has proved successful thus far. Jon and I bought a moderately (meaning $10.99) priced wine the other night and as he cracked it open he suggested that we throw it in the blender first.

I was confused, did he want to make wine smoothies? If so, that's weird-but I'm game.
No, a wine smoothie was not what he was after.
Jon reads "The Blog Of Tim Ferriss" and he said that Mr. Ferris mentioned how to "hyper decant" (essentially, aging your wine five years in 20 seconds).

Basically, when people do that swishing around the glass with their red they are letting air get into the wine, thus enhancing the flavor. So if that little swish, swish in the wine glass works imagine what a blender would do?! Well, we followed Tim's advice and blended half of our wine (for roughly 20-30 seconds) and saved the other half for a taste test.

At this point I left the room so that Jon could poor the two specimens of wine so that my taste test would be blind. He brought me two wine glasses, I tasted both and immediately had a clear winner and sure enough, it was the blended wine! Like I said, I don't really know what makes wine "good" so I can't really tell you if the " bouquet was pungent" or it had a "nice oakey flavor", but I did know that the wine that had been blended tasted A LOT better.

So go ahead and try it, and come back here and let me know your results!

(Ed note: We used red wine for this experiment. I'm not sure if white would work, but someone try it and let me know!)

Music Monday: Bruno Mars

I may a little late to this party but are you guys fans of Bruno Mars?
I had heard his Grenade song on the radio but that was about it. But then one morning I saw him perform on the TODAY show and I was transfixed by his energy! There was something about his stage presence that made me not able to stop watching! His performance was old school about his energy-very James Brown.
(fast forward to the 2 minute mark)


Soon after seeing his performance I checked his CD out of the library and found that I really loved a lot of his music. And, what made me like him even more is that Glee covered some of his songs.



Are you a fan of Bruno Mars? Do you have a favorite song of his?

Beach Walk

My commute takes me right along side of the beach, while commuting is not on my list of favorite things I feel lucky to have such a pretty drive ("When the dog bites, when the bee stings, when I'm feeling sad, I simply remember commuting and then I don't feel soooo bad"-it does have a nice ring to it though).

When I leave the house nice and early it is such a beautiful sight to see the moon bouncing off the ocean. Its really quite lovely. On my way home from work one day I saw a person walking down the beach with their dog-now this is not a rare occurrence but it was the first time I actually noticed it, like really tuned in ya know?

So I decide that when I had time off of work I would be that person walking aimlessly down the beach with their furry best friend. I took two weeks off for the holiday season and penciled in my beach walking then.

Jon thought that my idea was a good one so he came along too.

In a pleasant change of events the weather was really something spectacular. It was still slightly chilly but the sun was burning bright!

It was truly a day that re-charged me. I love those days.