This post is brought to you by Basic Juice, who started the shebang, and my friend Janet at Escaping Words, who nagged tagged me.

1. O dolce vino

We the uninitiated tend not to drink wine because it's always a thrilling gamble: each winery, each vintage, each bottle is a temperamental diva just waiting to snark you an attitude when you're tired and want a nap. A nice fat bottle of Red Stripe, on the other hand, is the ratty old blanket you pull up to your shoulders as you collapse on the sofa.

Well, I have a wine for you, a startlingly good one that is surely helping to shatter this oenoreluctance amongst the young'uns. This Saturday I went to a post-college college friends get-together whose host comes from the estimable Napa, California. They had a startlingly good white, Barefoot Winery's Sauvignon Blanc. It was absolutely my kind of wine: crisp, dry, lightly scented of honeydew and lime. Didn't hurt that it more than held its own among a remarkable spread of appetizers from sushi to bruschetta.

The clincher is that Slota claimed to have gotten this manna from Trader Joe's at $3.50/bottle. Two Buck Chuck graduates from college.

2. Like wine for chocolate

Sunday brought a factory tour of Scharffen Berger Chocolate, a boutique chocolatier founded in Berkeley in 1997. There, them those chocolate people talk about chocolate like wine people talk about wine: references to blends and varietals and origins spewed left and right, and our guide emphasized that they continually taste batches of beans to create their blends. She claimed that each pod — nay, each bean — had tinges of different fruits or flavors.

To prove her point, the guide passed around a small cup of roasted crushed beans, or "nibs", and I tipped out a small handful for slower reflection. Number one tasted like chocolate. Number two tasted like chocolate. Number three tasted like a bloody rich Cabernet. I'm still wigged out.

3. I send you off into the interweb

The New Yorker has a fantastically dark satire of the back-to-the-farm movement gone off the deep end: Larry Doyle's "May we tell you our specials this evening?"