A good article from the Wall Street Journal food and drink section on what to look for on the wine label. The advice? Be sure the wine isn’t too old, doesn’t have too much alcohol, and stay away from what they call “critter labels.” Read it here…
Well the weekend is here and we will all, hopefully, have our fun, our sun, and our projects. What’s that? You need something to do? Bring out the power tools, here’s your first project:
Over at the Blue Collar Mountain Biking site, they have a great post from a little over a year ago on how to build your very own ‘blue collar bicycle stand.’ I modified the support structure a bit, and added a few more bolts here an there, and that’s it. It should be enough to hold a light-weight tandem for some simple tuning of brakes and spokes. And, most of all, it was fun. You may download the plans for this project here, or view them as a full resolution image. What’s that you say? You need a wine to accompany your build-a-tandem-bicycle-stand project?
Might I recommend the politically-savvy and well-branded 2004 Red Bicyclette Chardonnay? Chill it deeply, that is, deeper than you normally would because you’ll be in the sunshine, out doors, working on this bike stand. Fitting and apt for your project is the wine label, although this time we here at wineandwheels.com did not purchase the bottle because we have a bad habit of prejudging a wine by its label. Nope. This time we bought it because, well, we’re American and it has the word “bicyclette!”
Gerry Glasgow, the vice president of marketing for E & J Gallo Winery, upon traveling to France with other Gallo executives comments on the almost 5,000 photos they returned with:
Red bicycles seemed to recur in the pictures [...] but red bikes sounded American, so it became Red Bicyclette. French, but easily translatable (emphasis added).
Baguettes in a handlebar basket, a bicyclist in a beret, and a little dog (with a baguette in its mouth, how bone-afied!) were added and a brand image was born. Finally, as Frank Prial, no stranger to the catch phrase wrote last year for the New York Times:
Studies have shown that 90 percent of all wine drunk in this country is consumed within 30 days after it is purchased, indicating that aging and cellaring are irrelevant for most consumers. Like Yellow Tail, the new Gallo line of French wines, Red Bicyclette, counts on a catchy name and clever packaging – not wine snobbery – to make sales.
So fear not if this isn’t in your cellar; get ye to a nunnery winery and pick up a bottle for the weekend.
Happy Inauguration Day!
