I am not one of those people who go to bars and then order a glass of the house red. The bar is just not a place where I can enjoy a glass of wine. It's loud, crowded, and generally too smelly (though not necessarily in a bad way) to really appreciate the wine, and to be honest, most offerings are not very remarkable anyway.

Funnily enough, for all their production, there are relatively few Portuguese wines available to buy in the States. Below, two that I've drank lately that you can track down for your own pleasure.

Spring break is tantalizingly close, and I, for one, cannot wait. In order to keep myself occupied, I am attempting to clean out all my quotidian wines so I have lots of room for the goodies I'm planning on purchasing while on vacation. Below are three that I've finished and rather enjoyed.

With the weather being so screwy lately, I've had a difficult time limiting myself to one season's type of wine. The blizzard definitely made me break out the heavier, darker wine in my collection, but the mild sunny weather that followed on its heels made me think of spring and wines that echo the fresh greenness that will appear sometime in April, if we're lucky. Below, an eclectic mix that suits the current climate:

Ah February, month of the Superbowl, Olympics, Groundhog Day, Presidents Day, Black History Month and . . . what's that last one? Right, Valentine's Day. Rah (shakes pseudo-pom-pom apathetically). Bitter, moi? Au contraire, in the spirit of Hallmark I'm reviewing three wines for the grape-hearted, 11 days early.

Greetings, dear readers, and a toast to my final wine column of the semester. I would like to make a few notes on giving wine as a gift as we enter the holiday season. A bottle of wine makes a wonderful gift for several reasons. It's something that can keep for a long time (at least several months if stored properly). You can buy something really special for relatively little money, as $20.00 gets you a much better bottle of wine than bouquet of flowers.

Thanksgiving is drawing near. According to empirical evidence, holidays cause more stress than anything else (with the possible exceptions of standardized tests and the words "we need to talk"). How can you survive the stress? While I would not condone going on a heavy drinking binge that permits you to stumble through the holiday in an apathetic stupor, I do have some wine-related suggestions.

So it's Parents Weekend, and you're looking to show your parents a good time. I recommend the following: clean up your room and host a mini event for your parents and those friends whose parents are not around.

As the autumn sets in, I begin to think of my favorite wine accompaniment: food. Something about the cool weather makes me want to cook large quantities of tomato sauce, or soup, or any number of rustic foods. Below are two fall-themed dishes that feature yummy wine, one for a shoestring budget and one for the more flush among us.

Autumn brings many changes to the environment?leaves changing color, an extra hour of sleep in October, and most importantly, nipple-numbing cold weather. Never fear, we are still due a few more days of delicious sunshine. So, this week I have wines that would be perfect to drink while outdoors and some that will keep your blood pumping in the cold.

Every fall, without fail, comes the inevitable question: "so what did you do all summer?" More often than not, I'm rather embarrassed that I don't have some amazing adventure to share. This year, however, I do have some adventures to share, for this summer I spent my free time drinking lots of wines, attending tastings, and even visiting a fantastic vineyard. From all the fun in the sun, here are some things I learned:

So, readers, we have reached the end of the wine reviewing year. Of course, I fully intend to continue trying new wines over the summer in anticipation for the fall. For those of you who are graduating, my gift to you: the cheap and dirty guide to drinking wine.

A few weeks ago I had a raspberry dessert wine to match my delicious pineapple upside-down cake and was seriously distressed. It was like drinking Robitussin. Fortunately, I was able to palm it off on my dinner partner who, for some reason, enjoys these syrupy disasters. However, just because I haven't enjoyed dessert wines in the past doesn't mean I shouldn't give them a try now. For your reading and possibly drinking pleasure I present three dessert wines of a wide variety.

Welcome, oh happy readers. Inspired by this week's spring (or was it summer) weather, I thought that I would try wines with whimsical names. I am sure that you have seen these wines in the shops, and have wondered, perhaps even chuckled about some of them.

Before I get to this week's column let me first say a few words about that most basic necessity, the corkscrew. Throughout my years as a wine drinker, I have had the unfortunate experience of having the corkscrew break while opening a bottle on three separate occasions.

Hurrah for spring and with it the resurrection of the weekly wine column! I have finally returned from Egypt, where the wine industry is only just recovering from its nationalization under Nasser in the 60s. To date, there are only four major brands of wine in Egypt: Omar Khayyam, Obelisk, Grand Marquis and Cru de Ptolemees. The first three produce a red and a white varietal; Cru de Ptolemees only produces a white. Of the four brands, the best is the Grand Marquis label, which, if not exciting or delectable, is at worst very drinkable, if a bit bland. General opinion is that the whites and especially the Cru de Ptolemees are not very good. I have not imbibed the Cru de Ptolemees, but from what I hear, I would rather drink the salty desert sand. However, it is best not to dwell on the swill of the past, and instead let me move onto the wine I tried last night.

Welcome to part two of the Thanksgiving wine extravaganza. This week we cover some more wines that should be good for Thanksgiving dinner. I would like to point out that these wines cost less than the average bake-shop pie and that it takes less time to uncork a bottle of wine than it does to make even the simplest of side dishes. So, for the student with three papers to write over the break (and I think that's almost everyone I know) this is the most minimal way to be a part of creating a fabulous Thanksgiving.

So, this week, I would like to remind you (just like your professors, the CPC, and everyone else who likes to nag) that we are just two weeks out from Thanksgiving. Wahoo! Three extra days of weekend?and you get to spend it with your family, who will hopefully fork over some money along with the leftovers.

I've noticed that wine drinking has become a hot topic of late. All of a sudden, all over the place, the media is full of wine drinkers. Now, I'm not saying that this is a bad thing, in fact, far from it. But what is causing this huge interest in something so ancient? I don't know, but I'm giving you a heads up about some of the wine-related stuff out for consumption (pun intended).

As most of you know, next week we will be having a contest worthy of its own pay-per-view special in which one side will come out victorious and lord it over the losers for the next four years. Lest the Orient be blamed for a political bias, I will not say whom I want to win, but instead, this week, I am devoting my column to the proper drink for all celebratory occasions: champagne.

Welcome once again to the fantastic world of wines. I've been feeling a little guilty the last week or so because I have been, as usual, neglecting white wines. This is mostly because I'm not really a white wine kind of girl. I can't be bothered to plan ahead enough to actually put a bottle in the fridge to chill in advance, and since most of my wine drinking is spontaneous, I frequently don't have a white ready to drink. So this week, to make up for my poor representation of white wines, I have two very lovely but wholly different wines.

Just in time for Halloween comes this product from the Transylvania area of Romania. Unsurprisingly, it's a beautiful blood purple red and the taste is very good. It has a thick earthy flavor that gets less intense over time. Although most of my tasters were more excited about the cool label than the wine at first, and were more interested in discussing prurient matters in bad eastern European accents, all my tasters enjoyed drinking Vampire.

Parents Weekend is upon us, and what better way to interact with your visiting folks than through wine? No, I don't mean you should go out and try to get your parents drunk; that would just be wrong. Sitting down with your parents and sharing a bottle of wine either with dinner or before, however, is a good way to spend some time with them.

After the Daily Red debacle, I was unwilling to try another organic wine, but I didn't want to discount the whole group because of one bad bottle, so I tried again. It was the color of the squishy stuff in a lava lamp. This set off alarm bells in my head, because that's not what a wine should look like.

In honor of those celebrating the High Holy Days, I decided to do my good deed for the week and find a good alternative to the nasty cough syrup Maneschewitz has the nerve to call wine.

Before I get to my reviews for the week, let me explain how this is going to work. I am not a wine snob; while I have attended a class on wines, I do not believe in using words like "leggy" or describing a "bouquet." I love wine. Wine is a very social drink because it means you have to have company in order to do a bottle justice; I don't believe in re-corking. Also, I like the fact that you could drink a different bottle of wine every day for the rest of your life and never do the same one twice.