Wine is immensely complex, but 3CUPS offers a path to enjoyment and understanding. Hear me out. Let's start with my premise; wine's complexity is due to the fact that it encompasses different grapes, vintages, countries, growers, vintners, currencies... you could go on and on. Point is, finding the jam or mustard which makes you smile takes a lot less study and effort on your part. In fact, if you give me an hour we can pretty much cover a food product like mustard and you'll know more about the subject than anyone on your block, neighborhood or maybe even your entire town. Give me an hour and we can barely begin talking about and learning about wine.

That's why we have formatted our business to be a place that offers fun, tasty, and incremental learning about wine... and you can move at your own pace.We begin with a carefully selected group of about 225 authentic wines. Each wine has been vetted by Jay Murrie and Elaine Thomas using their years of sensorial experience. Each wine has a sign which can be taken home with the wine to refer to when you open the bottle. We also have each wine's information on our website if that suites you better.

Here are 3 Ways to Learn About Wine...

1. 3BOTTLES... Is our monthly wine club that breaks down the sometimes overly complex world of wine into digestible bites. We ship you (or you can pick up at our Elliott Rd. location) three wines centered around a theme, a premise, a concept, a passion. We include with the trio an abundance of text telling you all about the wines we've selected, placing them in a context of their homeland, their history, the families that crafted them. 3BOTTLES is way more fun than going to school, and over time you can learn tons about authentic wine without leaving home. Here's the link to read more about 3BOTTLES.

2. Weekend Wine & Wine Flights... Happily, many of you have discovered our wine bar. The only real way to learn about wine is to regularly taste it. To make this process easy and fun we create two new wine flights each week, one red, one white. For a low price you can sample two ounces of three different wines that (at least tenuously) share common traits. This week, the white flight features Gruner Veltliner for $6, and the red flight is Great Languedoc Deals for $5. And every friday we describe the Weekend Wine in this e-mail, a great deal on a wine that deserves time at center stage. We pour free samples of our Weekend Wine on Friday and Saturday so swing by for some wine, stay for cheese, bread, pies...

3. Classes and Socials... There is a lot going on at 3CUPS and our website always has the latest details on our events. In broad terms, we do two types of wine events. Our Wine Socials are precisely that, easy evenings of hanging out and chatting with our favorite (generally local) creators and sellers of food and wine. Informal, irreverent, educational in the sense that we use wine at these events in the manner we believe it was intended to be consumed. Our classes are structured, formal (but still fun!) affairs. Through our 3CUPS Wine Series of events you can learn about wine in a more conventional academic environment. We'll talk at you, you'll ask questions, wine will be swirled, cheese will be served. Note taking is appropriate, but not mandatory. It's fine to come to these classes knowing absolutely zero about wine in advance. We'll try to add insight for participants from all points along the wine knowledge continuum.