Returned home from Las Vegas yesterday after pouring wines at the annual portfolio tasting of our Vegas distributor Red Rock Wines.  Now that I’m older, I’ve learned to head off trouble preemptively and so brought along my wife and kids since the event was held at the family friendly Mandalay Bay Resort.  And throughout our stay, whenever the kids encountered sights that struck them as particularly outlandish, they would ask  “why would anyone do that?”, to which my answer was usually “because no one else was stupid enough to beat them to it at a different spot in Vegas”.

A prime example of Vegasian excess is the 42 foot high wine tower at Charlie Palmer’s Aureole.  It’s encased in lucite so you can watch the “wine angels”  gracefully climb up and then rappel back down with your trophy bottle of wine.  I have to admit the concept became considerably more intriguing when we learned that our 2006 Madder Lake Zinfandel is on their wine list and therefore housed somewhere within the amazing tower of wine.  Could it possibly be that an athletic/angelic young beauty has scaled to the top of the tower to retrieve a bottle of Jus Soli as part of a happy couple’s first romantic night of their honeymoon?  We don’t think we have to worry about an older sugar daddy wining and dining his high class hooker with our vino since he would clearly buy something showier, right?  And should you happen to visit and find out that our wine is situated down near the bottom within easy reach of any staff member, please don’t ruin the fantasy for us.  We like to think that the angels are responsible for bringing our wine down from the heavens for the enjoyment of mortals before they head off for their night of depraved adult entertainment.