Feeling a little blue, reader? Has that cold done a number on your sense of taste, so that your nightly nightcap just isn't the same? It can be tempting to overdo it in mid-December, rendering you tired and cranky with the biggest celebrations still ahead of you. So get well soon, because it's party time, and there will never be another December 2007. Whip yourself back into shape and get ready to drink some excellent wine before we close out another odd year and head into an even one (they're better, don't you know).

Rebecca Murphy's wine suggestion for this week in the Dallas Morning News is a "fat and sassy" pinot gris from California's Anderson Valley. Tastes of pear, and has a creamy texture? Sold. Her fellow wine writer, Kim Pierce, talks about vin santo. What is this stuff that can be found in stores if you look hard, but used to be just a "private stash" item? It is usually a dessert wine, and the one she highlights is "sweet but not cloying," and it has all kinds of dried-fruit flavors ... Baroncini Il Santo is also for all kinds of wallets, at $8 a bottle.

Wrap up a few of these for your friends, and then stash away a handful for yourself: Châteauneuf-du-Pape is the wine of love all through the year, but as we get into deeper winter, and food gets richer, it can be a great match -- and it feels like such a splurge to open one of these on a sad winter's eve. The "wine of the week" S. Irene Virbila points us to in the L.A. Times is a Châteauneuf-du-Pape made mostly with grenache with syrah rounding it out, and she says the nose "practically jumps out of the glass."

Karen Page and Andrew Dornenburg of The Washington Post are all about the double happiness of the wine-cheese pairing this week. They put it so well, we'll quote them: "Just as grapes achieve their gastronomic zenith as wine, milk reaches its own as cheese. Tasting wine and cheese together provides double the opportunities to contemplate the delicious wonders of fermentation." This is a great and valuable guide for cheese beginners. Their suggestions: cheddar with Chardonnay, chevre with Sancerre, muenster with Gewurztraminer, and more.

If you like Chianti, but you're budget-oriented, you might have shied away from Chianti Classico, wondering if it's worth the extra money. Dottie and John of The Wall Street Journal think it is -- and they say the 2004 Classico is especially delightful. Their index focuses specifically on 2004 Classicos. Read their column to find out why this wine makes them think about red bricks, and to be convinced that there is good reason to spend a bit more for Classico.

Very cute use of a literary device: Eric Asimov channels his inner English student as he personifies rosé champagne for this week's column. It's a little story written from the perspective of the rose bubbly, whose personality is sort of gentle but mildly haughty, and it is all about the giant spike in this wine's popularity. It includes the usual tasting panel report at the end. We like this article's style especially because it plays with the idea that some Serious Wine People would never drink pink. Still laughing at this: "From 1995 to 1998, exports of rosé Champagne represented just 1.8 percent of all the Champagne shipped to the United States. In 2006 it was 8.37 percent. Let's just say I’m smokin'!"

The L.A. Times' Oeno File column is titled, "So you want to be a sommelier?" Apparently "everyone wants in on the game" and "the race is on to gain certification." Being former New Yorkers and current Washingtonians here at Hot Plates, we didn't realize this was the situation out west. Writer Corie Brown explains to us that as L.A.'s restaurant scene has grown up, "hobbyists with no more than a subscription to Robert Parker's Wine Advocate and the ability to babble" (ouch!) are seeing opportunities for themselves, and they are going for it. It is a fascinating, information-packed article -- it may surprise you to know it can take many years for a sommelier to "matriculate through the four levels of the master sommelier program," which has an "extraordinary failure rate."

Beyond the world of wine, we read "Not Your Aunt Prudence's Punch" in The Washington Post -- chuckling aloud as the writer insults punch for being "sad" and "pathetic" and the punch bowl "scary" and "ugly." It's a teeny bit formulaic, but still enjoyable: We first get a little history, and then the writer edges up to the idea that perhaps punch is sort of "back": "Perhaps it's time for real punch to rise again." It made us scoff, laugh, and wish we'd ladled ourselves some of the electric-red-with-oranges stuff at that jewelry party last weekend.