Mirabelle owner Joseph Maher has plucked former Pappas Bros. sommelier David Russell as wine director for his new wine cellar, which has a capacity of some 6,000 bottles--a relative bucket compared with Pappas' on-premise storage capacity of 40,000 bottles, but Hulkish when you consider Mirabelle has only 40 seats. Maher says he and Russell will buff his wine holdings from 300 to some 3,000 selections in the near term...A study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition reveals that guzzling more than three drinks per day contributes directly to weight gain and obesity among men age 40 to 59, irrespective of the type of alcohol consumed. More than 7,000 men from 24 British towns were probed for the five-year study. The most famous 20th-century Brit (other than the Mop Tops) anecdotally confirms the meat of this study. Sir Winston Churchill was said to begin the day in bed with a scotch and soda, nurse a bottle of champagne for lunch capped with several double brandies, sip beer in the afternoon, ditto his lunch intake at dinner before moving on to port and sip Johnny Walker Red in the evening. Now we'd be the last to suggest Churchill was svelte, but he arguably saved the world from a vegetarian crypto-sadist with a bad moustache, and he lived to sweat out his beverages to the age of 90, keeping his spare tire inflated the whole time.