My first Burning Man I decided to bring a couple five-liter boxes of wine for the camp.* Keeping it cool would be not trivial so I decided on a couple reds. Stopping at BevMo I picked up a box of Franzia Merlot 'cause I like it. Wanting something different I selected a “California Red” by somebody else (Inglenook?). The Merlot lasted about three days so in the evening I hauled out the other one and set it up before sampling a glass and – Oh, yuck! Glaring at the box’s label I then saw in the fine print, “Serve Chilled.” It took five days for that box to be consumed.
*There were 120 in the camp so it’s less generous than it sounds.
Yeah, Americans somehow have the idea that wine is fancy. Wine ain’t fancy. It’s been the daily food of peasants for thousands of years. You can make wine fancy if you want, and not all wines taste alike. But it only has to be fancy if you feel like making an effort to make it fancy.
People think it’s fancy because of its price. How many other liquids do people encounter in life that cost from $5 to infinity per 25 oz bottle? (Not that there’s anything wrong with that. ;))
I don’t think Americans see it as fancy as much as we see it as … um … refined. What I mean by that is that there is an odd cultural space in our society that covers both things that are somewhat fancy or typical of upper class men and also covers things that are feminine. Johnny Walker Blue Label is undeniably fancy, but I can imagine many men who would happily take a taste (and would probably insist on shooting it) who wouldn’t take a free taste of high-end wine. At the other end of the spectrum, the Barefoot Wine bump linked to is very clearly marketed very much to women, and I’m pretty confident that women make up a disproportionate fraction of the wine market, especially at the non-fancy end. Both upper-class masculinity and femininity are seen in our culture as opposed in some sense to traditional, non-upper class “macho” masculinity, and wine, as a category in American consciousness, sits right at the intersection of the non-macho types.
A bottle of perfectly good wine only costs $2.99 at Trader Joe’s.
The wines that cost hundreds of dollars are just for being silly. They’re just extremely rare vintages for which there is only a limited supply in the world. And since in 2016 there are lots of people with more money than sense, the demand for these limited supply wines has increased. At the hundreds of dollars level it’s more about showing off how much money you can set on fire than it is about the taste of the wine. And lots of these bottles aren’t for drinking, they’re for owning. Cracking open a 100 year old bottle of wine from a famous vintage is fine, as long as you don’t mind drinking cat piss.
No, sweet red wine is not the wine of rubes (“an uneducated person who is usually from the country”)
Sweet red wine is the wine of alcoholics, little old ladies, secret tipplers, single men in single rooms & other people who know exactly what they are drinking. (Sweet red wine because it get’s you more bang for your buck, and because it goes down easier than rough red wine, and because if you’re drinking a rough red, people will know what that means).
Rubes drink beer, cocktails, lolly water, & sometimes sweet or fizzy white wine. Sophisticated drinks.
I don’t drink often but when I do I enjoy either port, sherry, moscato d’asti, merlot, pino grigio, bourbon, blended scotch or preferably single malt scotch. What am I?
Do you like the dry aperitif sherries, the finos and manzanillas? I’ve been addicted to those since my first visit to Andalusia. Drink 'em chilled, with tapas. They also make a great dinner wine with something like grilled shrimp.
Yes, I do. And both combos sound great, thanks. I may just do the grilled shrimp tonight.
And in return may I suggest a romantic combo I first learned about from Quincy Jones (in an interview, alas, not in person), which would be chilled moscato d’asti with shortbread cookies. A marriage made in heaven where the cookies make the wine taste better and the wine makes the cookies taste better. Throw in a young lady, music and a fireplace and you’ll be living Q’s favorite way to spend an evening.
Sounds good! There are some interesting combinations of sweets and booze that DO go well together.
Ross Thomas, one of the great political thriller writers of the late 20th century, created a minor continuing character who made cameos in several novels: Howard Mott, the brilliant Washington lawyer. In one book he recommended a serving of lemon meringue pie with a Bloody Mary.
I’ve never tried if and I get funny looks when I mention it, but the combination of sweet-sour-salt-vodka has always sounded extremely appealing.
That’s what I said. It’s just regular wine produced as a bulk agricultural product. Drink it out of a handmade ceramic cup or mason jar for full effect. Those wine drinking peasants 1000 years ago would have been glad to get wine this good–good meaning it’s got nothing wrong with it.
