Free Wine Patent Art Printables

Wine is so much more than a beverage. It’s a passion, a lifestyle, and a friend! Celebrate your passion with our free Wine Patent Art Printables!

With Father’s Day fast approaching, Handan wanted to make some patent art printables to commemorate the hobbies and interests in my life. They turned out amazing, so she decided to make some more so we could share them with you.

These free patent art printables make awesome Father’s Day gifts. They’re great for birthdays and Christmas, too! Seriously, ladies, enough with the dress socks and ties. We have enough. And don’t even think about novelty aprons. If we get one more “Hail to the Chef” or “Real Men Rub Their Meat” or “I Like Big Buns” apron, we’re going to turn off our grills in protest, and millions of children will go burgerless this summer. Do you want that guilt on your conscience?

I thought not.

Over the next several weeks, I’ll be presenting Handan’s patent art printables along with my usual stories and blathering. For those who like that sort of thing, read on! For those who think I’m a yammering idiot, you may skip to the end and just collect your free stuff. Don’t worry – I’m not judging you. 🙂

(Pfffft! Of course I’m judging them, but they’re gone! It’s just us now.)

Okay, let’s get on with it. Today’s free patent art offerings are all about the wonderful world of wine.

I first stepped onto the path of fine wine back in 2003, when I was trading stocks at an investment bank in San Francisco. I had long been traveling the not-so-fine wine path – that started sophomore year in college when I developed gastritis (an inflamed and swollen stomach lining) two days before school started. No, it wasn’t due to stress. I didn’t have any at that time. It’s possible I may have sealed my stomach’s fate by taunting the chef at a restaurant near the college. My parents had dropped me and my stuff at the dorm and then taken my friend Axel and me out to lunch. Buffalo wings were on the menu, offered in the usual mild-medium-hot-insanity heat levels. Of course, I considered “insanity” wings to be so far below my heat tolerance level that I was embarrassed for the restaurant. I told the server that I required wings far hotter than “insanity.” I asked her to tell the chef to make them as hot as humanly possible…and then crank it up a couple of notches.

The stakes were getting high.

My friend Axel looked on with interest and concern. My parents probably wondered where they went wrong.

Even the neighboring tables took notice.

I was all in now. Nothing left to do but up the ante.

“Tell him I dare him.” I concluded with a smug smile.

Ah, the impetuous decisions of my youth.

The wings came, and I could not tolerate them. They were far too hot for me to handle. It was all pain and no pleasure.

But my hand was dealt, and I had to play it.

I ate those wings as fire spread in my belly and sweat poured down my face.

When the server asked if they were hot enough, I shrugged nonchalantly. I wouldn’t give them the satisfaction.

The next morning, as I walked to lunch, a pain struck my stomach that never left. After two weeks of unrelenting misery, I went to the infirmary. They claimed it was probably a stomach bug, so they put me on a rice and oatmeal diet.

Two weeks later, I was back at the infirmary. This time they had me drink a radioactive milkshake so they could have a better look at my innards.

I watched on the monitor as they scanned my guts. My stomach was swollen and distended. It looked like a close-up video of the sun as it spits out great gouts of gas and flame. My stomach was an angry, churning beast, trying to consume itself with acid.

The doctor sent me back to my dorm with a prescription for Tagamet (this was years before it became over-the-counter) and strict orders not to drink alcohol.

So of course, I started experimenting with various beers and wines to see if I could drink any without pain and discomfort. I discovered that cheap white zinfandel worked like a charm. From then on, it was my (near) constant companion. I bought it by the case from a little convenience store in Cornwall, Vermont. It was the only booze vendor around that accepted my Illinois fake ID that my buddy Christian made for me back in high school with an Apple IIc, a cheap color printer and a laminating machine. Not a weekend passed during fall semester that I couldn’t be found strolling from party to party, bottle of white zin in one hand, cigarette in the other, untucked flannel shirt and a baseball cap perched backwards on my unshowered head.

Would it shock you to learn that I didn’t have a girlfriend?

I traveled that not-so-fine-wine path for about a decade, but everything changed that night in late 2003.

I had recently started with the investment bank, and all of the traders went out to dinner one night at Morton’s Steakhouse. We were there at the expense of another firm with which we did a lot of business, and that firm was picking up the check. My boss was a true wine connoisseur, and he ordered the wine that night. The first bottle we had was a 1997 Stags’ Leap Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon, and I’ll never forget it.

I had enjoyed wine for years, but I had never had a really good bottle until that night.

It changed everything.

Aromas and flavors I’d never experienced flooded my senses. I had no idea something seemingly so simple could be so complex! How could grapes and oak barrels produce something so profound?

It was the start of a decade-long love affair that consumed my every thought and my very last dollar. When I was laid off from my Investment Bank job in the summer of 2006, I decided not to go back into finance. I wasn’t very good at it, anyway. It takes a certain personality to thrive on Wall Street. I do not have that personality, nor will I ever acquire it.

Instead, I looked into how I could make a go of it in the world of wine. My ultimate goal was to find a job at a winery and someday become a winemaker. But that would require moving out of San Francisco – something I wasn’t prepared to do at the time. Instead, I found a job tending bar at a local wine bar and shop.

Through various strokes of luck and good fortune, I soon became the wine buyer – the guy responsible for deciding which wines the bar and shop would carry.

My mornings were filled with meetings with winemakers and wine brokers. We’d taste wine (spitting it out, of course…well, most of it, anyway) from about 10 in the morning until 2 in the afternoon, and then I’d carry on working behind the bar into the night.

It was a glorious job, if not the highest paying.

Not long after, I was promoted to general manager after a shakeup in the company left the position open. My hours stretched even longer, but the increased stress was offset by my love of the product. I had briefly tried selling wine wholesale – like the brokers who came in to show me their portfolio of wines – but I was terrible at it. Behind the bar, however, I could sell wine to anyone. Expensive glasses of wine ($20+), rare bottles, you name it. My passion made it possible. It was the one and only time in my life that I was good at sales.

During those years at the wine bar, I soaked up every bit of knowledge about wine that crossed my path. The books I read were all about wine. My conversations centered on wine and viticulture. Everything was wine.

I had amassed a decent collection of wines, starting back when I had a lot of disposable income during my finance years. Though I wasn’t making nearly as much at the wine bar, I continued to plow any free cash back into wine.

It had become a habit, but not a very sustainable one for someone of my means. It was a fun lifestyle, but I was struggling to see the future – especially with debt piling up (it wasn’t just the free cash going into wine!)

And then along came Handan. We met online in 2008, but by the end of 2009, it was clear that she was my future. Without a moment’s hesitation, I quit my position at the bar in early 2010, sold almost everything I owned and embarked on a journey around the world with her that has altered my course forever.

In those early months overseas with Handan, I can remember every bottle of wine we drank. The first bottle in Doha was a 2005 Cabernet Sauvignon from the Penedès region of Spain. We drank it while dining at a steakhouse in the Ramada hotel. It was my first sip of wine in over two months – my longest wineless stretch in decades, lol!

And my first Turkish wine a few months later. The grapes are unpronounceable, but the wine was much better than I was expecting!

There were more bottles, especially after leaving Afghanistan and re-joining civilization in Vietnam and India. I cherished each sip, because wine in those countries was expensive, so it was a rare treat.

I still love wine – I always will – but it is no longer the driving passion that it once was. I am grateful for the years I spent at that little wine bar in San Francisco. I learned so much about wine and work and life. I made friends I keep to this day, and I have some great memories.

Maybe one of these days, I’ll pick up a bottle of some cheap white zinfandel for old time’s sake. Who knows? Maybe it will start Handan down the same road that I once traveled.

Minus the cigarette and baseball cap, of course.

Before I go, let me give you the usual information on today’s printables: Handan designed these wine patent art printables to fit into a 16×20 inch frame or a 24×36 poster frame, though you may scale them up or down as necessary. 24×36 inch scales down easily to 20×30 / 16×24 / 12×18 / 8×12 / 4×6 inches, and 16×20 inch scales down to 12×15 / 8×10 / 4×5 inches with no problems. If you need help with scaling down these printables so you can print them using your home printer, then make sure you check out our “How To Easily Resize Pictures” post.

Now it’s time to click on the button below to download today’s free wine patent art printables – they are all in the Patent Art section of The VIP Patch.

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