Where there's swill, there's a way

That may be the worst pun I've ever used in a blog post title, but anyway, I just happened across a website called Swillparty.com, which turns out to be a Buffalo/WNY site devoted to social wine tasting. Apparently SWILL is an acronym, standing for "Several Wine Imbibers Liking Libations".

They've got a wine blog (already bookmarked for the next update of the blogroll), and they've even come up with a nifty-looking kit for getting your own wine-tasting parties together, along with several other items of merchandise. So, if you're local and you're looking for wine-tasting stuff, keep your money local and buy from them. And if you're not local, buy from them anyway, because your locality doesn't need the money as much as Western New York does! I'm not quite the wine drinker I used to be -- beer, rum (Spum! Vrum!), and Southern Comfort are my poisons of choice these days, although I do enjoy wine and I've got a half-bottle (or whatever the technical term is for a 375-ml bottle) of Sauternes that I'm keeping for consumption when I make my first professional fiction sale. (Although at the rate I'm going, that bottle will be too valuable to drink when that day comes....)

I found this site, incidentally, by exercising an old online pseudo-hobby of mine, namely, Googling names of people I've gone to school with. Turns out that the founding SWILLer, Anne Conroy-Baiter, is one of those old friends with whom I lost touch years ago. (It also turns out that she's apparently quite the watercolorist, which is something I don't recall knowing about her at all from high school. I could really learn to like this Interweb thingie!