"Take wine out to the ballgame..."

So you head to the ballpark, it’s a bright summer day and you have a hankering for wine. Sure, beer is the preferred drink at a baseball game, but regardless, you just want a glass of wine with your hot dog and peanuts. But without the actual glass – too treacherous – you can’t have shards of glass flying when you catch that home run. You can’t BYOB, so what to do? Hold on to your first base. Fetzer winery in Mendocino has saved the day. Actually they, and a company named Zipz have created a new day.

We now have single serve wines in safe, eco-friendly, 100% recyclable durable plastic which are shaped like a real wine glass hold some pretty good wine. Problem solved, crisis averted, and wine to drink. The Red, called Crimson is primarily Zinfandel, Syrah and Cabernet and the taste is clearly Zin-driven. It’s a very pleasant kitchen sink blend, far superior to bag-in-a-box wine, or whatever-in-a-can and frankly, this would make a terrific everyday red wine.  The White, known as Quartz, is a blend of Chardonnay, Riesling, Gewürztraminer and Pinot Grigio – a fine concoction ending up fruity, fresh and slightly sweet. The glasses are sealed and have a lid.

Currently they are available at these ballparks:

Tropicana Field - Tampa Bay Rays

Coors Field - Colorado Rockies

AT & T Park - San Francisco Giants

Safeco Field - Seattle Mariners

Citi Field - New York Mets, and

Turner Field, home of the Atlanta Braves.

There are plans to roll these out to other ballparks and perhaps even supermarkets, so they will be ideal for picnics, time at the beach, even your own backyard deck. Smart, smartly designed, and we hope successful. It’s a home run.  CRIMSON & QUARTZ

$9-11/ 187 ml – Alc:12 % (White), 13.5% (Red)

BOOZEHOUNDZ RATING: 88 POINTS

Getting Naked

I love new ideas in the wine world in part because they are so few and far between. Naked Winery in Hood River outside of Portland in the beautiful Columbia River Gorge has always been pushing ideas around to increase sales and get people to not take wine so seriously. Enter their Wanderlust White, a blend of various grapes, in this iteration it’s Gewürztraminer and Riesling, all done in stainless steel then bottled in a BPA-free plastic bottle. Yeah, you read that right...a plastic wine bottle. Gimmick? Not really. Well ok, maybe, but so what? Workable? Oh, yeah. A pleasant acidity, a hint of sweetness, apples, pears and a slight resin, it’s not a complicated white wine, but it is the perfect picnic wine. And if you drop it (frankly why the hell are you dropping wine to begin with?) the bottle will bounce, not shatter, and the happy wine inside will remain unharmed. We’ve all had the experience of buying a bottle only to have it slip and go boom. Bummer, right? At first glance the bottle looks smaller, because it is thinner, lighter and easier to carry on those long treks to your make-out place. Anyhow, the wine is good, the packaging even better. Is this a foretelling of things to come? Time will tell, but this is pretty cool.

$14/ 750 ml – Alc: 13%   NAKED WINERY

BOOZEHOUNDZ RATING: 88 POINTS