“Standing in the middle of nowhere, wondering how to begin….”

OK, kids, Gonzo G. is getting some new digs, so if you’re seeing this post it’s because you were set up with the OLD RSS feed or the OLD email feed, in which case you need to go to http://www.gonzogastronomy.com and, like the Kinks say, do it again. I think you’ll like my new face, so hurry up and come on over!

 

“Where do you come from, and where do you go…”

We’re ordering some sushi at the sushi bar not long ago, and knowing the limited offering of beers there, I ask for a Sapporo. The guy next to me hears and feels inclined to tell me that of the two big Japanese import beers, he prefers Kirin Ichiban. “But Kirin isn’t an import,” I tell him. “Of course it is!” (You stupid, uncultured swine, he thinks.) He laughs lightly. I grab the half-empty bottle out of his hand, turn it, and point to the “Brewed under the strict supervision of Kirin’s brewmaster at Anheuser-Busch, Inc. in Los Angeles, CA” and retort, “NO. It isn’t.” My serving of miso soup has, at this point, gone cold.

Despite the fact that I’m not even remotely a gambling woman, I’m willing to bet that there will come a time in the not-so-distant future when the distinction between domestic beer and imported beer will be supplanted by that of mass-produced beer vs. craft beer. Given the lines—or should I say borders—that are being blurred because of big-brand buyouts and global mergers, defining what is and isn’t an import is an even less stable conjecture than stock investment planning at this point. Add to that the fact that in terms of case sales, most of the leading import brands are pale pilsners (I mean, Corona and Heineken alone account for half the category for fuck’s sake), and suddenly that foreign landscape begins to look an awful lot like the domestic beer scene here in the US.

The growing confusion between domestics and imports, for starters, doesn’t end with Kirin. My husband happens to like Blue Moon Belgian White—a light-bodied wheat beer he sometimes chooses with sushi—a name that pissed off the Confederation of Belgian Brewers enough to sue Coors, the company that brews the beer. Thing is, Coors is now a division of Molson Coors Brewing Company, and Blue Moon gets brewed on both sides of the border. Then there’s Brewery Ommegang in Cooperstown, NY which, given its locale, would appear to be a domestic brew. But since 2003, Ommegang has been owned by Duvel, a Belgian brewery, and their Three Philosophers is a blend of an ale brewed here in Upstate New York and a kriek brewed by Liefmans in Belgium. So what the hell are you drinking, something domestic or something imported? The short answer is, you’re drinking something tasty, so why care? How important (or accurate for that matter) is citizenship at this point?

Despite the pathetic softness of our economy, and oftentimes despite tighter wallets, many consumers are counter-intuitively splurging on the priciest segment of the beer industry—craft brews. Country of origin is no longer as important as how the beer tastes. The unfortunate side effect, however, of American craft brewers being inspired by old European recipes, and European brewers being inspired by the American craft beer movement, is that the big boys—the ones producing the pale, bland, insipid pilsners—are now playing off the “small is better” philosophy and reaping its benefits like hungry leeches. Those Goliaths are fighting tooth and nail to hold on to every last bit of their market share by creating companies like Green Valley Brewing (owned by Anheuser-Busch) that mislead consumers into thinking that they are buying a craft, small-production beer, and it’s that competition that needs to be regarded with a proverbial fine-toothed comb at this point.

 

“I ain’t the sharpest tool in the shed…”

I’m not altogether sure how other bloggers operate, but I’m the kind of writer who’s constantly finding inspiration for articles all over the place, whether in a magazine, at a store, watching TV, whatever. That basically translates into tiny sticky notes plastered all over the office, random thoughts scratched out on everything from junk mail envelopes to cocktail napkins, magazine and newspaper clippings stacked randomly in a pile, and press releases and sell sheets tossed amidst the constantly growing sea of dead trees. Don’t even get me started on the saved slew of emails that serve as potential springboards, too.

I’ve been dying to write up these three products for some time now…two that fall under the category of “you’ve got to be fucking kidding me” and one that sits in the opposite corner, as a “get me some of those NOW” product. Mind you, none of these are received samples that I’m reviewing, just stuff that has caught my eye for better or worse (though I’d readily accept samples of the third product for scientific purposes of experimentation, of course). I know I’ll get some flack from a reader or two, who will undoubtedly tell me that they are kitchen-challenged, and that these products do offer a valuable service, but I call bullshit.

The first is Leifheit’s Perfect Roll Maker which I saw in a trade magazine, and I’m pretty sure hasn’t hit the US market just yet. Before I knock the thing, let me reiterate my annoyance with single-use gadgets—things like garlic presses, salad spinners, and pancake batter dispensers—that clutter a kitchen with their relative uselessness, and could easily be replaced by utile tools like a knife or a ladle. This “roll maker” twists your sushi, stuffed grape leaves, etc. into a roll so you don’t have to…umm…ROLL SOMETHING WITH YOUR HANDS. Those are free tools last time I checked, people. Have we really gotten that lazy that we need to blow our devalued dollars on a contraption that does what we can easily do? If you can’t be bothered to roll your own sushi, I’m not sure you have any business making sushi at home at all. Go order some from the take-out place in town, transfer it all to a nice sushi platter, crack open a beer and call it a day.

The second is up the same alley (Sloth Alley, I guess): Kuhn Rikon’s Egg Separator. For $16 you can once again buy a crappy piece of plastic that will collect more dust than it will egg whites, when you could easily USE YOUR HANDS. I get it…some people don’t like using the back-and-forth method with the broken egg shell because if you’re not good at making a clean crack in your eggs you’re likely to get tiny bits of egg shell along for the ride. I really do get it. But your hands are the perfect (and free) tool for this. Let the white slip through your fingers and the yolk will be left behind in your palm…presto. If it’s simply a matter of, “Eww, I don’t wanna get my hands full of egg snot” then I’m guessing you’re not yet a parent, because you simply can’t gross out a parent. Period.

The third has already been put on my wish list. You know, the go-to list for anytime a relative or friend (or forgetful husband) needs a gift suggestion. Yeah, that one. For every time you’ve asked for your drink to be served “on the rocks” there is now a way to truly get them on the rocks. Teroforma’s Whisky Stones are a set of nine cubes of soapstone, a soft stone that won’t scratch your glass and is known for retaining temperature for long periods. The stones don’t alter the flavor of the drink (the way some connoisseurs believe granite can) and they won’t water your drink down like ice will. After a few hours in the freezer, BAM, you’re ready to rock…huh, get it…rock. I kill myself.

 

“Is it cool to go to sleep on the floor, ‘Cause I don’t think that I can take anymore…”

Fear and Loathing In The Garden State

When the sun is beating down on you in an open field, where weekend winos beg to be sold the latest contraption in “wine accessories” that are built for a buck and sold for five, and bored children, dragged to the outing by those weekend winos, fight for attention at the Make-Your-Own Tie Dye kiosk, patience becomes the most quickly abandoned virtue. It’s not long before your head begins to scream in dull agony, and you’re not quite sure whether to blame the unrelenting heat, the mediocre wine or the herds of winos packed so tightly by the pourers you’d swear they were heading for slaughter. But regardless of who or what you blame, decapitation becomes a sensibly viable option at that point.

It seemed like a relatively harmless idea to drag 5 other adults and a 12-year-old with me to an outdoor festival for NJ wines, but then again I’m a masochist, and perhaps need to reevaluate my sources of entertainment. There were notebooks involved and sun block, and a decent blues band (albeit white-boy blues band) cranking in one corner, but man there were oceans upon oceans of fucking blueberry wine, surging toward me with the singular mission of drowning my sorrows. My sorrows, much to their dismay, had learned to swim. I had been told that my hard hatred for Jersey wine was blind prejudice—that it was unfair to make a blanket statement about a state’s wines. I had also been given cause to doubt my stance because a couple of wineries in Cape May are now making great wine. Perhaps, I thought, things have changed. Perhaps I need to revisit Jersey wine. 20 bucks later I realized I was still right, and I want my money back. If possible, I’d like my 3 hours back, too.

It was Tomasello’s fault now that I think about it. I had pushed and elbowed and hip-bumped my way through the barflies, those that felt the need to taste every single wine from every single winery because, after all, they wanted their 20 bucks worth, and made my way up to Tomasello’s pourer…my first of the day. And she had the nerve—the unmitigated gall—to pour me a lovely, crisp, well-balanced, sparkling Blanc de Blanc Brut made from the local Vidal Blanc grape. And two doors down, at Auburn Road, there was a bright, ripe, lightly oaked chardonnay with absolutely no flab. But after that, my notes became more rants than anything else, loaded with question marks, exclamation points and expletives even I couldn’t make out. What was that I wrote? Shit fest or short ferment?

“Did you see the local news guy, Katie?”

“You mean the one with the microphone sitting idly in his hip holster and the full glass of wine in his hand? Yeah, I saw him.”

By now the sun was high above us, declaring its potency by pushing the mercury upwards of 90° and yet not a single winery had the forethought to cool off their reds. Sure every white, pink, sweet and sparkling wine was in an ice bath, but the reds? Fuck ‘em. Nothing like tasting a cab franc that’s been basking in a 90° sauna for a couple of hours. Yum. Unoaked chards tasted oaky, dessert wines tasted acidic, and the word “green” kept playing itself over and over again in my head, like a bad rendition of The Beatles’ Revolution 9. By the time I was three-quarters of the way around the damned parade of plonk, I couldn’t muster the energy to fight the crowds simply in order to be poured another under-ripe mess or another cloyingly sweet mess…take your pick. But not to be outdone by their fellow statesmen, Renault Winery, one of Jersey’s most well-known wineries, and also its oldest (which now apparently is also a resort and golf club, in which case perhaps they should stick to that and give up wine making) had the balls to still be using the names “Champagne,” “Chablis” and “Burgundy” on their labels. My stomach churned before I even got to taste their wines.

After nearly three hours, my folks were nowhere to be found, my in-laws were off buying jewelry and I had thrown myself down at the mercy of the grass and dirt, digging in my purse for Tylenol like a junky that’s just dropped their last needle in a haystack. The kid in all his bountiful mercy came up behind me and handed me a glass of Fuze Banana Colada to toss back the two tablets, and in a moment of what must have been sheer palate fatigue I asked, “What is this, Unionville’s Riesling?”

 

“I’ve been wasting my time, ohh, I am losing my mind…”

They say you’re only as strong as your weakest soldier, or as beautiful as your biggest wart, or whatever the hell the euphemism is, so in the interest of full disclosure (warts and all) I wanted to reach out to Gonzo readers for help—help that, luckily for you, doesn’t involve donations of wine, kidneys or first borns. If, in the end, it’s your help that gets me where I want to go, I’ll happily consider a thank-you gift of wine, a kidney or my first born.

I’ve never wanted to do anything in my life as much as I’ve wanted to publish a book. In fact, half the reason I started this blog was to hone my skills, gain an audience and use it as a springboard to a book. And silly me, I was green enough to think that the very essence of this blog—the entire gastronomic world (not just wine or food) served up Gonzo style—was enough to base a book on. Cork dorks, after all, are usually foodies, and vice versa. Same goes for craft beer/spirits lovers, etc. A book that touched on gastronomy as a whole, rather than just one topic, seemed like a slam dunk because nothing like it exists. In fact, nothing like me really exists anyway, since the majority of writing in the food/beverage section of any major bookstore is dedicated to educational pursuits, which wouldn’t be such a bad thing if they were also entertaining…but they’re not…at all. Op/Ed simply doesn’t exist, especially in the world of fine beverage. And though the food world has writers like Anthony Bourdain that serve as the voice of dissidence, there’s little else. But there’s a need, isn’t there? Are we happy with the state of food/wine writing as it stands, or do we clamor for something more?

But I hit a SNAFU—not small by any means—known as literary agents. Apparently a shitload of them love my writing and think I’m “publishable” but they think my book proposal blows chunks. Ahh, the devil’s in the details, ain’t he? Writing about the many mavericks in the gastronomic field and whether those mavericks should be lauded or shot, is apparently not what a literary agent thinks will sell. Gonzo Gastronomy: The Angels & Demons of Food & Wine, as it stands right now, is a fish flopping on the ship’s deck, gasping for life. Mouth to mouth anyone? Here’s what I need from you…

If Gonzo became a book, what would you want out of it? What kind of a read would you want it to be? Topics? Point of view? Focus? Am I totally nuts to take a blog like this to the printed page? Did I lose something in translation? If you picked up a book with a chapter on Food Network’s fall from grace, a chapter on the underground mezcal revolution, a chapter on Champagne’s mutiny, and a chapter on extreme beers would you start salivating to read more or would you toss it into a fire and ask where Michael Pollan’s latest diatribe is?

In a blogosphere that’s filled with inane tasting notes and recipes, I set out to create one that didn’t get lost in the din. I wanted to establish myself as a writer that doesn’t fear reprisal from the industry, that distances herself from mainstream media, and that welcomes controversy with both open arms and a middle finger. I truly thought that readers wanted something more than an education in gastronomy—they wanted a visceral dissertation on what gastronomy does…move us. But I could be wrong (it hasn’t happened yet, but stranger things have happened). My readership is all over the map…foodies, wine geeks, craft beer lovers, gypsies, tramps, thieves, whatever. What the hell do YOU want out of a Gonzo book, if in fact you want anything at all?

 

“So where are the strong, and who are the trusted? And where is the harmony?…”

It’s been way too long since I did an Angel vs. Demon installment here, and reading through the latest issue of All About Beer put me in the mood to rant. I generally like the magazine, by the way, but its categorical lists of the “Best Beers of 2009” nearly caused me an aneurism when I saw Lindeman’s Pêche Lambic listed as the best fruit lambic. Thus you have All About Beer to thank for Gonzo’s latest: The Angels and Demons of Fruit Lambics.

Lambic in general, is a world of beer unto itself. Completely unlike any lager or ale you’ll ever taste, Belgium’s lambics serve as a reminder that not all beers are brewed equally, and at some point or another, if you find yourself becoming a sort of craft brew geek, you inevitably wind up exploring lambics as a sort of rite of passage. The real trick of lambic brewing isn’t in the brewing though, it’s in the fermenting. After the brewing stage, the unfermented wort is piped into large open fermentation vats and the roof of the brewery is swung open to let all of the naturally occurring yeast and other microflora that nature cares to provide in to ferment the beer—the stuff most other breweries fight tooth and nail to avoid. After the beer ferments, it is aged in wooden barrels, further contributing microflora that can potentially ferment out any remaining sugars. While most of the world’s breweries are clinically sanitized and sterilized, the natural spontaneous fermentation of a lambic is what gives the beer so much complexity, and what creates the bizarre mix of aromas and flavors that would mean a spoiled batch of beer in any other place in the world.

Then we make the leap to fruit lambics. Knowing that casual beer drinkers—not merely Budweiser-swilling folks, but even those with a more experienced palate—will be turned off by intensely sour beers, Belgian brewers often add fruit to lambics and do a second fermentation. The sugars and sweet flavors of the fruit help temper the sour personality of the lambic. In the best of these, the lambic character is still apparent and the fruit flavors merely round it out. Krieks use sour cherries, framboises use raspberries, pêches use peaches, etc. In the end, I expect to drink a beer that will have a distinctive fruit profile, but I also want to know that the underlying beer is a true lambic. Unfortunately, large-scale breweries like Lindemans (the biggest lambic import in the US) have, for years, been cutting corners and giving a gullible US consumer a product that can barely be considered a lambic, much less a true fruit lambic.

Welcome to the ring, the demon (and yet somehow, AAB’s winner for best fruit lambic) Lindemans Pêche Lambic. I’m not even sure where to begin with this demon’s list of sins against the nature of a true fruit lambic. For starters, at no point are any actual…err, fucking fruit…a part of making this fruit lambic. Lindemans uses a cloying fruit-concentrate syrup rather than fruit, and the result is akin to a cross between a wine cooler, a fruit-flavored soda and cough syrup. It lacks the complexity and nuanced flavors of a beer that has been in direct contact with real fruit. Hell, to be honest, it lacks any resemblance to either of its namesakes: lambic or fruit.

In addition, the Lindemans line is pasteurized (to kill the yeast), and then the fruit syrup and sugar is added. If the yeast wasn’t stopped, it would ferment the sugar in the fruit, thus it never undergoes the second fermentation the brewers of true fruit lambics set out to create. The sugar that gets added (also a hand-slapping no-no) is there to balance the tartness of the beer—a beer that, by definition, is supposed to be tart. Lindemans is big and cuts corners…end of story. Its Pêche Lambic tastes more like a peach-flavored soda than a crisp beer, and its line of products is far from traditional.

To make matters worse, we’re not altogether sure exactly how much actual lambic is used in making Lindemans fruit lambics. Unfortunately, there is no law regulating the control of how much lambic must be in a bottle that reads “lambic” on the label. The agreed-upon standard has been a measly 10%, which means you could more or less bottle 90% Aunt Jemima diluted with 10% lambic and call it Vermont Maple Lambic—which, at its core, is Lindemans’ MO.

To be quite honest, there are a host of wonderful, traditionally crafted fruit lambics I could have chosen to be the Angel of this battle, though they’re obviously not as readily available as the Lindemans bottlings. I nearly went with Hanssens’ Oude Kriek simply because I recently drank my last bottle of it, and it was a beautiful, crisp, well-balanced fruit lambic, drinking almost like a wine that held both its sweetness and its acidity in check. Instead, however, please welcome to the ring Cantillon’s Rosé de Gambrinus, which I chose simply because Cantillon’s beers are elegantly crafted and yet much more widely available in the US than Hanssens.

Cantillon’s Rosé is an elegant, dry Framboise (raspberry lambic), which has sometimes even included just a bit of Kriek (sour cherry lambic). It retains its funky lambic nose but has the depth of whole raspberries, layered with some oak and vanilla. It’s at once both rounded and bone dry, light and complex. You honestly can’t go wrong with any of Cantillon’s lambics for the taste of authenticity.

At a time when people are spending more time perusing a local farmer’s market and less time cracking open a can of condensed, processed foodstuffs, you have to wonder why we would drink a beer that’s adulterated with syrups and sweeteners when there is a wide selection of hand-crafted competition sitting on the shelf above it. Actually, I don’t have to wonder why. I know why Americans chug this stuff down—because it’s what they know. Packaging, manipulation, and lack of regulation have allowed us to believe what they’re selling. But what they’re selling isn’t fruit lambic…it’s fruit-tasting-syrup-flavored beer. If a bottle of wine says Champagne on it, I can bet whatever pitiful balance is left in my IRA that it comes from Champagne. Unfortunately, not everything that says “fruit lambic” is what it claims to be.

In the end, shouldn’t we value the hard work put in by traditional brewers and their natural yeasts, bacteria and fruit? Why give credence (or money) to those who merely offer up a sickly sweet novelty and ride the coattails of the lambic name? It turns my stomach to see mass media reviews of Lindemans, like the one in All About Beer, waxing eloquent as though they’ve just discovered the holy grail. I guess the pseudo-lambic is a revelation when you’ve been sucking at the teat of Anheuser-Busch, but given the increased attention that we as a country have put on our food, I’d suggest that we all learn something from our history with mass production: Dig a little deeper and understand what you’re drinking.

 

“No stop signs, speed limit, nobody’s gonna slow me down…”

I always start out with the best of intentions…I really do. But the road to hell is paved with them, and I’m pretty sure that’s the road I’m on, with no signs of a red light or a u-turn. A couple of weeks ago, some of my dearest Twittering food bloggers started a bit of an ice cream trend—a creamless ice cream trend. Actually, make that a creamless, eggless, sugarless ice cream trend. And rather than start my usual rants, I shut up, listened, and started turning my wheels. See, it turns out that if you freeze ripe bananas and then purée them in your food processor, what you get looks and tastes like a banana ice cream. Sure the fruit’s got a lot of natural sugar, but you end up saving yourself a shitload of calories by sparing your thunder thighs the rest of the goodies: cream, eggs and refined sugar. So I tried it. Froze a couple of bananas, puréed the puppies, tasted the result and smiled. This could work, I thought. This could be my salvation. This could be what gets me in a fucking bridesmaid dress for my sister’s wedding that isn’t the size of a circus tent, without having to live on rice cakes and….uhh…..more rice cakes. I stuck my new savior in the freezer and had some the next couple of days as my dessert. But salvation was short lived because I just can’t leave a good thing alone if it can go from good to great.

You know what tastes great with bananas? Chocolate. Yeah, chocolate tastes great with bananas. And rum. Dark rum is yummy with bananas. The angel on one shoulder was no doubt getting poked in the ass by the devil that sits on the other shoulder, and he was on the edge, losing his balance, and ready to fall off. And so this is where good intentions dead end, folks: banana/rum “ice cream” with Nutella chips. Adding the rum was not just a stroke of genius because it tasted great, but also because it kept the ice cream from becoming rock solid in the freezer. But then I thought of my favorite frozen treat, chocolate-covered frozen bananas, and thought well, how bad could a chocolate-covered frozen rum-soaked banana be?!? HMMMM?? So I spread a little Nutella on wax paper and froze it until it was hard enough that I could break it into small shards. Holy mother of Zeus was it good! And hey, at least I didn’t use bacon…..this time.

The next batch’s recipe has already been scratched out in my head: bananas with chocolate stout, a little maple syrup and yes, bacon. Peanut butter is of course always an option, but that’s too obvious an ingredient—I’ll leave it for the amateurs. Any other suggestions are welcome, but there is no formal complaint department here at Gonzo Gastronomy. So if this simple idea takes seed in your head and you wind up with your own concoctions, don’t come bitching to me. I told you to keep your eyes on the road.

 

WORDLESS WEDNESDAY – “We believed we’d catch the rainbow…”

 

“Times were hard but now they’re changing…”

So which is it that you want first, the good news or the bad news? Tough nuggies, my choice. The bad news is that Austria is unfortunately still an under-appreciated wine region. The good news? That Austria is still an under-appreciated wine region. So while it pisses me off to no end that these guys’ wines aren’t getting the recognition they deserve yet, its their relative obscurity that keeps their prices at bay and that tickles me pink. And when those said wines happen to be bubbles, well, I’m all shits and giggles, and their struggle for appreciation doesn’t hurt so much anymore.

I was sent a bottle of Szigeti’s sparkling Grüner Veltliner Brut NV (a Winebow import) a few weeks back as a welcome to Spring. I considered the option of sabering the bottle like Peter Szigeti did in the photo, but the thought of losing a thumb or worse yet losing the bottle of wine (coupled by the crippling fact that I don’t own a sabre anyway) made it not-so-much worth the risk. My thumb thanked me, as did my palate because the bubbles were fantastic. Not OK, not enjoyable…fantastic. It had a huge nose with scents of crisp apple and baked bread notes. Tons of bubbles danced in the glass and though it was graceful in its lightness with a peppery, smoky hit, it still maintained its complexity and had a bright finish. Totally food friendly. And just to make sure I wasn’t overstating myself, I let the last bit of wine go flat and then retasted. That’s when most flaws will slap you upside the head. That’s when sweet, sugary messes show their true colors. That’s when you know if you’ve been had. But the still wine tasted like the lovely GV it was supposed to taste like. Price: About $20

Not long after, I received Szigeti’s other 2 sparklers: a Rosé and their Cuvee Prestige Brut NV. Their elegant rosé is a blend of two little-known Austrian grapes (at least little-known in the US), Blaufränkisch and Zweigelt. It was rich and bursting with flavor, with plenty of strawberry notes, but it was bone dry. Price: About $30. The Cuvee Prestige is again much like a cremant, with tons of tiny bubbles. It had a beautiful cherry/floral nose and fresh acidity. Price: About $27.

I realize I’m overdosing you guys on Austria at this point, but if you’re looking for some fantastic, well-made sparklers that A. don’t cost an arm and a leg and B. aren’t your average, ubiquitous bottles (most of which are terribly flawed anyway) I beg you to seek out these Szigeti wines, particularly the sparkling Grüner if you really want a treat. And seriously, if you want to hear about nothing but California cabernet, Argentine malbec and Italian sangiovese you’re in the wrong place anyhow, so go away or I shall taunt you a second time.

 

“You just keep on using me, until you use me up…”

I realize that everyone and their mother is doing their part to be “green” nowadays, and that trying to undo decades worth of damage weighs heavy on most people’s minds in addition to preventing any further pillaging and abuse. So when I’m sent products for review that make the most of the crap we leave behind in order to prevent more crap from getting left behind, I tend to run for the computer keyboard. You’ll have to both forgive me for preaching and indulge me for praising, because these two ideas are a welcome addition to my home and to my travels. That whole Reduce-Reuse-Recycle thingamajig is pretty much mantra in my home, because I just don’t care to beat the crap out of this planet any more than we already have. The fact that I get boatloads of styrofoam sent in my wine shipments that I can do absolutely nothing with (other than reuse by sending wine to someone else) pisses me off, but that’s fodder for another day.

Totes come with black elastic that hold bottle securely in place.

8point8 is a start-up company based in San Diego that focuses on wood reuse. Brian Behncke, the owner, also owns a local construction company so he’s got plenty of opportunity to reclaim pieces of wood that are discarded at job sites. The first set of products he designed with the reclaimed wood are for us wine geeks, though he’s now got plenty of other clever designs. Here’s what his Etsy page says: “Did you know that there isn’t a recycling facility in San Diego that allows us to recycle wood with nails in it? Due to the cost of taking the nails out of the wood it goes directly into the landfill. Although it takes a little more time to clean the wood up, we feel this is a small price to pay for keeping large quantities of useable wood out of the landfill. We know there is a more sustainable way to deal with the problem, and that is to repurpose it. We’re 8point8 and we’re committed to diverting wood from the landfill, employing local craftsman and providing unique products to our retail community…All of our products are made from a sustainable source, reclaimed cedar, something that is becoming more difficult to find and more expensive to buy.” Add to all this the fact that his wine totes are the coolest designs I’ve seen in a very long time, and that they are reasonably priced, and you’ve got a damned winner! Seriously folks, forget all the froo-froo, bead-studded wine totes you see out there—these are where it’s at. I love carrying this thing around to people’s homes or BYOs and looking way hipper and greener than all the other dorks. Website Here

Comes with small elastic band so you can roll & tie them for easy transport.

Then we’ve got ChicoBag’s Produce Stand set of totes. While most of us are already bringing our reusable totes with us when we go food shopping (God I hope this is the case, because if my readers aren’t doing this, they’ve got 30 lashes coming), we still wind up using plastic for our produce. Each bundle of asparagus, each head of romaine, each cluster of grapes gets put into those little plastic bags they dispense in the produce aisle, not only because it keeps like produce together, but also because they’d tend to get everything else wet in the process. And while if you’re anything like me you’ll wind up reusing those plastic bags for garbage or such, now there’s no longer a need for them at all. ChicoBag makes 3 different produce totes: A hemp-cotton blend that’s good for leafy greens, grains and green beans, a rePETe™ mesh bag that’s perfect for apples, oranges and potatoes, and a regular rePETe™ tote that’s great for squash, broccoli, carrots and celery. The different materials are designed to optimize freshness when paired with the right produce, and what’s cooler still is that the rePETe™ material is made using recycled materials (it stands for recycled PET, polyethylene terephthalate, which is the dominant material used in plastic drinking bottle production). According to their numbers, ONE shopper will use about 500 bags in ONE year—that’s a lot of plastic to keep out of landfills. These great bags are the perfect way to do that, and they’ve now become part of my family of totes that come with me everywhere I go. These are just becoming available at retail locations, and aren’t yet on their website, but stay on the lookout! Website Here

So get shopping, people, you’ve got no excuse!