Joining the heathens

Back around the turn of the century, when a lady named Helga terrified me into learning to work in a restaurant at the forefront of the dot-com bubble, when a $60 bottle was a social cop-out and waiters fought with Albert, the old Swiss chef/owner, for the chance to suck droplets from empty wine bottles stashed on top of the ancient latch-door cooler, one of the waiters gave me some of the best advice I've ever heard.

After opening a $300 bottle of wine, he came back to the hallway. Typically, he'd be elated at the sale and presumed tip, but he looked disgusted.
"Fuck that, man. A $300 bottle of wine? Fuckin' give me three bucks and I'll get just as drunk and piss just as hard, and maybe I can use the money for something that matters, or something that I'll remember. But fuck, man, $300? That's a shitload of rent, insurance for a year, fuckin' more cases of beer than even I can drink in a month of Sundays, and do you really think that guy knows and appreciates the difference between that wine and the swill they fuckin' cook with in the kitchen? Fuck no! Gimme a fuckin' jug of Carlo Rossi before a sip of that!" (He went on much longer, for weeks, but that's what I can remember of the primary gist.)

What stuck with me--"I'll get just as drunk and piss just as hard"--shapes my palate today. If I'm going big or showing off, I'll buy a bottle for as much as $10. Usually, though, I spend under $5 and enjoy the wine from a ceramic teacup--my vessel of choice after years and years of polishing (and shattering) stemware and sneaking other drinks from white restaurant coffee cups--without the pressure and critical dissection of expectations.

Wine tastings, consequently, destabilize me. Spit out the wine? Swirl wine for a rinse, pour it out, and refill with wine--good wine--with a useful life of two lingual swishes? BURN THE HEATHENS!

Bad decision #1 was probably showing up with an empty stomach. But that's getting ahead.

Picture an oblong oval of thirty-seven folding tables draped with white table cloths, each full of four-to-twelve varietals lined three-bottles-deep. People in jeans and tee shirts--sometimes button-down, occasionally long-sleeved--mingle around with long-stemmed Reidels in one hand and scribbled-upon programs/price lists in the other. Nothing easier, in other words, than starting at table one and staggering toward thirty-seven. But I learned at last year's tradeshow: flip through the program to find the most expensive wines and try them FIRST, when you'll not only taste but remember tasting the subtlety and nuance.

And oh, the challenge to watch someone take my glass, swill a swallow around in it, and dump it out to "cleanse" the crystal. And oh, the pain to listen to a winemaker's explanation of the nuance and blooming grace of a particular vintage, to feel it open and blossom into fruity depths as it rolls around and creeps down my throat, then watch some guy swish it through his teeth and spit foamily into a vat of regurgitated wine.

I had to be careful, of course, because even tasting just the top wines meant two or three wines per table, two or three ounces per pour, for a solid ten tables. By the time I worked to the wines with which I am most familiar--the $32-48 bottles I recommend and regularly waft while opening--I was floating on goodwill and opulence. Not only was the world aglow along the edges of my wine-dark consciousness, somewhere around table four, the tenth or fifteenth glass of hundred-plus wine, I got it. I got what makes wine great--the balance, nuance, subtlety of shading as it rolls around the palate, arc of the mouth experience from first waft to lingering aftertaste--and I wallowed in it.
So when I got to the wines closer to my world, as my tongue riled up against an unbalanced note like an oboe in a Gabrieli brass choir--not necessarily a wrong note just a bad location, incomplete mix or somesuch (okay, the wine I keep at home hits the tongue like a shred guitar in a shawm consort)--I had no qualms about spitting. Having tasted excellence, having excellence freely poured with the story behind it--where the grapes come from, the label, the bottles, what it took to get here, when it started &c--why jeopardize the remaining tastebuds or strings holding the ground level?

None of which helped the shock of shots in a dive bar, followed by beers, followed by pool, followed by beers and encore performances in every dive bar we passed.
And think about the setup: a Brit, a long-haired hippy, an Oriental chick, and two guys walk into a biker bar in a remote Idaho town at midnight. What good can come of this?