wine and liquor

Okay, before I completely forget this story, I should get it down. It's about our first experience
with HWLS. The first night we got here, after driving for many many many hours in a truck, we met up with out landlord. The last several (possibly million) hours of driving through Iowa seemed to take a disproportionately long amount of time. I don't know why. Perhaps we entered a time warp. Luckily our landlord is very understanding and was still working and met us at like 11.30 or something absurd. Also it's one hour behind here, so really it was 12.30 a.m. and we had been in a truck for approximately 14 hours. I can't stress this part enough.

After we met up and got keys, we headed over to Hy vee to get some basic necessities like toilet paper and wine.

Now, we had our very first experience w/the Iowa wine store! We walked in- and it quite a sight- it's actually a pretty cool store. It has a lot of different kinds of wine and beer in cases and single beers and lots of things. Including Jekyl and Hyde, but more on that later.

All this was probably lost on us at the time though, as we were extremely tired and overly stressed, possibly from sitting in a truck for 14 hrs.
A VERY YOUNG looking girl who worked at the wine store approached us.

SERIOUSLY, this girl looked about 14. I didn't know you could be 14 and work in a wine store. Maybe you can though. I can't remember her name. Let's just say it was Shelly or Shelby or something like that. Or 14 year old girl.
She asked us what we were looking for and we said a sweet wine. We were standing right by some white wines. I guess we should have just picked one but like I mentioned, exhaustion and mental fatigue.
She recommended something that she called a dessert wine. For reasons I cannot fully explain, we decided to go with her recommendation.

So we try this wine and you know what? It's not really wine. It's like hard cider. It tastes like apple crack.

The next day, after unpacking, and getting some amount of rest, we went back to HWLS (did I mention that it is close). We pick up some "real" red wine to have with dinner (Yay our first dinner in our new home) and guess who rings us up?
Shelly/Shelby the 14 yr old wine steward. Well when we mention that our previous wine selection was a little lacking, she immediately says that she felt bad and that she realized the moment we left that she had given us a bad recommendation! She even starts talking to us about a local winery.
Now every time we go back, I have looked for the 14 yr old but alas, we have run into other wine stewards- an older/normal aged person originally from Ohio, Kenny, and my "favorite", Talon.

The awesome thing, well two really, about the HWLS:
1. They do NOT make you take bags! If you say, I have my own bag, they don't foist a paper or plastic bag on you! Huzzah! This almost makes up for the city's lack of recycling.
More on this in another post.

2. Their awesome selection of the KATZEN WINES!

Katz, aka Schwartzkatz the original, aka Happy Mosel wine, comes in SO Many colors, it is amazing. Red, green, blue, etc!

I know, most of you are saying, what is this Happy Mosel wine?

It is a nice white wine that comes in a BOTTLE SHAPED LIKE A CAT

It was first introduced to me by my good friend Mauren, with the original black cat wine.
I was very excited to see it comes in many different colors.

Okay...that is enough about the happy cat wine, but really, it's wine in a cat bottle.