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Now through May 15 Whole Foods Market (1601 South Brentwood Boulevard, Brentwood; 314-968-7744) is offering a sale on Spanish wines, featuring twelve wines from eleven different regions of Spain.

To further hype promote the sale, the Whole Foods location in Brentwood will be hosting a Taste and Tweet Spanish wine tasting event this Thursday, April 19, at 7 p.m., when three Spanish wines will be available for tastings: Castell de Raimat Albariño from Costers del Segre in Catalonia, Faustino Rioja from Rioja in northern Spain and Más de Leda Tempranillo from Castilla and León in northwest Spain. This week, Gut Check met with Whole Foods specialty team leader Beth Hadican to get the lowdown on the Spanish wines and find out why this special is worth buying into.

Hadican informed us that all twelve wines are new to Whole Foods and exclusive to the Whole Foods chain. While the Taste and Tweet event is only being held at the Brentwood location, all Whole Foods locations nationwide (including the other St. Louis Whole Foods location at Town & Country Crossing) offer the Spanish wine promotion through May 15.

During our small preview we tasted five of the twelve wines that are currently available. Each wine had a pleasant flavor and lingering appeal, but we won't bore you with wino jargon. Instead, we'll leave it to you to taste for yourself. Suffice to say we were suitably impressed by our sampling and prepared to fund further research out of pocket. If you're interested in attending the Taste and Tweet event contact the store to reserve your spot. If you can't make it out to the event, it's still worth a stop by Whole Foods to pick up a bottle or two of Spanish vino -- seriously, some of these bottles are on sale for as low as $7.99.

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Gut Check has always scoffed at those dedicated oenophiles who buy stemware that has been designed for one or two specific kinds of wine, like this Riedel beaut for Burgundy -- or, pardon us, for Burgundy grand cru -- which will set you back a cool $125 each.

Can this "beautiful monster" truly "take apart a lesser wine, mercilessly showing up its weaknesses" while its "slightly flared top lip maximises the fruit flavours by directing a precise flow onto the front palate"?

Who cares? When it comes to wine, we say mind over matter, and the only stemware we need puts us in the frame of mind for a ripping good time, whether our tipple of choice is grand cru Burgundy poured from a crystal decanter or the bottle of Thunderbird we keep tucked inside our pervy trenchcoat:

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Which is why we found this news from the FDA so devastating.

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Not an appropriate name for baby

Gut Check isn't above browsing the celebrity gossip, but we saw this juicy tidbit via Grub Street rather than our usual supermarket tabloids: Jessica Simpson -- did she sing? we honestly can't remember why she's famous in the first place -- and her fiance considered naming their soon-to-arrive child Zinfandel.

Yes, that's right: Zinfandel, as in little-z zinfandel, the grape that produces either A) a brawny red, or B) a wussy "white." So I guess they would have had their bases covered however the kid turned out.

At any rate, cooler heads prevailed, and baby Simpson will be named Maxwell. Which is a shame, really. As ridiculous a name as "Zinfandel" might have been, Simpson and her baby daddy were on to something. Booze has been at least partly responsible for more than a few instances of conception, after all. Why not honor its role as a, um, social lubricant?

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Drink up! If you have enough, you might feel those anti-aging proteins work their way through your cells.

The glory days of Mad Men, when doctors prescribed regular cigarette smoking and judiciously-administered (daily) glasses of alcohol, are, sadly, long gone -- except for red wine, that miracle drink that keeps us young and healthy while also getting us drunk. Good Lord how we love it!

For a long time, the health benefits of red wine were something doctors and scientists just knew, without knowing exactly why, except that if French people did it, it surely must be good because they are so much healthier and skinnier than we are. But now there's a possible explanation.

Here we go:

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Erika Miller

Give a gift of grapes at Garland Wines

​December has arrived in full force with blustery winds and twinkling Christmas lights, which means it's time for Gut Check to curl up inside the International Headquarters with a bottle of Oban and the new Péter Nádas novel for holiday gift-giving. Liquor is always the right size, but if a bottle of Captain topped with a bow won't cut it, let the folks at Garland Wines (11 South Old Orchard Avenue, Webster Groves; 314-961-9463) help you pick out the perfect wine during its annual holiday open house this weekend.

Garland Wines has hosted a holiday open house and wine tasting for over two decades. This year's event, which began Thursday night and continues today from 3-9 p.m. and tomorrow from 11 a.m.-5 p.m., features a tasting of more than twenty wines, special prices on select bottles and cases and a display of wine gifts to peruse. Garland Wines has also put together a gift catalog filled with top picks for presents.

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www.robertkacherselections.com

The fruits of the labor of widely traveled wine importer Robert Kacher.

If you haven't already made plans for happy hour this evening, Gut Check has a suggestion: Sally your bad self forth to the Wine Merchant, Ltd. (20 South Hanley Rd., Clayton; 314-863-6282).

Tonight from 5 to 7 p.m., the wine store hosts a tasting of bottles imported by Robert Kacher (you can call him Bobby). That all by itself would be a productive use of your time; the Merch ups the event to a must-do by bringing in Kacher himself to preside over the pouring, swirling, sniffing, sipping and spitting.

For decades Kacher has done his wine-mining the old-fashioned way, scouring the French countryside, tasting all the while and, most important, establishing one-on-one relationships with individual growers and producers whose approaches to winemaking best match his own ideals.

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Gut Check loves us some wine. We want a bottle with bang and a bang for our buck, so every week we will visit a local wine shop, where an expert will recommend a good-value wine priced under $15. We'll drink some and tell you whether we want to continue -- because the only time Gut Check has our nose in the air is while we're draining our glass.

Sarah Baraba

Walking into Copia Urban Winery & Market (1122 Washington Avenue; 314241-9463), Gut Check was a little intimidated and frankly nervous that they had misunderstood our request for a wine under $15. The white tablecloths, fireplace and sparkling décor didn't exactly indicate we'd be finding a bottle bargain. But, oh, did Copia's wine buyer David Schaeffer prove us wrong. He sat down with Gut Check for a taste of Charles Smith Wines' the Velvet Devil Merlot, that will set you back $15 on the nose.

This 2009 merlot hails from Washington State's Columbia Valley, giving it something California wines cannot. "Washington makes great wines, and they're pretty much known for their pinots," said Schaeffer. "The climate is a little bit cooler than when you go down south to Napa or Sonoma and that allows the grape to stay on the vine a little bit longer and gives them a little bit more sugar so they can make better, fuller wines."

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Gut Check loves us some wine. We want a bottle with bang and a bang for our buck, so every week we will visit a local wine shop, where an expert will recommend a good-value wine priced under $15. We'll drink some and tell you whether we want to continue -- because the only time Gut Check has our nose in the air is while we're draining our glass.

Erika Miller

​Always on the quest for easy-drinking, low-budget wine, Gut Check has picked up on some of the telltale traits that separate a decent bottle from a forgettable one. In our experience, wines that come with a twist-off top are often placed in the forgettable category, but Gut Check's opinion was changed by the Villa des Anges cabernet sauvignon from the Wine and Cheese Place (7435 Forsyth Boulevard, Clayton; 314-727-8788).

Andy Silver had this cabernet ready for us when we walked in the door and told us that for only $9.99, this wine is one of the store's better sellers.

"The price is absolutely right," Silver said. "To get a cab with some character for under $10 is very good."

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Gut Check loves us some wine. We want a bottle with bang and a bang for our buck, so every week we will visit a local wine shop, where an expert will recommend a good-value wine priced under $15. We'll drink some and tell you whether we want to continue -- because the only time Gut Check has our nose in the air is while we're draining our glass.

Emily Wasserman

Normally when one hears the words "Fall Fling," images of tulle-lined party dresses and flowered lapels come to mind. Maybe you feel a shiver run down your spine at the memory of a school-chaperoned event, complete with punch bowls and a greasy-haired DJ.

Luckily, Saint Louis Cellars' (2640 South Big Bend Boulevard; 314-880-9000) 2nd Annual Fall Fling was a much different affair. The event, which allows the general public to sample over 90 wines for only $5, is part of a biannual event series that started in the spring of 2010, and marks its fourth anniversary this Fall.

"We were originally trying to think of a one-year anniversary idea, and we thought of having an event where customers could sample everything in the store. We go to all the distributors and get to taste the wine before we buy it, so we thought it would be fun if people got to do it, too," manager and marketing director Diane Blaskiewicz explained.

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Two vegan rappers, a masked man and a wine company might seem like an odd combination (or a very poor TV sitcom pitch), but in the case of St. Louis-based Freaky Muscato, that recipe's been making beautiful music for nearly a year.

Local entrepreneur Jeff Medolla (otherwise known as The Bachelorette's Masked Man) hatched the idea for Freaky Muscato after driving back to St. Louis from Springfield and hearing the word "freak" over and over again in hip-hop songs on the radio. After flushing out a business plan and bringing rappers Murphy Lee and Kyjuan of the St. Lunatics on board, Medolla was originally set on producing a vodka.

"[Murphy Lee and Kyjuan have] been sipping on wine for a long time," Medolla says. "The vodka was getting delayed, and we had access to all this wine. I had to make a judgment call and they were like, 'Jeff, we seriously should come out with a wine.' Muscato is very popular right now. It's the number-one selling wine in the country, and [it] is a certain kind of sweet wine that's being plugged more and more in hip-hop music by people like Drake and Waka Flocka Flame."

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