We are having Christmas dinner with my wife’s Parents and Aunt, who I generally find unpleasant. They are kind of dumb and opinionated and watch a lot of Fox News. And other than trips to Walmart, I can probably count on my fingers the number of times they’ve traveled more than ten miles (about the distance to each other’s homes).
In any event, it comes time to serve some red wine and I offer some to the Aunt.
She says, “sure, you can just put some in this glass”, out of which she had been drinking egg nog.
I say something like “no let me get you a clean glass” (of which we have plenty). " You don’t want to mix egg nog and wine in the same glass."
“Why not?”
“I imagine it would taste pretty gross.”
After a moment of consideration, the Aunt then proceeds to mix some egg nog with the wine and taste it.
Apparently it did not taste good.
Like what the hell is wrong with this person? Not to make it political, but I see this as representative of Trump/right wing culture where you have millions of ill-informed people like this who are so proud of their stubbornness that they would eat human shit if Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told them they shouldn’t.
Or is it just stubborn annoying old people behavior? Like in their mind it’s 50 years ago where every extra clean glass served meant another hour traipsing down to the river to hand wash it and risk breaking it which meant your house was short a glass because only millionaires could afford glass cups?
I feel like I need to divorce my wife over this. I found the whole thing very unsettling.
I infer you’re reading a whole lot of your own feelings about this person into this one incident, but I wouldn’t automatically discount red wine in egg nog. I wouldn’t want red wine in my nog glass mostly because I don’t want cloudy wine.
Were I a drinker of alcohol, I just might try this, once, just to test the hypothesis. In the likely event that it turned out not to taste good, then I wouldn’t do it again. And if I heard from someone who had direct personal experience that it didn’t taste good, I might forgo the experiment, but not just for someone who reckons without evidence that it wouldn’t.
And a lot would depend on the wine. Something really tannic? Probably not so good. Something unoaked with more fruity flavors? May work fine. That list above prefers red wine over vodka, scotch, and light rum in egg nog. But I ask, what scotch? I can think of a number that I think would go well in an eggnog, like perhaps a Glenmorangie.
Just last week, I was getting a cup of hot tea and my cup had some residual egg nog in it. Rather than getting a fresh cup, I used the dirty cup just to see what the combination tasted like. So no, I don’t think it has anything to do with Donald Trump (which is a stretch worthy of Plastic Man).
As a non-drinker of alcohol, you might be forgiven for not understanding how it works. Generally wine is enjoyed for its taste and not usually used as a mixer. The one notable exception being sangria, which you would mix with an inexpensive red. Mixing stuff with your wine (particularly something heavy like egg nog) sort of defeats the purpose of drinking the wine.
Egg nog is traditionally mixed with brandy, whisky, bourbon, rum, even vodka.
In any event, who uses someone else’s dinner table as a mixology lab?
I am, or rather was, a rather prodigious drinker, and while not completely untrue, it’s also not completely true. Mulled wine is rather heavily spiced, flavored, and sugared as well. That also “defeats the purpose of drinking the wine.” But that can be said of almost any alcohol. I wouldn’t want to waste good drinking brandy or bourbon or dark rum on egg nog, either. That also defeats the point of drinking a nice bourbon or brandy. I’ve had plenty of wine drinks, from spritzers to wine & cola, to red wine hot chocolate. No, you don’t want to use a $50-100 chateauneuf-du-pape in it, but a bottle of your average supermarket wine, why not?
Nothing to me about the combination of red wine and egg nog seems prima facie to be automatically disqualifying. After all, isn’t brandy (essentially, distilled wine), one of the most common mixers? And there’s plenty of recipes for port wine egg nog out there? Why not try it and see if it works. Your relative at least tried, and didn’t just assume. (Having two young daughters, I often get frustrated when they automatically assume they won’t like something without trying first). Like I said, with certain wines I’m sure it works fine, with others, not so well.
I wouldn’t consume anything, mixed or unmixed, if I didn’t like its flavor. But some flavors taste even better when combined. It’s not outside of the realm of plausibility that the flavors of wine and eggnog might complement and improve each other.
And of course, it’s also not outside the realm of plausibility that they might clash. One doesn’t know in advance. Which is why one does the experiment.
Yeah, white wine eggnog and port wine eggnog are pretty common. Costco even sells a version. There’s a version on Wikipedia from 1907. I seem to recall a Portuguese version as well. (Personally, I don’t think I’d like red wine with it, but I’d certainly be open to trying it. I prefer a blend of rum and brandy.) The OP should educate himself, or at least do a minimum 10-second Google, before assuming his superiority.
I have eaten/drunk some bizarre combinations of things that sound like they would taste awful together and while most of them taste awful a few of them are surprisingly good, so I can imagine trying this once (with inexpensive wine) but also expecting it to be bad.
To the extent that people’s tendency to try something weird and new is related to politics (which I think is fairly low), willingness to new experience is generally associated with being more left-wing/progressive (giving little weight to tradition/authority is the opposite of conservatism), so I don’t think your political inference here makes sense.
And I can see stubbornness leading a person to do as described, because they don’t want to admit that they were wrong, and so they choose to double down on their wrongness rather than admit it. That sort of stubbornness could indeed be a symptom of modern conservativism. But in that case, they wouldn’t admit, after the fact, that the mixture tasted bad, as the OP’s relative apparently did.
A few weeks ago I absent-mindedly poured the last of my coffee into the wrong mug - one that contained a few teaspoons of lemon juice in anticipation of some cooking I was about to do.
I was extremely bummed as I had no more coffee and really, really wanted some. But I knew the stuff in the mug would taste like crap. I was desperate enough to sip it cautiously anyway, and damned if it wasn’t weirdly delicious. Didn’t taste like either coffee or lemon, but some strange and uniquely aromatic/fruity concoction.
Or Glühwein, as the German variant of mulled wine is called. There are countless variations listed in that link.
And as for the original question from the OP: I believe the proper ratio is not zero, it is infinite. If you want to drink, drink red wine. Or beer. Or whisky. Wodka and many cocktails are OK too. And champagne! Gin tonic is great when it is hot. But egg nog is IMO superfluous.
This, of course, is just my opinion. If somebody wants to drink something I do not fancy, that is fine by me. I reckon that leaves more of the stuff I like for me.
Are you trying to make curious about a drink with no alcohol at all in it? Mhhh…
