The Long and Whining Road

This is the last time I let the baby pick my wine.

Perhaps I ought to explain. I pick up my wine at my local Shaw's grocery store. A vast selection of cheap, right up my alley. I have made the mistake of trying to buy a somewhat more moderately priced wine at the Shaw's. I thought that because it had a wineaux equivalent of The Club on the bottle, it must be good. And, perhaps in a package store where they sometimes endeavor to store their wines not only at proper temperature but proper geometric angles as well, it would be. But it didn't really cross my mind that there's probably not a lot of folks going to Shaw's to buy that $22 bottle of KJ (Kendall-Jackson, for those of you not a bartender at any point in their lives) and it might have been sitting there, upright on the shelf, for a while. In fact, if I had put any kind of thought into it, I would have remembered the jokes I had made to myself concerning the the recurrence of folks checking out with flowers, a box of Muselix, a bag o' salad, and not just a gallon but a vat of Gallo. Usually white. But in spite of my little-used brain, I bought the expensive bottle, only to have the cork disintigrate under my more than adequate corkscrew and my memory tested for all those little tricks to get the rest of the cork out without pushing it in. And while the wine was nice, but not grand and hardly worth the effort, I picked cork out of every sip for over 8 days (cuz I can make a bottle of red last even longer than I can stretch a dollar).

So I usually check out what's on sale first. I stick to three right now: Pinot, Shiraz (of course!), and Syrrah. Every once in a while I get a Zinfandel. As I have mentioned before, I believe in my aunt's philosophy about a glass a day being good for the heart. And it doesn't hurt that there's lots of articles and studies backing her up. Anyway, (I seem to be going around my elbow to get to my ass tonight, huh?) the baby and I were just turning down the wineaux - I mean - wine aisle when he pointed to a bottle that caught his eye. Gallo-Sonoma. Pinot. On sale. Why not? [I've only bought a few brands more than once, Smoking Loon being my new fave right now] Other than the large amount of sediment deposited in my bottle, it was a decent drink. So the next outing, when it was time to choose, I stood in the aisle and waited for him to point.

Not surprisingly, he pointed to a bottle whose pretty blue label had a bunny on it. Rabbit Ridge, I think it is. A zinfandel. Probably fine for cooking a nice beef stew. Might I recommend you not use it as a hostess gift - unless it's a "Rabbit Done Died" party.

That's what you get for having a 17 month old sommelier.