The Chop Approves of Boxed Wine

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When we gave up our car a few months ago, we were afraid it might mean giving up the ability to keep our wine rack stocked regularly as well. Inasmuch as we don’t have the great good fortune to live right next door to a wine shop, it’s quite a task to carry home any more wine than can be enjoyed in a single night on a bicycle. Without wheels, our oenophilic options have been reduced to either having wine delivered by the case, or to trying to squeeze in a liquor store trip whenever we happen to have a Zipcar handy. That is, until last week.

Last week we bought our first box of wine for the Chophouse and instantly became a convert to the cult of the box. Like a lot of people, we’ve been going along under the impression that there’s not much more to boxed wine than the 5 liter Franzia white zins that Grandma would bring out for Saint Swithin’s Day. Times have changed though, and you can now choose from not only red, white, and blush in a box, but can select from region, grape variety, and sometimes even vintage year.

A Bota Box looks right at home on our wine rack.

We’re no wine snob. The truth is that we’ve enjoyed almost every bottle of wine we’ve ever had, and like an $8 bottle just as much as a $28 bottle. Our main objection to the box has mostly been aesthetic. As you can see in the photo though, that’s much less an issue than it’s been in the past. We’ve been buying Bota Box recently, and the 3 liter size (equal to four standard bottles of wine) fits perfectly on the shelf and doesn’t call too much attention to itself with a somewhat understated package.

Once we embraced the packaging, it allowed us to realize all the other benefits that come in the box. Not only is it much easier to carry home, at $17.99 it also averages out to $4.50 a bottle, which is about half of what we were paying before. The box also allows us to drink as much or as little as we wish, without worrying about opening a bottle (or a second bottle) and having wine left over. The bag stores wine for up to 6 weeks with no loss of freshness.

bota box chardonnay

It looks just as good in the fridge.

They’re also much better environmentally. According to some statistic we dug up someplace on the internet, boxed wine decreases landfill waste by 91%, and reduces greenhouse gasses by 76%. Those are some pretty hefty numbers, but setting aside landfill waste, wine bottles also take up a hell of a lot of space and add a lot of weight to our recycling bin. From now on we won’t be spending every Thursday wondering if our neighbors are silently judging us for having so many empty bottles in there. Wine boxes just look like so much cardboard in the bin.

But the final, and perhaps most ironic benefit of the box is that it finally enables us to get some use out of the fancy wine decanter we bought at Crate and Barrel two years ago and almost never used. It wasn’t worth bothering with for bottles, but it’s incredibly convenient to just pour a few glasses from the box into the decanter and carry it up to the bedroom or out to the balcony.

Have you tried any of the new arrivals in the boxed wine market? Brought a Black Box to a dinner party or a box of Pepperwood Grove up to your rooftop deck? Have any thoughts or favorites? Let us know about it in the comments.

How to Handle a Mispour: A Bartender’s Guide

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Anyone who’s seen the inside of enough bars can easily tell a good bartender from a bad one. There are certain places which have great reputations for service, and hire nothing but good bar staff. Unfortunately, there are even a few places where the opposite is true and there’s not a decent barkeep present any night of the week. Most bars fall somewhere in the middle of that equation, and the bigger and busier the bar the more discerning you have to be in sizing up your bartender.

And you should always size up your bartender. They’re sizing you up, to be sure. The internet is full of top ten lists of bartenders’ complaints about customers, and every time you walk in they’re wondering which one of those stunts you’re going to pull. What’s seldom acknowledged though is that sometimes bartenders are shitty people who have no clue about the intricacies of drinking culture and are wholly unsuited for their jobs. It happens sometimes. People are often hired because they’re good looking or they’re a friend of a friend or they happened to be around when there was an opening.

Professional bartender

A good bartender never lets a drink go to waste.

We had the misfortune to encounter one such bartender this weekend. If she wasn’t new to bartending she was at least new to this particular bar. It was pretty clear right away that she wasn’t the A-team, and would have probably been more comfortable being broken in on a slower weeknight shift than a busy Saturday. She poured us the wrong drink, and once we got the right drink, she quoted us the wrong price. These are both very forgivable mistakes, but what she did next was not.

What she did next was to pour the extra beer down the drain! It was shocking. It was scandalous. It was one of the most pointless, stupid and amateur things we’ve ever seen done behind a bar. A freshly poured pint of perfectly good beer absolutely and completely wasted.

It wasn’t even the waste of beer that frustrated us the most. It was the breach of protocol. Mispours are a fact of life, and even the best bartenders will end up with extra drinks from time to time. The good ones, however, know what to do with them. Even in the worst sorts of bars with the strictest rules and controls (think airport bars, TGIFridays’ and the like) a good bartender and a good bar manager realizes that a wrong drink, once poured, should not go to waste. While it can’t be sold, even in corporate bar hell it’s understood that it should be given to someone, and that a free drink on someone’s check usually doesn’t replace one they would have bought anyway.

The best way to handle a mispour is to offer it to the customer for whom it was poured on the house. “Oh, you asked for Bud and I thought you said Boh. You can have this one on the house if you want it.”

Failing that, the next best thing is to offer the mispour to a deserving regular- ideally one who usually drinks what was poured by accident. “Hey Frank, it’s your lucky day. I just poured an extra Boh. Here ya go buddy.”

If the extra drink is declined by the original customer, and there don’t happen to be any regulars around, the drink should then be offered to the patron who occupies the Cheat Seat. Anyone who makes a point of sitting close to the taps is likely an experienced drinker and a good customer, and will certainly appreciate a free round. They likely watched you pour it and saw the whole thing and it’s kind of rude not to offer it. Hey buddy I’ve got this extra Boh. Yours if you want it.”

And even if for some strange reason you, as a bartender, have not offered that drink to one of the people described above there’s a pretty good chance that there’s a cook or a busboy or a barback or a just-clocked-out server hanging around who has been working their ass off for very little pay and even less thanks and could sure use a cold frosty beer right about now. Sending a mispour to the cook is always a good move, not just because they’re working over a hot stove, but because they’ll remember your kindness when they end up with an extra basket of onion rings or an overdone burger. “Hey, take this back to Charlie in the kitchen and see if he’s thirsty.”

The bottom line is that a mispour isn’t just an extra beer, it’s a pint of good will in a glass. To let that good will go to waste is an affront to common decency and tavern culture.

The Couch Chronicles, Volume VII

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We’re still waiting patiently for the fast-approaching delivery date of the new sofa we’re trying to win in the Test it, Blog it, Win it contest from Su Casa Furniture. A couch is typically the first thing that goes into a living room, and in our case it was the first thing we actually picked out, but it’ll be the last to go in. Since the pieces at Su Casa (including the couch we picked from Pad) offer so many custom options, it gives us plenty of time to make the rest of the room ready before it arrives. Once it gets here, all we’ll have to do is put our feet up on the matching ottoman!

In the meantime we wanted to share with you a couple of small DIY projects we’ve completed in the living room. We watch enough HGTV to know that sometimes the only way to achieve the custom look you want in a room is to throw in a few DIY projects. It’s also a great way to stay under budget, and it’s definitely saved us a few dollars that we can spend elsewhere in the room.

Project 1: The Transom Glass.

Our front door has a transom above it that was little more than a plain pane of glass. It’s never been an issue before, and frankly we barely ever noticed it when the room was empty, but now that the space is close to being finished and we’re going to be spending time in there, our ordinary transom window was in need of an upgrade.

Our plain transom.

Ultimately, we’d like a custom piece of stained glass up there, but that’s quite an expense and having one designed and made is a big enough project all on its own. With all we’ve been doing lately we opted for a more temporary solution that’s almost as stylish and a lot less expensive. With a couple of spray cans and a little patience, we turned it into an urban-chic address panel for around $20.

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(Yep. That’s part of a Dolce and Gabbana ad from the back cover of GQ.) It didn’t turn out perfectly and probably would have worked better if we’d held out for stick-on vinyl stencils, but all things considered it’s not bad. It looks a sight better than it did before, anyway:

Our new DIY transom window.

The house numbers actually look even better from inside than from the outside, and the frosted background does a great job of hiding the ugly roof of the porches outside. The industrial font in the stencils and slight overspray actually fit very well with some of the other softened industrial elements in our our design plan. For the small amount we spent on this, we’re quite pleased with the outcome.

This project also enabled us to remove our ugly old house number plaque which became suddenly redundant. It’s even inspired us to re-coat the mailbox in a hammered steel finish which will complement the transom, so we can say our living room makeover has officially spilled over onto the porch.

Project 2: The Floor Vase.

We had originally bought this floor vase, which was about $90 on sale. The problem was that we couldn’t decide whether to use it in the living room, or in an empty corner of the dining room, where it looks equally good. We knew we were going to need a second vase, but weren’t exactly keen on spending $90 or more on another one we liked just as much. So we were delighted when we found this one at Goodwill:

This vase was ugly.

It’s a ceramic vase in great condition, and has the size and shape we were looking for. And it was only $12. It was ugly though, like something you’d find in an outdated condo in Ocean Pines. That’s when we remembered about textured spray paint, and figured a stone finish would look and feel just right on this piece.

So we bought some spray paint.

We made a quick trip to Lowe’s, and after $8 and a few hours of drying time, we have what looks like a brand new vase:

Now it looks great.

It came out quite nicely, and for only twenty bucks we ended up with not only a vase that was exactly what we wanted, but one that we can point to and say ‘Yeah, we did that ourselves.’

Little things like these are important not to overlook. We really didn’t want to get such nice furniture and set it down in a completely empty room and call it furnished. With a little thrift and imagination, we’ll be able to have our new couch delivered into an actual living room and not just some room at the front of the house.

Lower Dens @ Ottobar Tomorrow

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Sometimes writing blog posts about bands is easy. Sometimes you know the band well and they’ve been doing some interesting things and there’s a natural angle to take and the post writes itself. Sometimes it’s pretty hard. Occasionally there’s nothing to say about a band except ‘hey, they’re playing and they’re pretty good.’ And sometimes, you don’t even bother to write much of anything.

There’s not much we can say about Lower Dens that hasn’t already been said recently by better writers than we are. They were featured on NPR’s First Listen two weeks ago, and were the subject of a City Paper cover story last week that gave all the details of what the hell happened since the last time we posted about them.

Lower Dens

Lower Dens returns to the Ottobar tomorrow. Click below to hear the track 'Brains' from the new LP Nootropics.

It’s been about a year since they lost a guitarist and canceled an Ottobar show at the last minute. Tomorrow they’re back at the bar along with local favorites Celebration, as well as Brooklyn’s Violens and a band called Sprayer, whose name is so vague we’re not even going to bother Googling them.

Maybe the only thing left we have to add about this show that hasn’t been said is so obvious that it doesn’t need to be said at all. We’re going to say it anyway: If you’re going to go, get there on time, because there is a 100% chance this show will sell out.

Mondo Baltimore @ Windup Space Tonight

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So today kicks off the 4 day cine-thon that is the Maryland Film Festival. The MD Film Fest is great. It gets better every year, in fact. Or at least that’s what we hear. If we’re telling the God’s-honest truth we’ve never actually been to the Film Festival. Pretty scandalous, huh?

It’s not that we’ve been unaware of it or have been purposefully staying away. Last year we even lined up a date and were in the car on the way to the Charles when we decided the weather was too nice to sit in a dark theater so we went to the ballpark instead. Perhaps this is finally the year we at least make it out to see one of the insider’s picks.

If you’re in the position tonight where you waited too long to get tickets for opening night, or if the whole idea of a film festival is just a little too highbrow for you, we suggest you check out Mondo Baltimore instead.

Now in it’s 3rd year (!!!) Mondo Baltimore is as tasteless and wonderful as ever. Tonight’s program starts with the Heckle Bestest competition, in which several Mondo regulars will goad, groan, and grunt at a selection of the trashiest film clips ever screened in a game show type effort to determine who among them is the lewdest, crudest, cleverest and bestest Baltimore film heckler. personally, we love the idea of competitive heckling and we can guarantee that you won’t find anything like this among the shushy snobs around the corner.

Tonight’s feature is 1994’s The Dallas Connection. As you can see by the trailer above, it’s pretty much a live-action version of Team America World Police with titties. So, so many titties. You see Choppers, in 1994 there were no iPads. There was no wifi, no cell phones that play movies, and barely any porn on the internet at all. There was no The Wire no Sopranos and no Girls. When people signed up for premium cable channels, it was basically understood that they were signing up to have smut cabled into their living rooms.

The Dallas Connection is a prime example of that. It stars 3 Penthouse Pets and two Playboy Playmates (because porn stars used to want to be real stars instead of pretending to be porn amateurs). They get naked. A lot. And when they’re not naked, there are giant guns and explosions and fistfights and helicopters and stuff. That’s what used to qualify as premium cinema.