Resisting The Wine Culture: Exercises in Futility

What is this motherfucking Champs-Élysées?! Are we drinking wine with every meal now? Are we selling beer at McDonalds and eating frogs legs and rabbit meat? No. We're not. Yet still everyday I'm absolutely bombarded with the wine culture, like a pusher in a playground.

If it's not an email from Wine Enthusiast telling me about reduced pricing on stemware! and "winter whites" (for the third time in as many days) then its another fucking issue of Wine- Whatever-catalog-disguised-as-magazine in my mailbox or it's the overzealous couple at the liquor store asking me where I've been every time I darken their doorstep.

Where have I been?! What are you my internist? My therapist? My personal trainer? My barber? My mother?! Where have I been?! I come here occasionally when I want wine. Have you picked up on that yet? Save the Spanish inquisition for the bum you can set your watch to everyday when he comes in for his travel-sized bottle of Famous Grouse.

Maybe I'll have a glass after work one night but usually its at dinner on the weekends if I'm in the mood. "Where have I been?" Will you just leave me alone with your subtle tannins, oak barrels, fruity finishes and "spicy throughout"? And, Wine Enthusiast, thank you but I'm all set on "stemware" for now. I'll let you know when I'm flush and can afford the "Vivid Wine Decanter & Aerating Funnel Set". I know where you are, I'll come to you. K?

Unless there is some groundbreaking discovery in the world of wine, I really don't need to hear about it every week much less every goddamn day.

We've got our fancy Rabbit bottle opener. We've got the cheap rubber & plastic restaurant bottle stoppers and we've got one that looks like an old fucking doorknob and its made from yellow crystal. We've got a wine rack and it's teeming with wine: reds, whites, sparklings and blush. We're all set. I need nothing. No more wine accessories. I don't need a frame for all my corks or the $8,000 446-bottle, 3 temperature zoned EuroCave Performance Hybrid Complét wine fridge. I mean, enough with this lunacy already!


It's like buying a new pair of sneakers when you were a kid and the guy at the register trying to sell you socks, extra laces and waterproof spray. Will you just give me my new Nikes and shut the fuck up?

I just wanna sip my Riesling, pet my dog and be left alone. Thank you. "Where have I been?" They've got some nerve!

Go here and click around, you'll actually shit yourself with the amount of stuff they sell. Somehow a bottle of wine and something to pour it into will no longer suffice. Now we've gotta have the socks, the extra laces and the waterproof spray.