Insulting Wine

Truth is far stranger than fiction. And, with wine, sometimes the truth is, in retrospect, quite funny, but at the time was not funny as well. But, these two little vignettes remain with me to this day. One is more recent, the other far older.

The older one goes back to probably the 1960s when, at least where I grew up, wine spritzers were all the rage. While not many men drank them, the women in the area seemed to love them. Men would not have been caught dead drinking these "girlie" drinks, so they drank them on the sly when nobody could see them. They were refreshing and somewhat fruity, I guess, and they contained alcohol, but because of their generally low alcohol content and ease of drinking, you could drink a lot of them and still get up out of your chair.

For the uninitiated, it's a simple drink. You mix wine, preferably cheap and fruity, with club soda, or seltzer water, if you prefer that name for it. It is believed that this drink was invented in Austria in the 19th century when wine drinkers seeking sparkling wine just didn't have any, but they found that adding sparkling water in small quantitites to wine gave the wine the bubbly sensation of Champagne. For those not having the money to spend on Champagne, it was a good substitute, or so I am told. 

In any event, back in the late 1960s, or it could have been early 1970s, my parents had these particular friends. I don't know what the husband's business was, but he seemed wealthy among the wealthy. He had a new wife who was about half his age who actually said when another woman asked her that she would never have a job because her place in life was to look beautiful next to her husband. She liked wine spritzers. And, not just any wine spritzers. 

I remember being at a dinner with my parents and this couple and his two kids by his first marriage. And, as was apparently her custom, she ordered a wine spritzer. And, in particular, she asked for it to be made with the best wine they had there (not by name, but simply the best). Someone called her out on it.

Her husband stopped the server before she headed to the bar to get the drink and asked that his wife's spritzer be made of whatever cheap wine they had. 

The drinks came and this woman raved about how much better the spritzers were with the finest wine. The server assured the husband that it wasn't.

The other story is far more recent. We were hosting a party at our home, a sort of dinner party, but not of the style that were fashionable 50 years earlier. But, we were serving wine and I was refilling glasses if guests wanted -- red or white according to their likes. But, at any point in time, I was only pouring one red and one white and what they were was changing through the evening.

As I poured from a fresh bottle of white wine, moving around the tables, I skipped over one person in particular. They were insulted. They asked why they did not get any and I replied that they still had wine in their glass.

"So !," they responded.

I told them that in this house, we don't mix wines, and they responded that it is just wine, it's not like mixing Bud and Bud Light.

True story and the biggest insult to wine I have heard.