​A new president will be sworn in on January 20, 2021.
 
I’ve never celebrated a presidential inauguration; in fact, I’ve never really thought anything about them except it is a lot of money to spend on a ceremony for an already-elected person.
 
Agree or disagree with Trump, he’s gotten most of us to pay attention to our government and patriotism like never before. So in light of this new interest, I will be tuned in on the 20th and, I wanted to share what wine I’ll be using to toast to this amazing country we live in.
 
This type of wine has a heady pedigree: (Info taken from Kirsten Georgi, www.ArmchairSommlier.com.)

• Betsy Ross sipped it while sewing the American Flag.
• It was used to toast the Declaration of Independence in 1776.
• A few days before the official signing of the US Constitution in 1787, the Founding Fathers partied at City Tavern in Philadelphia. There were 55 people present, and they drank 54 bottles of it.
• George Washington drank 3-5 glasses of it each night before retiring. Something about soothing his chronic tooth pain.
• During his first year as President, Thomas Jefferson ordered 3,500 bottles of it.
• And later, Francis Scott Key drank it while composing the Star Spangled Banner.

 
“It” is not some American hybrid wine, or a Finger Lakes ice wine made from Riesling. Those weren’t being produced in the late 1700s. Americans, like those above, who drank wine had to depend on imports from Europe that by English law were delivered exclusively by English ships and were taxed accordingly.
 
But there was a loophole that our wine-loving Americans figured out.
 
Madeira.
 
In the mid-1600s, a Portuguese princess named Catherine of Braganza was to marry Charles II, King of England. This is not a love story, however; this is a story of a pre-nuptial agreement.
 
Madeira, a small island off the coast of Northern Africa, was Portuguese, (and it still is today.) In the pre-nup for the 1662 marriage of Cathy and Chuck, Portugal prevented England from taxing any of the exports from any of their land holdings.
 
So the wine from Madeira couldn’t be taxed by the English. Enter our crafty, future Americans.
 
It became a mainstay of American life, especially by those who favored an independent future. Ordering Madeira at a bar became code for support for the revolution. Our forefathers and mothers loved it so much that by the end of the 1700s, they were buying between 25-30% of all the Madeira produced.
 
It is a wine that is produced in styles that range from dry to sweet, from traditional grapes called Sercial, Verdelho, Bual and Malvasia; in lower end versions, it is made from the local Tinta Negra Mole grape.
 
After making the base wine, it is fortified with grape spirit which raises the alcohol level to 17-18%. Then the wine sits exposed in the sun… for 20, 40 or even 100 years or more. It is the only wine that it is fortified, oxidized, and heated - an extremely unique combination.

Depending on which type of wine you buy, the aromas and flavors will remind you of raisins, nuts, or perhaps smoke.
 
Find a Madeira at your local liquor store and pour a chilled glass on January 20th.
 
This will be the most emotional inauguration in over 200 years. I want to be drinking something that fills my veins with the same wine that helped inspire the birth of our amazing country.

As I wait to start my interview with Devin Thorpe of Forbes, I sit back from the webcam on my desk, close my eyes and become still. Deep breaths in and out. I try to calm my racing mind.

Will he ask me to show him a gift box? Do I know my financials well enough? Is there lipstick on my teeth?

“Hello everyone and welcome to Make Your Mark on the World show. I’m your host, Devin Thorpe, I’m a Forbes contributor covering social entrepreneurship,” he begins and I smile, waiting for the camera to turn on.

How far cancer has brought me.

I know the Benedictine monks in the late 1600s...

MORE (You'll be redirected to Kirsten's blog on HuffPost.)

Radiation is the sneakiest of all the cancer treatments I go through.

I meet with the friendly, smiling radiation doc. It’s hard to see her as a doctor—she looks like a P.E. teacher. With her pixie cut and glowing skin, she talks about beams of radiation, percentages of tissue damage versus effectiveness of the treatment and decreases in the likelihood of cancer recurrence.

With my Stage Two situation and family history of breast cancer, she explains, she would like to treat this “aggressively.” I agree, so she schedules me for my radiation run-through and tattooing.

Tattooing?...

MORE (You'd be redirected to Kirsten's blog on HuffPost.)

When studying red wines, people in the know use categories like the following to describe them:

• Fruit - How noticeable are the berry aromas and flavors in the wine?
• Acidity - How much does the wine make your mouth water?
• Tannin - How grippy or sandpaper-like is the feeling in your mouth when drinking the wine?
• Alcohol - How alcoholic is the wine? Wines with higher alcohol are typically more viscous and dense in the mouth.
• Body - How mouth filling is the wine? When compared to milk, is the wine like skim milk, whole milk or cream? (Keep your eye on this category as it figures into the story later.)

I enter my plastic surgeon’s office after my double mastectomy to get my...

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As I sit topless in front of a complete stranger—a handsome, 40-something, Indian-from-India plastic surgeon—I have thoughts running through my mind:

• These are pretty normal, right?
• Not bad for a 50-year-old with three kids?
• Could still get some Mardi Gras beads, eh?

Then, as he takes his fingers and lifts my breasts up, effectively taking them back to a time before I could get into R-rated movies alone, new thoughts run through my mind:

• Ooooh ... apparently there may be a bit of a droop to them now.
• That was a lot of milk for a lot of babies.
• Maybe not the fancy beads.

The plastic surgeon says...

MORE (You'll be redirected to Kirsten's blog at HuffPost.)