come wine with me

don't know about you but the mister and i celebrate most things with alcohol. not the healthiest of habits but it's testament to the power of advertising and branding, like how it's not a celebration if we don't pop open a bottle of champers. in fact, C very kindly gifted us bubbles graciously carried to london from trieste that we'd been saving for the occasion. it was such a labour of love (especially on ryanair!) and sweet of her to want us to try a product her hometown was famous for. all for cottage industry and this was from a small producer that doesn't export. she's born and bred and proudly trieste-ian(?) so if it's got her vote of confidence, that's more than reason to try. 

oh! but for this celebratory steamboat meal we cracked open the brunello the mister's folks carried home for us after his tuscan trip two summers ago! they were in london when i was having exams and he knew for the sake of my academic transcript the three of them were better off in italy ;) good call, mister. without going into too much detail, it was a rough time at work and the mister brought the brunello to look forward to when the tide changed. 

speaking of tuscany and brunellos, we've a bottle in singers waiting for me to graduate from medsch. because it was while we roadtripped tuscany in 2010 on my grad trip that the idea to sit medsch entrance exams and apply germinated. keep saying that if not for the mister's encouragement, and signing me up for entrance exams the same time as the bar exam (!!!) i would never have bitten the bullet. so we bought a good bottle then and i hope it's somewhere safe with his folk in singers for us to share with family when we're next home over summer. and our respective folk aren't big drinkers so hey, more for us :)

as a funny aside, the mister unilaterally decided our current red wine glasses were substandard (they're ikea...) and insisted on only drinking out of 'proper' wine glasses. which resulted in a race against time to the shops before they closed but we got lucky and it was love at first sight (for him) at john*lewis with this set. i initially lamented the expense but as the night wore on and the alcohol got the better of me, the wine glasses started to grow on me and now i think they're absolutely splendid and wonder why we didn't splurge earlier. oh i know why, he didn't have a fab job then ;)