AWS Holiday Party Reservations

RESERVATION DEADLINE IS

JANUARY 9,2016

$60 PER PERSON

Please RSVP with

your entree choice to:

aws.pittsburgh@gmail.com

Or you may reply to  412-657-0777

Mail your check, payable to AWS to:

Dr. Dennis Trumble

1302 Arch St.

Pittsburgh, PA  15212

Holiday Party Menu and RSVP

Holiday Party - Details to follow

Warm and Personal Holiday Greetings from your Board!

Dear Friend,

Greetings from the echoes of what some folks like to call “Black Friday”–a day on which so many of us cash those early Christmas bonuses.   Anyway, since our treasury was a little depleted, your Board Members decided to make all our own gifts this year.  It was getting a little boring having the champagne dinner at Le Mont (as we usually do with the treasury money) anyway.  It’s been so much fun bonding as we create treasures from the old tinfoil, unused building materials, and scraps of wine cases. We did, however, want to update you on the accomplishments of your elected Board Members this past year, so:

Bev, the Potentate of Programs, has recently taken to expressing herself through poetry during her therapy sessions free time, so we’ll let her start us off with holiday poem:

“Season’s greetings and fleeting meetings, with the ones we love, on earth and above.

Let’s spread our cheer o’er many climes, during these wonderful and happy times—

Alright, that’s it, enough of this crap. The in-laws are here, so much for my nap.

I spilled my wine, that’s just my luck, “But Mom, it’s Christmas!” Yeah? Who gives a f—

It’s a work in progress. . .

Dennis realized the one thing that he hadn’t finished from his bucket list, besides remodeling the bathroom, was to become a professional basketball player.  So he began training in late May, bought several hundred dollars’ worth of supplements down at GNC, more Ace bandages than Florence Nightingale would know what to do with, got a membership to Club Julian, and proceeded to burn himself raw on their newest tanning bed.  After he got out of the trauma ward, he vowed that sports had not seen the last of him.  As far as I can determine, this means he spends Saturdays, Sundays, and Monday nights avoiding Kathleen by dodging behind the big screen down at The James Street Tavern.

Guess who finally got called to Jury Duty after throwing herself on the mercy of the court? Kathleen was selected, with “a jury of her peers,” to serve on a trial that started December 1st. That is why this letter is getting to you so late. She was doing her civic duty, and trying to earn enough money to treat Dennis to some steaks on the Barbie at Outback Steakhouse.

The night before her jury duty, Kathleen did some brushing up by skimming the Declaration of Independence, the amendments to the Constitution, and contemplated the historic court cases like Plessy v. Ferguson and Brown v. the Board of Education. Finally, she perused the Emancipation Proclamation for good measure. She wanted to be prepared for whatever might be asked during her tenure as a juror.

This summer, Tim hiked the entire circumference of each of the Finger Lakes in his Birkenstocks while carrying three Haitian orphans on his back. In September, he invented a fuel injection system that will allow cars to get 500 miles per gallon. But most impressive of all, after years of intensive training, he finally learned how to put down the toilet seat.

Brittany started the year by designing an entire line of swimwear for cats. In March she achieved enlightenment and went to Tibet to have a glass of banana wine with the Dalai Lama.  In October, movie studios went into a bidding frenzy for the rights to her best-selling, coming-of-age/mystery/fantasy/thriller tome, “Planet of the Grapes.”

This past year, Marie received national recognition for watching every Christmas movie broadcast by the Hallmark Channel in 2015. In addition, she single handedly saved Amazon from financial ruin with her online purchases.

As many of you know, Marie is a great lover of cultural treasures and is always on the lookout for artifacts that can potentially unlock the mysteries of our ancestors, and that might also match the earth-toned color scheme of her guest house. In April of 2015, she unearthed the lost Anasazi City of Lukachukai with a band of Navajo pot hunters. Like you, I assumed lost cities were confined to ocean floors and 19th century jungles, but this massive, century-old cliff dwelling is a testament to the few undiscovered wonders still hidden in the world.  The clay walls didn’t stand a chance against Marie’s new axe (purchased on Amazon, I might add).  She came away with as many ochre colored skulls as she could carry!

The summer was fairly inconsequential for Terry and Pat. Terry won a handful of journalism awards, lost funding for his research project on determining the five best kinds of monkeys and finally got those drapes that Pat had been wanting. He also fought a cow, but that’s a story for another time.

Since it snowed last night in Butler, Terry got up early and made a sled with old barn wood and a glue gun. He hand painted it in gold leaf, got out his loom, and made a blanket in peaches and mauves. Then to make the sled complete, he made a white horse to pull it from DNA that he had just sitting around in Pat’s craft room.

Not to brag or anything, but Thom finally achieved Diamond status on his Hilton Honors card, thanks to the AWS National Convention. Do you know what that means? It means that he get a free bottle of water on check in, sometimes two. You’re jealous, aren’t you? Frequently he gets a parking spot under a street light and perhaps best of all; he might get a Toblerone candy bar. Perks, my Friends! Perks!

Merry Xmas, Happy Hanukkah, and/ or whatever alternative Holiday you may choose to observe,

Your Board

More Than You Ever Needed To Know

CHAMPAGNE

It’s the Holiday Season, and our thoughts always turn to wine.  The question is which wine.  If we’re looking for the most versatile, then there’s only one answer.  Champagne’s effervescence cleanses the palate, it makes food more enjoyable, and more importantly, it is more effective than tequila when you’re trying to impress a date. Champagne is arguably one of the greatest discoveries that happened to mankind. And, like most great things, Champagne was discovered by accident.  Here are some more items about The Bubbly that don’t even come up on Jeopardy.

ENGLISH CHAMPAGNE

The British were the first to see the tendency of wines from the Champagne region to sparkle, and they tried to understand the reason behind those tiny bubbles. Due to the use of coal-fueled ovens, the English glassmakers produced stronger, more durable glass bottles than the French. English bottling and corking skills were far superior to those in France so wine was often transported to England in wooden wine barrels where merchant houses would then bottle the wine for sale.

During the winters of the Champagne region, temperatures would drop so low that the fermentation process was prematurely halted leaving some residual sugar and dormant yeast. When the wine was shipped to and bottled in England, the fermentation process would restart when the weather warmed and the wine would begin to build pressure from carbon dioxide gas. When the wine was opened, it would be bubbly. In 1662, the English scientist Christopher Merret presented a paper detailing how the presence of sugar in a wine led to it eventually sparkling and that by adding sugar to a wine before bottling it, nearly any wine could be made to sparkle. This is one of the first known accounts of understanding the process of sparkling wine and even suggests that British merchants were producing “sparkling Champagne” before the French Champenois were deliberately making it.

THE WINEMAKER IN THE IRON MASK

Dom Pérignon was originally asked by his superiors at the Abbey of Hautvillers to get rid of the bubbles since the pressure in the bottles caused many of them to burst in the cellar. As sparkling wine production increased in the early 18th century, cellar workers (especially the riddlers, or remueurs in French) had to wear a heavy iron mask to prevent injury from spontaneously bursting bottles. The disturbance caused by one bottle exploding could cause a chain reaction, which would cause wine cellars to lose 20% to 90% of their inventory this way.

THE DEVIL’S WINE

Effervescence has been observed in wine throughout history and has been noted by Ancient Greek and Roman writers but the cause of this mysterious appearance of bubbles wasn’t understood. Over time it’s been attributed to phases of the moon and both good and evil spirits. It was considered a wine fault in early Champagne winemaking. The mysterious circumstance surrounding the then unknown process of fermentation and carbonic gas caused some critics to call the sparkling creations “The Devil’s Wine”.

SPRAYING CHAMPAGNE

Champagne has been an integral part of sports celebration since Moët & Chandon started offering their Champagne to the winners of Formula 1 Grand Prix events. At the 1967 24 Hours of Le Mans, winner Dan Gurney started the tradition of drivers spraying the crowd and each other.

CHAMPAGNE ETIQUETTE

Champagne is usually served in a Champagne flute, whose characteristics include a long stem with a tall, narrow bowl, thin sides and an etched bottom.

The Champagne coupe or Champagne saucer is a shallow, broad bowled, stemmed glass, commonly used at wedding receptions, often stacked in layers to build a champagne tower. Champagne is continuously poured into the top glass, trickling down to fill every glass below. Legend has it that the shape of the glass was designed using a mold of French Queen Marie Antoinette’s left breast as a birthday present to her husband, Louis XVI. As much as we would love for this to be true, this is almost certainly false. The glass was designed especially for champagne in England in 1663, preceding them by almost a century.

Not to be outdone, however, Moët Hennessy Champagne brand Dom Pérignon released a glass modelled after supermodel Claudia Schiffer’s breasts back in 2008. Both Schiffer and Lagerfeld (the photographer of note) had a long association with Dom Perignon, the former appearing in a series of ever more suggestive ads for the brand. In 2007, the pair hosted a series of lavish parties for the launch of the Oenothèque 1993, the house’s top bottling. The glass, which sold as a package with a bottle of 1995 Oenothèque, cost $3,150!  Check for one on eBay!