Red & Wine Bash Reinvents Wine Tastings
By Erika Kubick in Food on Jun 23, 2014 9:25PM
The highly anticipated Red & White Bash, Wine Enthusiast Magazine’s charity benefit, showcased wines with upwards of 90 points on the Wine Enthusiast scale. Red & White held its inaugural event last month in New York City and hopes next year to add more cities in addition to New York and Chicago. The bash took wine tasting to another dimension and created an effervescent experience lush with dancing, socializing, finger foods and, of course, a variety of domestic and imported wines.
The crowd was smartly dressed, sociable and generally young. Local jazz ensemble Brooke and the Nice Things provided a bubbly vibe, while on-site hair and makeup stations maintained the burlesque, carnival theme. The venue for the event, Architectural Artifacts, a sprawling antique showroom with an enchanting industrial aesthetic, was not a difficult one to transform into a charming space. A bounty of multi-colored floor lights and a rainbow of dyed laces clinging to chandeliers, not to mention the vast collection of antiques and objets d’art that the venue not only exhibits but lists for sale, articulated a smart but amiable ambiance.
Red-and-white striped booths lining the wall poured varieties from around the world, and there wasn’t a bad glass in the room. Among my favorite stops, Kysela Pére et Fils, a wine importer and distributor out of Virginia, poured from four bottles, all of them excellent. I refilled on the Thorn Clarke 2010 William Randell Shiraz, a spicy, warming bottle with soft tannins and notes of salted caramel. I also found myself drawn to the edgy vibe of Michael David Winery, which handed out micro patches that said “Deadly Zins.” Their Petite Petit, an 85 -15 blend of Petite Syrah and Petit Verdot with the best label of the festival, is delicious and as cozy as a bakery. Not that I needed a break from wine, but I was compelled to also sip on brews from Unibroue as well as whiskeys from Michter’s Distillery, one of the oldest distilleries in the nation. Their Single Barrel Rye has notes of grass and charcoal with a remarkably crisp finish.
Local vendors, like Boka Restaurant Group and E+O, provided everything from micro finger foods to a table of wine-friendly cheeses, including Pleasant Ridge Reserve, a divine raw cow’s milk cheese from Wisconsin. Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse did the only on-site cooking, with strips of filet mignon topped with horseradish sauce tossed on a fluffy bun and set before the swarm of hungry guests.
Despite my unwise decision to wear a white vintage blouse, I left jovial and stainless with only a little wine spilt on the floor. All proceeds benefited Wine to Water, a charity bringing clean water to underdeveloped countries. Wine Enthusiast’s Red and White Bash was a complete wine-tasting experience, commemorating the celebratory ritual of wine drinking and I hope to see it come to Chicago again next year.