Since I don’t teach on Fridays, Thursdays are my Friday nights. Before you commence slapping me for being obnoxious, I assure you, I put in my 40-50 hours/week. I simply relish being able to put in as many of them as possible from my apartment, and Friday is the one day I have the luxury of doing that all day. Although, more often than not, Friday is the ONE day of the week I do NOT work – I’ll admit that it’s nice being able to take care of all of my personal errands on a weekday, and on Saturday and Sunday when the grocery store is mobbed, I’m happy as a clam staying home with my lecture notes and lab reports.
Anyway, I digress. Tonight, I felt like making myself a Nice Dinner, so I stopped at the one place in my small town that sells Nice Ingredients. This guy has a complete monopoly in town on any kind of premium protein, and while his intentions are good, I have already figured out that he doesn’t always have the knowledge to back it up. The man carries good meat, makes EXCELLENT sausage, and always stocks good beer, but there’s a reason I rarely buy wine there. He advertises on Facebook, and while I perk up to see what fresh fish he has on Fridays, and what new beer he is carrying, I inevitably end up rolling my eyes at his wine specials. He seems to fall for the siren song of mediocre, well-marketed, slick-labeled mass-market wines. Not that there’s anything wrong with that in this particular market, but personally, I’m just not going to get hard for a wine from “Cupcake Vineyard” or “Menage a Trois.” Don’t even get me STARTED on “Mommy’s Time-Out.” Most of the wines in his shop that I would drink can be purchased at Meijer at better prices, and thus…I do.
But this evening, I was doing my shopping, and he offered up that he had just made some fresh Italian sausage (and andouille…and brats…I DO love this man’s brats…) so I got some. And decided, what the hell, I’ll pick up a bottle of wine for my Friday night dinner of sausage and peppers.
Oh, have I mentioned that I have already picked out a couple of cheeses (curds and string cheese…are you getting the general idea yet?) and two kinds of sausage? Okay.
Him: “Do you need any help with the wine?”
Me: “Nah, I think I’m okay.”
<short interval of undisturbed contemplation>
Him: <popping around the corner> “What do you like?”
This man is DYING to help me. This is part of the reason I love him – the drive to please is strong with this one. I don’t have the heart to let him know that he cannot possibly read my tastes better than I can – he just does not have the skillz.
Me: “I like a lot of things. Just trying to figure out what I want with my dinner.”
At this point, he leaves me alone. I think he gets it.
I pick out a cheap, but not Cheap, Italian red to go with my dinner. Also grab a 4-pack of Good Beer to have around, and head to the register.
He cards me, rather demonstratively, and proceeds to explain that his daughter earned him a rather hefty fine earlier in the day by not carding a decoy sent by the authorities. Also is a bit too forthcoming in the details, explaining that he needs to make $1500 in alcohol sales in order to recoup the costs of the fine…I’m guessing that means he was fined about $500. Okay, maybe $1000. He only needs about 49 more of me to come through to make that up. Considering what he charges for his meat, I think he’ll recover.
So I come home and have a little pre-dinner nosh of some curds (to find out if they were squeaky…they were not) and string cheese and a Founder’s Backwoods Bastard (caramelicious!!!).
A couple of hours later, I work up enough appetite to make my dinner, and open my wine. This process starts in rather mundane fashion…pulltab to open the foil on top…
…but under the foil is what appears to be…a screwcap?
I’m not used to screwcaps with foil, but whatever, I proceed with the unscrewing…
…only to find glass underneath.
Not a glass neck. There is a glass top as well. Clear glass, while the bottle is green.
What the fuck?
My wine bottle has a glass stopper in it.
Are we seriously doing this now???
I have had bottles of wine that were clearly corked. It is unfortunate, and unnecessary. I have absolutely no qualms or snobbery about screwtops on my wine…I’m actually a fan, as long as the wine contained by them is tasty. One of my favorite winemakers is actually doing studies on AGING wine with screwtops…I’m not sure he has a leg to stand on, but I admire the science.
This…is not science.
This…is Marketing Genius at work.
Seriously, Marketing Geniuses (please note the sarcasm, dear Reader…): I would MUCH rather have a regular old screwtop on my $11 bottle of wine than try to pry an awkwardly tiny glass stopper out of the bottle. This is the single most bizarrely awkward bottle opening I have ever personally witnessed. And I have SEEN people sabre bottles of bubbly. Badly.
In my perplexed state, I updated my Facebook status to say, “<Wahooty> is puzzled by her wine. Are glass stoppers what we’re doing now to prevent corking? I’d rather have a screwtop.”
One of my more worldly friends “like”d that almost immediately.
One of my childhood friends (who, just for the record, still lives in our hometown and is some sort of equipment mechanic now – I did not grow up in one of THOSE DC suburbs…) commented, “need to let your wine breath it will bring out the taste”
<THWACK>
That would be the sound of a forehead slap at the very moment my head hits the keyboard.
Certain groups of people…the lovely locals in the small town in which I live or the people I grew up with… will never cease to make me feel like a completely pretentious ass. Because they mean so well, and have no idea how completely and utterly ignorant they are about…oh…absolutely everything I enjoy. As an educator, I think I can say with absolute confidence that the biggest problem with stupid people…is that they don’t know they’re stupid.
Seriously, if you ever feel stupid…you aren’t. Questioning your own intelligence is, in my opinion, a sign of having some. I feel stupid on a regular basis – it’s what drives me to seek out information and learn things, and thus grow as both an intellectual and a human being. There are those who offer recommendations based on their knowledge of what I know, and what I don’t…and then there are those who just think they know shit when they’re actually clueless. And these are the people who, if I tell them what I’m really thinking, would label me Pretentious, and possibly, depending on my tone, an Asshole. Because they simply don’t know that you’re not being pretentious if you actually KNOW WHAT YOU ARE TALKING ABOUT. They can not fathom that you know so much more than they do about the topic at hand. I had a friend in high school who hung out with the nerds…not because he was all that smart, but because he was in most of our classes and we were the ones that were nice to him. But somewhere along the way, he allowed this to convince him that he WAS smart, and he regularly tries to engage in intellectual banter with me on my Facebook feed.
Depending on who you ask, it was Mark Twain or Oscar Wilde or Winston Churchill who said, “I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed man.”
I am not so noble. In fact, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t occasionally just smack his ass down to shut him up.
And this, dear friends, is why I am an asshole. Sometimes, I just can’t help myself.
But I will always…ALWAYS be nice to the sausage man.
You can’t be pretentious if you know what you’re talking about, but you also can’t be an ass to a man with good meat.
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