I won’t claim to be odoublegood whose frequency and mastery of a restaurant review is legend here on Austin metro blog. So how about a different perspective…

What a great way to get blasted! We caught the bus downtown Friday evening with the objective of going to try out Taste Select Wines. We’d already eaten, so we were not going for the food. Here’s how it worked.

You go in, the take a credit card and in return give you a pre-loaded $50 gift card. You insert the card into one of four machines loaded with an assortment of select wines. You chose the wine you want, hold your glass under the spout and press the button. Out comes a 1.5oz taste of your selection. We were sharing one card between two, and apparently soon hit house rule 1. over the speed of drinking. It was great, a little of this, a little of that, a taste of this, a taste of that. Before long we’d spent $30 and I for one was starting to have a hard time describing the wines coherently. I’m sure that was because of the assault on my taste buds rather than the amount I’d drunk(honest guv).

When we visited they had a selection of 16-whites and Rose wines, priced from $1.75 to $5.02 per 1.5oz serving, and 32-reds, priced from $2 to a staggering $16.70 per serving. So, depending on how careful you were, this could be a pricey evening out. However, we left having spent around $30, tasted some great wines, and in reality spent little more than the price of an average priced bottle of a single wine in a normal bar.

The location was modern style, a high ceiling and lots of brick work. The music was only just audible, and so wouldn’t get in the way if you were eating and talking to friends. The atmosphere was ok, but might not be as good if the place was less than full.

The only downside for the “drinks” only crowd was that was really no easy way to cleanse the palette or obvious way to dump the wines that you didn’t like. It would have been nice to have had a tap with water only, hopefully at zero cost, and some way to get either some bread or crackers. Overall though Taste Select Wines on the corner of Chavez and Colorado was a fun way to spend an hour.

In the interests of transparency, I’d just like to say I paid for all my drinks myself(honest guv) and didn’t declare I was a reviewer for Austin metblogs and so didn’t get any special treatment from the pumps, especially when they though I was drinking too fast ;-)