We wrote a book!
Over the years, we fielded many questions from our friends and family about wine and spirits. We've never seen this as a burden. Rather, we enjoy sharing our knowledge and experiences with our loved ones. And now we want to share our wine and cocktail knowledge with the world and writing this book was the best way to accomplish that!
Although we discussed the idea of a book many times before, it took our wedding to be the opportune time to put the pen to paper. We know, that's crazy. Like we didn't have enough to do already with all the standard wedding planning. But sometimes it takes an extra push to get you to do something that you've put off for numerous reasons, good or bad.
During one of our wedding planning sessions, we discussed wedding favors. Since a focal point of our wedding was our bar menu, creating a wine and cocktail book as a wedding favor was a no brainer. To be clear, our wedding bar wasn't any ordinary wedding bar. Guests could only order via the menu and there was no vodka to be found. The bar menu was comprised of seven Teakwood Tavern Original cocktails and four wines sourced from a few of our favorite wine growing areas. The book took the wedding bar idea and expanded on it.
In the book, we included the recipes to those seven wedding cocktails along with four additional Teakwood Tavern Originals and ten Classic cocktails. We also discussed how to set up a home bar. For the wine section, we wrote about topics that we are often asked about (e.g., How to Taste Wine, Wine Regions to Explore, and How to Talk to a Sommelier).
Sadly, our wedding was canceled due to COVID-19; however, by that time the books had already been published. So we sent them out to our wedding invitees and now we are selling copies to the world.
There are a plethora of cocktail and wine books out there, and we cherish many of them. Still, many of those book can be overwhelming if you don't have a solid foundation on wine and spirits. That's where our book comes into play.
Teakwood Tavern's Guide to Empty Glasses and Full Hearts should be used as a home base for the reader's journey through the world of wine and cocktails. We hope that it inspires readers to build that home bar or order that bottle of wine that they were previously unfamiliar with. Or at the very least, that it encourages readers to take fun pictures of their fur babies with alcohol!
Cheers,
Shen and John
