Nothing goes better like wine and online casino, let me tell you that! Well, okay, sure, maybe wine and physical casino is a better combination, but not everyone can afford regular visits to a real location, and frankly, nobody would have to! It’s the 21st century, and our technology allows us to accommodate for pretty much everything! Who says that you need to dress up, go to a real casino, buy an expensive bottle of wine and then spend hundreds of dollars on roulette? You can just as easily put on your PJs, grab a box of store-bought wine and spend a couple of bucks on slots, and you know what? As long as you do both the drinking and the gambling moderately, there’s nothing wrong with that! And I’m here to teach you how to get started! With the online casino part, at least – I have a feeling you’ve already started with the drinking!

Now, the first thing you need to do is compile a list of online casinos for your country (hey, just because you’re here, that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re from Quebec – according to the site’s metrics I have plenty of visitors from the UK and other countries as well). It doesn’t have to be a comprehensive list, just use Google to find a pre-made list you can use. Our UK friends can use sites such as highstakecasinos.co.uk to get a good idea, while the rest of us just need to be patient and do a bit of work in order to compile our own lists. Once you’ve got yours, though, it’s time to start eliminating!

The first step absolutely has to be checking each and every single one of your sites to make sure they’re legit! The last thing you want to do is play in an illegal casino – best case scenario, you’ll lose all your money, worst case, you’ll get arrested. If you’re Canadian, you can use this handy-dandy site to view the legislating bodies for your region and then use those to verify that all casinos on your list are legitimate. Chances are they are – illegal casinos rarely make it to the front page of Google, but you never know. After all, they say better safe than sorry, right?

Finally, your last step should be reducing your list to just one casino. First and foremost, try to eliminate all casinos that you dislike aesthetically. Some people may call this judging the book by its cover, but honestly, if a site looks bad, chances are it’s not going to offer too much to you. Next, try to ask yourself what you want to play. If you want to just play a specific game (say, the “Game of Thrones” slot), try to limit your list to just casinos who have it. If it’s live roulette you want to play, eliminate any casinos that don’t support it. Read the terms and conditions, see if there’s anything there that you don’t like, and if there is, eliminate that casino. Sooner or later you’re going to be left with only one choice, and that’ll be that! Congratulations – you’ve discovered your first online casino! Have fun!

Pastis is an amazing anise-flavoured spirit which has originated and enjoys great popularity in France. First commercialized by Paul Ricard back in 1932, Pastis is extremely loved in southern France, especially around Marseille. This liqueur usually contains around 100 g/l sugar and somewhere between 40% and 45% alcohol, although there are some non-alcoholic varieties also. Pastis emerged 17 years after the ban of absinth, in a time when France would feel the need for an anise-flavoured drink to substitute absinth. The drink is nowadays flavoured with liquorice root and while it has always been associated with absinth, the two are in fact very different. Pastis does not contain any grand wormwood (Artemisia absinthium), from which the name of absinth came to be. Another difference is that absinth is made of the classic green anise while pastis is made from herbs of Asian origins – star anise.

If I would have to name one drink that I don’t usually like, that would be vodka. But truth be told, there are few variations out there that will simply make you go bonkers over it. Such a drink is Shotka, a Lithuanian-made vodka, which is – get this! cannabis-flavoured. Not to worry, there is no THC inside it, only a high percentage of alcohol – 50% and the whole ‘taste the wild’ think they have going for them is something you won’t want to miss out on. The first time I tried this drink I had three shots one after the other and it felt like I drank the juice of life – I had so much energy, I could have moved mountains. Seriously, you have to try it.

Jägermeister is a German digestif, made from no less than 59 herbs and spices, with 35% alcohol. A flagship of Mast-Jägermeister SE, Jägermeister is a highly flavoured drink, many times drank with Red Bull, especially in Italy. The label contains a verse from the poem Weidmannsheil, by forester and hunter Oskar von Riesenthal. The translation of the poem is:

Jägermeister is used in many cocktails and shots. For example, a shot of Jägermeister dropped into a glass of Red Bull is called a Jägerbomb; Jägermeister with Rumple Minze and Baccardi form Liquid Heroin, while a cocktail with Jägermeister with Malibu Rum and pineapple juice is called a Surfer on Acid. Nice names, right?