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WHO DO YOU INVITE TO A HOT DOG DINNER? ANGELS & COWBOYS.

These days, I try to find any opportunity to feel normal. So when a day of working at home, washing my hand, and sitting in Zoom meetings gave way to an unseasonably warm evening and an invitation to eat hotdogs with friends, I jumped at the chance.


Good friends don’t have to impress each other. Good friends don’t need a formal invitation or fancy food. They can get together at the last-minute and make hotdogs for dinner. Because with good friends, it’s not about what’s on the table, it’s about who’s around the table. It’s the company and the conversation that matters. Of course, the wine matters, too.

That’s why, when I hung up the phone, I grabbed a pack of Hebrew National all-beef hot dogs and a couple of bottles of my new favorite red wine: Angels & Cowboys Proprietary Red, 2018, walked over, and settled into my friend’s backyard.


As the hot dogs came off the grill, I opened both bottles, poured (into disposable plastic) glasses for my friends, slipped off my mask, and took a sip.

From Sonoma Valley, Angels & Cowboys Proprietary Red is a blend of Zinfandel, Syrah, Petite Verdot, Sangiovese, Petite Sirah, and Malbec. Founded in 2014, Angels & Cowboys is a collaboration between Yoav Gilat, founder of Cannonball Wines, and Michael Schwab, a graphic designer from Northern California. Maybe that’s why the label is so simple and appealing. Out of the bottle, the wine is a beautiful deep garnet color and tastes like autumn in a glass. I sniffed, I sipped, and immediately detected a tangle of berry and plum flavor with spicy notes of cardamom and mineral creating earthy robustness that I welcomed after a summer of drinking chilled whites, rosés, and fruity pinot noirs.


This was my first taste of the 2018 Angels & Cowboys Proprietary Red. Since that evening, I’ve shared bottles with friends from the neighborhood and beyond and enjoyed I’ve it at home with my family and with the presidential candidates during the debate. It’s my new house wine and because it’s less than $20 a bottle, I can afford to drink it with a roast of lamb, as the winemaker suggests, or pair it with hotdogs. It goes perfectly with both.

By Carol Band, our Wine Connoisseur

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A Personal Journey

When I began studying wine several years ago, I really just wanted to know the difference between a Rhone and a Burgundy, a Napa Cabernet and a Bordeaux. I did not have any grand ambitions. However, as I progressed through the classes, I realized that wine brings so many subjects together – you have to pore over detailed maps to memorize appellations, you have to know the different character imparted by schist or slate or loam or limestone, you have to study how many hours of sun each zone averages to know which grapes are likely to ripen well or over cook in which areas. You have to smell your way through the world – what is the difference between black berry and black currant? What does acacia or hawthorn smell like? is there a difference between lemon, lime and grapefruit smells? Or apples, pears and quince? You also have to study the various ways that wines are made – when are they harvested and by machine or hand? How are they crushed? How is the juice handled before fermentation? What temperature do you ferment at and which strains of yeast do you use? Then there are complicated processes for filtering, fining, additional malolactic fermentation, blending, aging, bottling…

It is astounding how complicated the process is and how much of a bargain wine is at almost any price that we pay these days.

Wine is a second career for me – in the my previous life, I worked in international development and traveled the world. I have been to Mali and Malawi, Albania and Macedonia, India and Indonesia, Nepal and Mongolia. After having children, this sort of travel became impossible and it took me years to find something that was as absorbing and challenging, not to mention something that would give me enough of a reason to take time off from spending all my time with my children.

Who knew wine could be that thing? The more I learn about the wine world, the more I realize there are depths and nuances that I would never have guessed. Something relatively new to me has been the world of Wine-as-fundraising. The wonderful thing for me is that it brings my previous life – working with the poor and vulnerable – together with my new life – learning and teaching about wine. Therefore, the wine I am discussing and we will taste in the shop this week is a wine for a cause.

Thanks for reading, Seema

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