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Wear any good wine lately? Personally, I've always felt chardonnay jeans make me look fuller-bodied than the barbera-stained straight legs do. And as far as fragrances go, I prefer grassy sauvignon blanc to the musky sweetness of sauternes, especially on a spring day.
In yet another sign of our wine-soaked, post-Sideways times, fashion designers are actually soaking clothes in, and imbuing perfumes with, wine.
Taking the term "fruit of the loom" literally, Milan-based fashion house Cool Hunting People recently sold out of a limited-edition jeans line dyed with some pretty decent Italian stuff that most people would consider too good to cook with.
Over in France, a winemaker has teamed with a perfume house to create a line of fragrances designed to evoke the aromas of wine.
Bordeaux wine maker Ginestel has teamed with a perfume house to create a line of fragrances designed to evoke the aromas of wine.
That's not all. At the University of Western Australia, scientists researching a cotton alternative have reported a breakthrough that is already threatening to make the Cool Hunting People's jeans look like yesterday's fashion - a way to grow clothes out of wine waste product.
The "fabric" is a cellulose fibre that forms on the surface of the fermenting tank after wine is exposed to oxygen.
Instead of sewing the fragile cellulose, the researchers draped it like a sheet over an inflatable doll, then deflated the doll, leaving behind a prêt-à-porter dress (and, one presumes, some explaining to do about the invoice for the inflatable doll).
It all calls to mind a pun adopted by one of those cult Napa Valley wineries as a house motto and souvenir bumper sticker: Life is a cabernet. Apparently, it is literally getting to be that way.
The jeans, a collaboration with Italian winery Pico Maccario, come tinted in a choice of two stains: a red Barbera d'Asti Lavignone and a white Monferrato Estrosa, the latter an uncommon blend of chardonnay, sauvignon blanc and an enticingly named Italian grape variety called favorita.
"We liked what it did to the fabrics," said Stephan Brakebusch, Cool Hunting People's former New York-based partner. "It made them softer. It broke down the enzymes of the dyes in the denim."
It also gave the originally blue denim fabric a hint of pink as well as an air of sophistication, he said. The white-wine wash, meanwhile, made the white denim darker and more earthy looking.
With the wines retailing for about $15, and roughly three bottles needed to tint each pair of trousers, $195 (U.S.) may even sound like a reasonable price by today's designer-denim standards.
To drive home the conceit, Cool Hunting People decided to package each pair in a two-bottle wine gift box, with the rolled-up jeans on one side and a bona fide bottle of the matching wine on the other.
Available only in high-end boutiques in the United States and Europe (retailers wouldn't have been able to sell alcohol through Canadian clothing stores in any case), the 500-pair production run is virtually sold out, Mr. Brakebusch says. But he adds that the jeans' quick success may inspire the sportswear label to consider other possibilities (though I suspect not wine-stained neckties, of which there is no shortage in my closet).
If pink isn't your idea of a hip trouser hue, at least not off the golf course, you can still don your favourite beverage by spritzing yourself with what might be called vin de cologne.
Bordeaux wine maker Ginestet sent three of its cuvées to a university oenology faculty to isolate aroma molecules, which were then used as the basis for a line of perfumes.
There's Botrytis, a scent named after the so-called noble rot fungus responsible for shrivelling the grapes that make Bordeaux's famous sauternes dessert wine. Sauvignonne is imbued with the herbaceous-smelling grape found in Bordeaux white wine. And for hard-core oenophiles there's Le Boisé, a spicy, woodsy balm redolent of oak barrels used in aging wines.
The oak fragrance even comes packaged in a miniature replica of a Bordeaux wine bottle, nestled inside a wooden box. The price for each women's perfume is about $75.
You don't even have to be conscious to appreciate some of the products basking in the wine-chic halo. Feeling drowsy after too much silky-smooth shiraz? Now you can hit the sack in silk-lined comfort with the Shiraz mattress, a 1,600-double-pocket-coil model from English manufacturer Dunlopillo. Unless, that is, you prefer the richness of the "hand-tufted" Chardonnay or, new for this season, the micro-quilted Sancerre. The mattresses, by the way, are available at Sleep Country Canada.
Using wine's cachet to sell non-potable products isn't entirely new, of course. Rhetorical ploys based on grapes and wine regions have been with us for years, particularly in the cosmetics and home-fashion industries.
Makeup producers including Laura Mercier and Bobbi Brown have long been enticing consumers with "merlot" nail polish and assorted wine-hued lipsticks. Brands such as Ralph Lauren and Behr offer a rainbow of paint chips in such shades as "champagne toast," "riesling" and "zinfandel."
But the sudden pervasiveness of wine as marketing conceit is probably inevitable at a time when the beverage has become the good-life badge of countless celebrities, from proto-punk rocker Iggy Pop, who confesses to a glass or two of Bordeaux as his sole remaining vice, to country superstar Toby Keith, who can be seen plying sultry actress Heather Locklear with a bottle of red in his video Crash Here Tonight. That's right; a country musician sipping wine, not beer or Jack Daniels.
Summoning wine to sell other stuff also offers an interesting counterpoint to the trend of entertainers, sports stars and fashion designers doing the opposite - using their celebrity to sell their own wines - among them actor Gérard Depardieu, director Francis Ford Coppola and singer Olivia Newton-John, to name but a few.
Perhaps the dodgiest wine-chic connection may be Yamaha's scooter, the Vino, aimed at competing with the Italian-chic Vespa. Italians may drink a lot of wine, but do you really want to be riding a vehicle named after an alcoholic beverage when the law pulls you over for a spot check?
Come to think of it, it might pair nicely with one of those bumper stickers.
