My crazily-talented friend Ellie designed wine labels for her design company, Flywheel, to give away for holiday gifts.

I’m full of indecision.  Whether I could justify becoming a client-quickly!-to get a leftover bottle of this awesome wine.

Whether I’d choose the wine that complements beef or duck or pork.

Whether I could ever be as funny as the backside of the label:

The next time you arrive at a party, bottle of red/white/bubbly in hand, surprise your hosts with Popptags.

Special Popptags for the holiday season include: 

              ’Tis the season to get tipsy!

              You deserve the best.  I could afford this.  Happy Holidays!

Poppags, 3 for $9.95

Whenever I was invited to a birthday party as a child, my mom took me to Target and let me roam free to choose a gift in the $12 range (a price that didn’t seem arbitrary until now; I guess I figured this was a universal birthday-gift-giving-price). Problem was, I always came back with a gift I wanted for myself and I would be upset, and inexplicably shocked, to have to part with it.

So the story would continue, as an adult, with this wine thermometer. It clamps right onto a standard wine bottle and compares the bottle’s actual temperature against guidelines for chardonnay, pinot noir, and port, among others.

Best of all, it’s just $9.50. Enough money left to add a card (or a chocolate bar).

Today marks the release of the 2008 Beaujolais Nouveau.

Many oenophiles say the quality of the 3rd-Thursday-of-November-spectacle doesn’t measure up to the hype. And this year’s crop is particularly weak.

Nonetheless, I’m planning to buy a bottle. The labels are pretty. It’s a fun way to celebrate the beginning of the end of the year. Also, I enjoy tracking where I’ve been when I’ve tasted past vintages of Beaujolais Nouveau. The first was in college.

With Halloween behind us it is apparently time to think about holiday gifts.

Normally this would make me gag, but in the case of wine gift baskets–bring on Christmakwanzakah.

Bottlerocket is a fun wine store on West 19th Street (which I found out about via some free wine tastings).

In the store, wines are arranged according to what types of foods they’d go well with: “take out,” “seafood,” “treats,” etc.

Another perk of this store is its gift baskets, ahem, pails, which you can custom-fill with various wines, champagnes, wine/food-themed books and magazines, and wine accessories… whatever would delight or inspire. They do the wrapping and the shipping. You don’t have to be in NYC to give or to receive one of these pails.

Couldn’t December come a little faster? Just kidding.

LocalWineEvents.com is a helpful website for anyone looking to learn more about wine or just throw back some free sips around town.

On the main page you select your location, and then you will be presented with a long list of current wine (and sometimes food) tastings, dinners, tours, lessons, and classes near where you live.

I subscribe to the newsletter version (”The Juice”), which is emailed to me every week or so. I prefer the layout of the newsletter because I find it easier to scroll down looking for events with “free” in the cost column.

Thanks to LocalWineEvents.com I have discovered some good wine shops as well as nice wines. Sometimes if I know I’ll have an hour to kill in Manhattan between, say, an appointment and dinner, I will look up whatever events might be in that area during that time. Nothing passes the time like a few tastes of wine.