It’s one of those drinks. You know, those drinks. The kind that say on the menu “Served only to parties of two or more” and comes in a fish bowl (okay, it probably never housed any fish and did have a stem, but it was a behemoth of a thing).  It’s a rum punch but you’d really have to convince me that it was much more than a bag of sugar with some fruit on top served with six straws.

I hate being any sort of booze elitist, because who really likes guys like that? I had held my tongue when a bottle of Martini & Rossi Asti Spumante was referred to as champagne. A bachelorette party limo where talk of how drunk we’ll get tonight is hardly the platform to educate some lovely ladies on the difference between our bottle of bubbly and methode champenoise.

Try as I might, small sip after small sip of The Rough Rider started making me queasy. Sugary drinks are hardly my thing these days and as much as I could force my palate to approve the beverage, my stomach went into full out protest. I just heard it telling me that drinking this much sugar is going to trigger an upchuck way before it triggers any alcohol buzz. It wasn’t worth the trouble of keeping appearances and joining in on the novelty drink fun.

As I paid attention to my tastes and body during a conversation about how it would cost $500 if anyone puked in the limo so we should get drunk, but not too drunk, a $6.00 glass of CK Mondavi Pinot Grigio seemed all the more appealing. Maybe it’s not the best wine I’ve ever let touch my tongue but in that moment, the respite from sugar coma was incredible. There was acid, not accompanied by too much sugar, and I could relax and enjoy the moment again. Drunk but not puking? I can do this. As I downed my wine, all was settling in.

It’s hard to get comfortable in certain situations sometimes, as I was finding that night at my good friend’s bachelorette party. You may not have noticed, but I’m not the girly-est of girls around. But somehow, getting the right drink eased me into the night and opened me up to allow myself to have a good time.

A shot and a gin and tonic later (continuing my theme of lower sugar drinks), we hit the dance floor and let loose.

That probably sounds more foreboding than it actually is but I’m okay with that. My writing professors always said that the title of a piece needed to draw the reader in so maybe this is about doomsday in Charlottesville , VA or maybe it’s not. I guess you’ll have to keep reading to find out.

Spoiler: It’s not about doomsday in Charlottesville.

There’s all sorts of recaps for WBC floating around. Some good, some bad, some funny. This one is more personal (put on your group hug shoes and let’s get ready to do this).

Big events like WBC tend to evoke big emotion from yours truly. Last year, I was so overwhelmed with the amazing experience that I had that I still have a draft of what I wrote directly after the conference ended that I’ve chosen not to publish.

This year, I’d say my emotion was just as big, but the emotion was different. I’d had a fantastic time, drank great wines, visited super awesome places (Monticello, anyone?) and best of all, hung out with some of the coolest people I know. I feel lucky enough to call a number of the attendees friends and to have even shared a hotel party or two with one of our keynotes, Eric Asimov (who’s pretty badass because he’s so down to Earth).

But back to the emotion. I was left feeling unsure about the future of this blog. Why? Let’s get into that.

My life in 2011 has focused less on wine and more on losing weight and building a solid foundation with my fiancé for our life ahead (no, we haven’t set a date for our wedding and I don’t want to make any of this post about that, honestly). I was thinking about how I don’t post as much as I used to and even worse, I don’t follow through with posts that I have ideas for. Sometimes, it just feels like I’ve lost the motivation to keep up with this old thing (I started this guy in January of 2009 so in the land of blogging, that actually is pretty old).

And then I thought about it some more. So what if my focus in life is changing? That just means that maybe the focus here should change, too. After all, if you go back to my very first few posts (please don’t), I wrote a few wine reviews, and that’s something that I find extremely boring and unhelpful now. I stopped writing them after something like the 4th one, which shows how quickly I adjusted my writing and content a couple years ago when I was unfulfilled.

I started my blog back then with the ultimate goal of gaining employment in the wine biz, and that happened less than 9 months after starting to chase my goal. What did I do then? I refocused this thing to be a more personal account of my own life within wine. That’s worked for nearly two years but maybe it’s time to readjust again.

I’m not sure exactly what this means for me (or for the blog), but it does mean that I’m not closing shop, even though I’d thought about it quite seriously. It might mean that while I get my act together, there won’t be many posts. In the end, I hope that there’s a positive result to be found and that I can continue trying my best to deliver the best stories that I can tell.

In the end (which really might only be the beginning if you think about it), I’m sticking around and everything is pretty much unicorns and rainbows. I love writing and I love writing about wine.

Look at how Millennial I am, posting a Lisa Frank image. My generation is so unique that no one could possibly think that they understand us. (I really did have this stationary set, fyi.)

At the end of March, I filled all of you in on my journey of losing weight. I said it then and I still kind of like to try to keep this thing limited to wine related stuff, but screw it. I want to share this update with you so I’m going to. Knowing more about the (wo)man behind the curtain never hurt, right?

Since January, my life has been so different than the months before that. Now, two glasses of wine on a Wednesday night is something rarely even attempted, let alone commonplace. Going out to eat is a bit more tedious because I actually care about the nutritional value of what I take in. Making my own food has taken a higher priority. When we do go out, I more often order a salad instead of a sauce-covered piece of meat between bread. It might not have been want I wanted before, it’s what I want now. I’ve actually found myself craving salads in a way that I’d only ever craved chocolate before. A deep, aching cry from deep within the fibers of my being just screams “I need vegetables!”

It’s good.

This doesn’t mean that I haven’t found a balance between my life of wine consumption and calorie limitation, though. I still enjoy some pretty good wines. I’m just doing it a little less often and when I do indulge, I’m having fewer glasses. I’m a little more selective and I’m not finding that to be a terribly bad thing. The lack of hangovers also isn’t a bad perk (of course with the exception of my Stanley Cup celebration). My mornings are better for it.

It’s not like I never splurge, either. In May, I traveled to Niagara, CAN for a wonderful iteration of TasteCamp North, and totally forgot for a few days what counting calories was like. Granted, all of the food was amazingly local and fresh, so I wasn’t all that concerned with terrible gross additives or anything like that, but it was refreshing. I came back and was surprised that I hadn’t even gained anything back from some of those over-indulgences.

After all this babbling you probably want a numbers update, huh? Sure, sure. I’ll cave. In my last update I’d lost 25 pounds. I’m quite happy to report that as of this morning, that number is up to 38 pounds lost, meaning that I’m a mere 12 pounds from reaching my major goal of losing 50 pounds.

At this point, I’m pretty sure that I’ll take my weight loss further than that 50 pounds, but it’s going to be an amazing goal to reach before the end of 2011 (that’s really my only goal for a time table here). Having made all of this progress, I have no doubts that I’ll get there and when I do, I’m going to look back on 2011 as one hell of a transformation year.

While I’ve been a little absent from this blog and from the wine scene, it’s not been a waste. Wine will always be a massive passion for me to enjoy and nerd out about. One day (hopefully soon) I’ll be able to fully dive back into this in the way that I once did. Until then, I’ll see you at the Wine Bloggers’ Conference next week!