Wino, vino, whatever. It all translates to “drunk”

Let the holiday gluttony begin!

Sunday, Bill and I went to a wine tasting. I’m not sure “tasting” is the appropriate word, though. Drinking? Gulping? Slurping? Maybe.

A friend of ours owns a wine store/bar here in our town and he puts this event together every year to sort of kick off the holiday season (and, duh, sell some wine). It was supposed to be last weekend, but because of the fires all over Southern California, a lot of the distributors and guests couldn’t get up here, so he moved it. It’s a pretty amazing event if you’re into wine (and we are)—he invited all of his distributors to bring their best wines, and this year they had about 17 distributors that each brought at least 10 different types of wines. You do the math. 17 x 10-20 = drunkity-drunk-drunk.

When we walked in the door we were handed a list of all the wines they were serving along with a map of where they were set up. If you’re smart (or not a drunk), you check out the list before you walk in and formulate a plan. If you wing it and wander around from table to table like most people do, and if you actually drink the serving they pour for each wine, you’re pretty trashed before you get halfway through the first table.

I wasn’t feeling up to getting sloshed (it WAS a Sunday after all, and I usually do my heavier drinking on Fridays so I have a couple of days to recovery!) so we did have a plan. They had some great wines that I wanted to taste, so I decided that I would do what most people hate to do, and that’s take a couple of sips and then dump the rest into a pail. If you’ve seen “Sideways” you know about that pail. It’s the detritus, the sludge, the toxic wine tasting trash. It’s the mix of every single wine served that day with a dash of water and lots of backwash for good measure. It’s just foul stuff. I can’t pass one without wanting to puke.

Drunken wine photography

But after a few gulps of good wine, my non-drinking plan went out the window. First, I found a couple of wines I really liked. This gets problematic because it’s not like tasting in a winery—you aren’t limited to a single pour. You still get the little “taste” serving, but you can actually drink full glasses of wine if you loiter around the tables long enough. Chat up the guy serving you, and you could conceivably down a whole bottle.

Then about an hour into the “tasting” my taste buds went numb. You can realistically only taste so many wines. Five? Maybe. 170? Not so much. Everything starts to look and taste the same. You can’t even tell the difference between red and white wines sometimes.

I’ve found at these events, that once you lose your sense of taste, your other senses go into overdrive. There are those who favor the sense of touch. There’s always someone at these events who gets a little too touchy-feely. I saw a whole lot of LWD—Lesbian While Drinking. Gaggles of girlfriends suddenly become (air quotes) girlfriends (air quotes). {Nope, Bill, no one in our group. Seriously.}

Then the sense of smell — or lack of it. Too much wine and people start belching in your face all that cheese they’ve been snarfing down because now they have the munchies. And they can’t smell past their own face, so what do they care?

Then the vision goes and with this, and so does the sense of equilibrium. The spinning starts, the tripping and hanging on tightly to whomever you’re talking to happens.

It makes for good entertainment because we live smack in the middle of a Stepford community. Lovely homes, perfectly manicured lawns, people make decent livings and everyone is trying to keep up with the Jones’. Everyone puts their best face forward at all times (and sometimes those faces are freshly Botoxed and tucked—not that there’s anything wrong with that!). But a little bit of money and the sense of entitlement clearly doesn’t buy class or manners. And it sure doesn’t make you immune to the effects of alcohol. Personally, I prefer this version of our Stepford—the slightly slurred, drunkenly happy version. The veil gets lifted and you really get to see who people really are and what they’re about when they aren’t hiding behind status or wealth. They’re usually more fun with a drink or two! (So am I, for that matter!)

It was a fun way to spend the afternoon, but I do think I’m going to stick with martinis for a while.

Cheers!

Even though the ground spun for a minute, the view was lovely