Wine Blending at Bin 36

We were up about 6:30 to get ready and head to the airport for 9am flight to Chicago. Since we both have status with Northwest/Delta we both got upgraded, ahh first class. Thankfully it was only a short flight but still nice to have the extra leg room. Our flight left on time and even arrived a bit early! Yeah! I have terrible luck with flights so I was very thankful that we were on time. Sarc picked us up at the airport and we headed to their place, they have a super cute townhouse in the Logan Square neighborhood and it really is a great layout. 2 floors with a nice deck and a garage! That is hard to find in the city. We cabbed it downtown and stopped to watch a bit of the Bears/Lions game before heading to Bin at 1.

This years blending was from 1-4 and we knew it would be super packed right at 1 so we waited a few minutes before heading over to Bin. It was 1:15 when we got there and there was still a decent line. Instead of heading to the blending area right away we headed to the bar for a glass of wine and to catch up with everyone there. Dan, Jen, Tony, Adalia, Kathleen, Sarc, Ivy, Mike and I- we had quite the group! We started blending around 2:30 when we could get 9 seats near each other, we had a whole system to maximize our blending. Each person got 3 tries at a blend that had to be at least 75% cab and then a mix of Merlot and Syrah. So we wrote down a plan to figure out the best way to try the widest variety of blends. This was our 3^rd year doing this so we felt like we had a good system going! An hour later we finally had our blends figured out and went to order our wine. You get to pick a custom label and name your wine- this year we choose a Chicago Themed label for our 2009 Friends Blend and a label with a filigree motif for our Spicy Life wine (In honor of my blog). The wine should arrive by mid December, just in time for Christmas gifts!