Happy End-of-2019, Everyone! Some of you may have followed my 24 days of Swill or Swell on Instagram in December (find me @lizbchicago), with the Aldi Wine Advent Calendar.  And I gotta say — I pre-judged the whole box, thinking it was all going to be fucking crap, but guess what? There wound up being 19 Swell bottles and only five bottles of total Swill. I call that a win, for $69.99 and the daily fun of popping open a new mini bottle.

It wasn’t fancy wine and almost all of it was non-vintage and imported (except for the God-awful White Zin from California – that asshole bottle did not even get opened – went straight into the recycling bin). Honestly, I even wished for full-size bottles of a couple of them, like the Rosé of Merlot from Day 3 or 4.

But then. Then my friend Patty challenged me to do Swell or Swill on Aldi’s Seven Days of Sparkling – meant to be consumed from Christmas through New Year’s Day. What was I to do? I can’t turn down a challenge. So off to Aldi I went! and I plunked down my $24.99 for a big box containing seven 187-ml bottles of various sparkling wines.

And there was only one person fit to plow through these bottles of bubbs with me — the inimitable Rob Frisch, my co-star on “Name That Wine,” over on YouTube and blogger extraordinaire at Odd Bacchus.

So, as my final toast to you in 2019 – I present our comical tasting video, plowing through all seven sparklers at once! I hope you enjoy and I’ll see you in 2020!

Happy new year everyone!