Welcome to Winter

Our lovely warm fall weather ended abruptly last night. In the course of just 10 hours the temperature dropped 50 degrees and we were hit with seven inches of fat wet snow. Here at home I spent those ten hours quietly freaking out about how I was going to drive to work. I've never ever driven in snow before -- let alone a blizzard, so the morning commute had me terrified.

My lovely husband prepped me well -- drive slow, don't brake too fast, stay in your lane if possible, etc. It was all helpful advice. (Although the one thing he didn't mention was that the brake lights on the dashboard we're going to go off -- which made my heart stop for a second.) Anyway, it took an hour and a half, and I only screamed once (when a truck blew by me and the entire car was *splatted* with a heavy smack of muddy slush), but you'll be proud to know that I managed to get to work in one piece. The car's in one piece too - if you don't count the nail marks in the steering wheel.

With the day being filled with frazzled nerves and heavy snow, I thought this might be a good night to start the 2006 Anderson Mulled Wine Ratings. (I know those of you familiar with the 2003 Anderson Cheese Chart are excited -- we certainly have a history of brilliant epicurean evaluations, don't we? I believe our top cheese won on a rating of "MMMMmmmmmmmm".)

Alrighty. Our first contender is a traditional mulled wine, from The Bay Tree, sold last year through Crate and Barrel. I steeped the little bag in a cheapy bottle of Black Swan Shiraz/Cabernet.

I'm giving it a 3 out of 5. It's lovely and traditional, but maybe a little too clovey. So it's a little dry. And my tongue went puffy. So there you go... -2 points for needing to push your tongue against the roof of your mouth to make sure it's not *actually* getting bigger.