Over the past six months, I’ve been spending the majority of my Friday nights with a “new” friend of mine who is originally from Atlanta, Georgia. Tall, active and practical in mind, she values a night nibbling on a macrobiotic dinner followed by a short yoga session, well above a dinner spent at an exceptional five star restaurant with a wine list larger than the entire series of Tolkien novels combined. So when Friday night rolls around, and she asked me the big question, “what should we have for dinner?”, I get excited! Considering that I live with a man who wants on his tombstone “I lived by ham, and I died by ham”, I absolutely adore an evening where I can allow my internal vegetarian out of the bag to bask in fresh produce, tofu, tempeh and whatever else may constitute a new macrobiotic creation. It’s a night to purge my system of the gastly meat byproducts hardline vegetarians plug their noses at and an opportunity to simply sit and enjoy the company of a lovely friend.

Yet one cannot fully cleanse their body without a glass of wine, can they?! I need those fabulous red tannins to slowly ease their way into my blood system to protect my heart and cleanse the arteries Thankfully, M. agrees with me and has made sure to always provide me with the honors of opening a bottle of wine the minute I walk into the door. The quality of the wine, however, can range from divine to questionable. Considering that her husband only drinks watered down beer with a large dash of lemon Fanta (called a Clara in Spain), while she generally drinks tea, …