Drinking Cheap Wine Doesn Necessarily Make Me Cheap

One of life’s simple pleasures for me is to dine in a fine French restaurant when I can afford it; not that I’m addicted to the cuisine, though it can be tasty, but because I enjoy torturing the waiters by purposely mispronouncing every wine on the list. Nothing pleases me more than examining the wine list while the snooty waiter looks down his nose at me, then, in a loud and clear voice, saying, “Bring me a bottle of your finest Bourgogne (only I pronounce it, ‘bur-gog-nee’)!” Or asking, “How’s your cabernet sauvignon (pronounced, ‘ca-burn-it so-vig-non’)?”

 Of course, the waiter inevitably scowls and corrects my pronunciation, prompting me to butcher the French language further by mispronouncing the words even more. Finally, I’ll say, “Okay, fine. I didn’t really want the ca-burn-it so-vig-non anyway. Bring us two glasses of bu-jay-lis.” It is usually about this time that I am asked to leave, which is fine with me because I can whip up a meal at home that will satisfy me more than the overpriced fare at the snobbish bistro, anyway.

The French…  What other language on Earth has no word for “victory” other than French?

(To be completely fair, I should clarify that my gripe is with Parisians in particular and not the French nationality as a whole. There are plenty of pleasant French folk living in the countryside or in villages that do not look upon Americans as inferior and primative, but Parisians are basically a waste of flesh.)

We’ve all known wine snobs, other than puritan French whelps, and nine out of ten of us want to flatten them every time they spout off about the “proper” wine to serve with this or that, and how dare someone serve an “inferior brand” or not allow the wine to “breathe” before drinking it. The tenth person is a fellow wine snob who deserves equal flattening.

Here’s my rule of thumb when it comes to serving wine: give your guests what smells and tastes good to you. If one or more complain, direct them to the nearest wine or liquor store and as they leave, ask them to pick up a bottle of Ripple for you, just for the shock value. Serve white wine with fish and chicken (I particularly enjoy white zinfandel)—unless you’d rather have a red wine. Do what feels right to you and to hell with the opinions of highbrow snobs. Why do you have such people as friends, anyway?

 One of the best low-priced wines I’ve tried is Yellow Tail, out of Australia, which usually runs under $10 a bottle and as little as $5 at some stores. But if you really want to go cheap yet acceptable, get on the Two Buck Chuck bandwagon. No, the Charles Shaw label is not found on great wine; I’d even say it isn’t “good” wine; however, it ain’t bad, and at $2 a bottle, the price per quality can’t be beat. As far as I know, Trader Joes is the only place to find Two Buck Chuck (my local store has a huge display of it, which is always two or three cases smaller by the time I leave). You can also find excellent prices on Yellow Tail and other affordable yet good wines at any Trader Joes (not to mention a wide assortment of equally affordable goodies to go along with the wine; I can spend all day—and a wad of cash—at T.J.’s). While Napa Valley wines have been all the rage in California for years, Sonoma Valley has always produced several fine wines, and more recently, some very nice brands have come out of Temecula and Murrieta in Southern California.

Of course, the French would never acknowledge that California wines are at least equal to those produced in France; then again, they’re all still in denial over the fact that after nearly all of the French vineyards died over a century ago, the vines they acquired to replace those lost came from California.

The French…  The only good things to come out of France were mustard, ripened cheeses and yogurt, which makes sense: these things are all soft and spineless, too.