The Fancy Wine Party

Newsletter 2024-05-12

I’m not a fancy guy. I’ll hold here for gasps of shock and horror. What I really mean is I’m a human garbage disposal. When left to my own devices, I subsist mostly on cottage cheese and cereal. Great Value brand fudge brownie is my current favorite, although I’m also partial to Marshmallow Mateys, a generic version of Lucky Charms. There’s no way I’m paying a premium for the box with the leprechaun on it. He’s the most overpaid mascot in the world. 

Given my history as a trash person doing trashy things, I’m the least likely human being to throw a fancy wine party. You have to take into account one extra variable, however: I had a gift certificate. Not the good kind that you receive as an actual gift, but the bad kind I paid for. My wife Lola and I “won” it at a silent auction in early 2023. By the time the bidding ended, we paid roughly face value, failing to save any money, which is my top priority at any charity event. The certificate entitled us to have a wine consultant visit our house with eight bottles for a tasting for twelve people. It wasn’t my kind of shindig, but we’d already spent the money. We were going to have an alcoholic grape juice soiree, whether I wanted to or not. 

Then we didn’t. We filled up our weekends with random activities and put off making the call to schedule it. It sat at the bottom of a drawer for over a year. Finally, when we were planning our family outings for summer and fall 2024, we pulled out the gift certificate and read the fine print. It said it expired six months ago. I was relieved that we were out of luck. Lola was undeterred. Giving up on the gift certificate would constitute wasting money. She’s started wars for less.

Lola called, and the company said they’d still honor the certificate. Not that they had a choice. In one of the only useful things Congress has ever done, they made it illegal for gift cards and certificates to self-destruct. That was bad news for me. Even though the party was already paid for, hosting it would still cost us extra money. It didn’t cover food. As Midwesterners, we were obliged by custom and religion to buy enough snacks to feed an army and a half. It also didn’t cover enough alcohol. Eight bottles is only sufficient for twelve people if your goal is to make everyone sober up and drive home before it gets dark. Actually going through with the party also meant we’d have to clean. I’ve lowered Lola’s standards enough that we no longer do panic chores when our regular friends stop by for board game nights. We’ve disappointed them enough to get all their judgment out of the way. Filling twelve seats would require us to reach out to a broader group with judgment left to give. We had to deep clean to impress them or else. I’m still not sure what the “or else” is. I’m too scared to ask. That question sounds like a marriage-ender.

We both paid for the party, but Lola was the one who refused to let it wither on the vine, so I deferred to her. She had final say over the guest list. Unfortunately, she has standards. Once upon a time, I was a great recruiter. Over summers in college, I hosted sixteen-player Halo LAN parties at my parents house. We always filled all the spots with virtually no notice. I had two brothers who played, so we started with three seats filled. Then I worked my way through my friends, my brothers’ friends, my acquaintances, their acquaintances, and finally total strangers if necessary. This was back before texting, so each invitation was a call to a landline. Kids today would die in the attempt. Our Catholic school was small enough that it printed and distributed a directory of everyone’s phone numbers. I worked my way through the entire thing. I didn’t care if you were good at Halo. In fact, I preferred that you weren’t so I had someone to beat. If you had two hands to hold the controller, you were in. If Lola had let me loose on the guest list for our wine party, I could have filled all those seats in a single afternoon. Instead, she treated it like a small, intimate wedding with a byzantine seating chart dictated by multiple divorces and family feuds. You have no idea the qualifications it took to get in. If I wasn’t married to the host, even I wouldn’t have made it.

In an attempt to be supportive, I sent out a Facebook invite months in advance describing what would happen on the big night. Twelve people RSVPed. In the final few days, five of them canceled. Three simply forgot and then booked something else they’d rather do that night. Two had a sick kid who ended up in the ER the night before. I’ll give that last couple a pass because it was my sister-in-law, Alice, and brother-in-law, Jerry, who we see all the time. They’ve proven they don’t have other friends, which I appreciate. Lola was flustered by the wave of abandonments. She didn’t have my formative experience of going through a school directory for a LAN party and treating people like interchangeable parts. At first, she was going to leave those spots open. At the last minute, I convinced her to let me fill them. Actually, she rejected my idea outright and didn’t change her mind until our friend Delilah said the same thing. My ideas sound better when they come from literally anyone other than me. I sent out the final batch of invites the afternoon of the party. I’m sure those last people were vaguely offended that I gave them two hours notice for a gathering that had obviously been in the works for months, but free wine makes even the worst insults go away. 

The morning of the party, Lola and I panic-cleaned the entire house. Not really. We stuck to the parts people would see. Going upstairs was strictly forbidden. We picked up, dusted, vacuumed, and did dishes and laundry in record time. It’s amazing how fast adults can move when they’re not forcing their kids to “help.” Our final errand was a grocery run. We didn’t buy any of our food until the day of the party. We like to live on the edge. We bought the finest soups, meats, and cheeses the grocery store had to offer. Then we rushed home. Delilah and her husband Peter showed up hours early to help us lay everything out. I didn’t know you could be a pro at charcuterie until I saw them in action. I would have left everything in bags and let people serve themselves. We finished right as the first guest showed up. If your event isn’t a buzzer beater, you’re trying too hard.

We had planned on an hour of food and wine followed by the official tasting but the wine guy showed up early. We let him get started because he clearly had places to be. He opened with a long story about how there was no pressure to buy, which is the kind of thing you say when there’s a ton of pressure to buy. He was nice enough, but he implied he was a retired millionaire who led wine events like this for fun. For a guy doing it for the love of the grapes, he was awfully eager to get out of here. Perhaps the problem was us and not the wine. The tasting was only supposed to be eight bottles, but he brought sixteen. He acted like it was an unscripted surprise, but I suspect that was the plan all along, like a band that pretends it’s going to leave the stage early only to charge back out for a totally planned encore. We had also asked everyone to bring a bottle of wine with them, which turned out to be overkill. We ended up with over twenty-five bottles for a party of nine, some of whom barely drank. People who had to drive home early tended to take a sip here or there and dump the rest. By the end of the night, we had roughly twenty open bottles of wine. We did not have twenty wine stoppers. The situation called for a human garbage disposal. It was my time to shine.

We didn’t finish all the bottles, but we put a respectable dent in them. Spitting was absolutely forbidden. I don’t have many rules, but whatever went into your mouth had to stay there. We live in a society. As for what was still in your cup, it was fine to dump it out or give it to someone else. Many of our sippers who had to drive dumped their extra wine into a single glass, leaving a four or five ounce blend of all the overpriced wines on the list. That sounded like just the kind of challenge I was up for. Lola beat me to the punch. She took a swig. I waited for her to keel over and die or at least make a face. She shrugged. It tasted like wine. I finished the rest of the combo glass. Before you gag at the thought, keep in mind that I’m Catholic, so it’s pretty common for a hundred people to drink sips of wine from the same glass. I assume the alcohol protects us from some germs and the Lord fights off the rest. God helps those who help themselves by helping themselves to another glass. The combo glass did, indeed, taste like wine. That was the moment when I saw through the Matrix. We had spent an hour listening to an expert talk about flavor notes and soil types, but when you mixed it all together in the wine version of a soda suicide, it wasn’t much different from an individual bottle lovingly crafted at an ancient French vineyard. It doesn’t matter what it says on the label or how much it costs; it’s all just bad grape juice.

Wine might be a scam, but that didn’t stop us from buying a bunch of it. We went in with Peter and Delilah to order fifteen bottles. None of us remember who wanted what. This was after the wine cup of doom, so we weren’t making great choices. It was too expensive, but as the host (or the guy who married her), I had to buy something as a point of honor. Sending the wine guy home without any sales would be even worse than not having enough food. The wine guy took off the second he was able to, followed by the light drinkers. After that, the real party broke out. I can’t give you a concrete timeline of events, but the night ended after 1 a.m. with us gambling on camel racing. That’s a board game, not an actual camel race, although if I had a second blended wine cup, I might have been up for the real thing.

The next day, we invited Peter and Delilah back over to help us finish more of the open bottles of wine. To escape the stigma I rightly deserve, I’ll leave unstated how many we now have left. The party was fun, but I wouldn’t do it again. Not in that format, anyway. If I did it over, I’d have everyone bring a cheap bottle of wine they liked and then do a blind taste test without an expert to guide us. The night would still end with drunken camel betting because we keep it classy in this house. That’s all for the future, though. As it stands now, I have a case of extremely overpriced wine on the way. When it gets here, maybe I’ll mix it all together for old time’s sake.

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for now. Catch you next time. 

James