Delicious Red

I'm back to my usual diet of basic red wine, better known (though perhaps inaccurately known) as "Delicious Red". I appreciate the fact that the vinyard took the bold step of naming it "delicious" so I wouldn't have to wonder. Had they not taken that step, I might have referred to it as Crappy Red, or Fair Red, or Simply Red.

And I'd rather not do that.

Last weekend I had (rather a lot of) good red wine, stuff that came in actual bottles and bore at least some sense of geographical pride. With Delicious Red, you're never sure where it's from, but these wines were more specific than that. They were all better than Delicious Red, but it's very difficult for me to say why, or in what way.

I don't, you see, know the first thing about the vocabulary and grammar of wine tasting. One of the three wines I had last weekend had a very vivid aftertaste - or was it a finishing note? - but I can't really explain it. Was is redolent of flint and tinder? Or did it sorta remind me of a high-grade hot dog? Did the wine have a tawny nose? Or was pleasantly odiferous in the manner of a freshly unwrapped Slim Jim? Was the early note light and fruity, or was it sort of in the same general flavor class as, say, chicken broth? No. But I can say that all of these red wines were not nearly as sweet as Delicious Red, which has a sweet berry-like finish that brings some manner of red Kool-Aid to mind (and here, one expects a giant anthropomorphic pitcher full of agitated red fluid to come crashing through the wall. Perhaps with a corkscrew; perhaps not).

Admittedly, I have been exposed to very high levels of wine snobbery on TV shows (clearly not shows intended for my consumption, but nevertheless still accessible to cretins such as myself). And while those TV shows generally convince me that speaking of the woody oaken nature of the mid-note of the bottom half of the last third of the swig of such and such a wine is folly, at least I now realize that wine is more diverse than (oh, let's just ride the metaphor all the way to the station) Kool-Aid.

All red Kool-Aids are alike, unless you make a serious mistake and mix in salt instead of sugar (not to belittle anyone, but my brother once made a "kit" cheesecake and used salt in the crust mix instead of sugar. I'll never forget the intense and very strange taste dislocation that caused. I took a bite of the crust and suddenly my throat shouted "IT COULD BE PHOSGENE!" I didn't know what it was. Phosgene, burnt rubber, elastomers, a light dusting of humus. Once I figured out it was salt I was okay, relatively speaking, but for a while it was very unnerving. Julius Caesar to the contrary, I always imagine the Romans to be master poisoners and my first instinct might have been to tighten my toga just a hair, and perhaps to lay off so much Delicious Red before posting.)

What was I talking about? I've been drinking Delicious Red wine and I seem to have lost control of my point. Sometimes I picture my mind as being a bit like a cowboy trying to keep a herd of several hundred head of point headed in the right direction, but not always successfully. Sometimes the trail forks and in the dust and confusion, my tired mental cowboy doesn't realize that half my herd of point has down the fork labelled "You'll Never Have That Thought Again".

I realize that judging wines on the basis of how rowdy the hangover turns out to be is like judging mini-vans on the basis of whether they explode on impact after falling off cliffs or not. It's not supposed to matter. It's not even supposed to be a subject. I sense wine fans everywhere recoiling in histrionic horror at my unseemly intoxication - "Reinhold, he drinks to excess! Fetch me my carriage!" But finer angles be damned: I find that Delicious Red equips me with a formidable hangover. Not as bad as, say, Old Milwaukee, but it's still a pretty burly hangover. If the headache were a primate, it would be at least an orangutan, and a surly one at that. But I note that higher-end red wines were less hateful in that respect. Mainly they just left me desperately thirsty, and the irony of chugging water out of a Kokopelli wine glass because of wine chugged out of a wine glass was not lost on me, but largely ignored by me because it's the sort of hoohah that only seems relevant when it's actually 5:30 AM and you're in the act.

BUT, and there we get to the operative heart of things, the red wine didn't make me ill. I have soft, spongy areas in my memory that probably mean that I probably tried my hand at some Gilbert & Sullivan, but at least there was none of that unsteady Force 8 business in my midsection, the feeling that I'm a fishing trawler full of aging salmon and it can't possibly end well.

Aint red wine great??