Wine

One of the greatest openings of any book I've ever read is from Glitz by Elmore Leonard.

"The night Vincent was shot he saw it coming. The guy approached out of the streetlight on the corner of Meridian and Sixteenth, South Beach, and reached Vincent as he was walking from his car to his apartment building. It was early, a few minutes past nine.

Vincent turned his head to look at the guy and there was a moment when he could have taken him and did consider it, hit the guy as hard as he could. But Vincent was carrying a sack of groceries. He wasn't going to drop a half gallon of Gallo Hearty Burgundy, a bottle of prune juice and a jar of Ragú spaghetti sauce on the sidewalk. Not even when the guy showed his gun..."

These lines pretty well sum up my feelings toward wine. Dinner isn't complete without a glass of wine, but Gallo red is just fine. I'm a wine lover not an oenophile.

If given a taste test, I would only reject wines like Boone's Farm and Mogen David. Wine should absolutely not be a stand-in for NyQuil cough syrup, nor should it taste like some solvent in my art room.

This concise discussion of wine leaves time for the topic of wine glasses. We drink our daily wine out of slightly upscale juice glasses. Why? Because one memorable night our 26 pound cat, Gato, jumped up on the dinner table knocking a stemmed glass full of red wine over on to the back of his brother below. Alarmed, cat 2 proceeded to run all over the house shaking red wine everywhere. I donated all my wine stems to Goodwill the next day.

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