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LaWineClub.com Visits The Wine Show
Posted by perle0 on 2005-02-24 00:30:41
(4238 views) 
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[Editorial]
[New Orleans] |
| As some of you may have heard, on Sunday, Feb. 6 (Mardi Gras Sunday…and Super Bowl Sunday for the rest of the country), the creators of LaWineClub.com made an appearance on Tim McNally's The Wine Show. This radio program, aired weekly on BizRadio 990AM in New Orleans, is an hour-long discussion of wine featuring various wine-related topics and guests. Tim was nice enough to offer LaWineClub.com a chance to appear and talk about the website and our vision for it. |
 The February 6 broadcast was a two-hour combined broadcast of The Travel Show (hosted by Stu Barash) and The Wine Show, done live from the courtyard of Brennan's Restaurant in the heart of the French Quarter. So on Sunday morning, LaWineClub.com's Mike and Kim got up early and headed down to the Quarter.
Brennan's is an interesting place. I'd walked past it before, but never had the pleasure of eating there, or even going inside for a peek. Across from the bar, near the door to the patio, was a display case that interested us very much. It contained a few of the restaurant's most impressive bottles of rare wine, including a couple of Chateau Lafite-Rothschild from the late 1800's. These wines are more showpieces than for drinking (if anyone could afford them), however--the display case is not temperature-controlled. Still, it's fun to look at a bottle of the world's finest wine, more than a hundred years old, and imagine what it might taste like if it were still drinkable.
We greeted our hosts, who asked us to take a seat at any nearby table and make ourselves comfortable while we waited for our segment. We chose a spot, and began preparing. We had brought several bottles of wine to share, and they all needed either decanting or chilling. Mike got decanters, corkscrew, and glasses from the bar and waitstaff, and secured an ice bucket.
While we were waiting and decanting, we met Tim's wife Brenda Maitland, who does the Wine of the Week column for Gambit, and their friend Bonnie Warren, who is Brennan's Publicity Chairman. We met another charming couple, a doctor and his wife, who also seemed to be old friends of The Wine Show and chatted with us warmly.  And of course, we met Brennan's sommelier, Michael Brewer, who maintains its world-class wine cellar, with over 35,000 bottles made up of 3,000 different labels of wine. Attracted by our frantic decanting, he talked wine with us and sampled our offerings, then brought out one of his own for us to try--a bottle of Twomey Merlot, which was easily the best Merlot I've ever tasted. The man knows his wine.
At last it was time for our moment in the sun (on the airwaves, anyway), and we were motioned over to the broadcast table and fitted with headphones and mikes. We repaid the gesture by finally pouring up some wine for our thirsty radio hosts, and chatted about wine and LaWineClub.com for about ten minutes. (Listen to the show! For those without massive bandwidth, be warned that this is a 50MB mp3 file.)
 The hard part was over, and we returned to our little table with our new friends and drank some more wine. We had brunch reservations for noon, so we were in no rush to leave. When the show was over, Tim and Stu joined the table and it was time for brunch. Since we still had lots of wine left, the others invited us to join them for brunch, and we gladly accepted. (After all, eight is more fun than two, and when one of the diners works for the restaurant, a little table-shuffling can be managed.)
Thus began phase two of our adventure, experiencing brunch at Brennan's. |
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