This weekend, we bottled wine. The process of which, I’ll be honest, felt quite contrary to all of my previous experience with the unbottling of wine. And I don’t know if I’ve told you, but, well, I’m very talented at it. The actual bottling of the stuff takes a little more eye/hand coordination than I am gifted with, so I took my place in the assembly line as bottle washer, corker and applier of slightly crooked labels (see: eye/hand coordination).
The event took place at a winery in the aptly named town of Grapevine. It’s a good thirty minutes away and my one experience with Grapevine consists of a date with a guy who lived out there – a lovely dinner, a trip to a wine bar, food poisoning and projectile vomiting. I went to Urgent Care in a brown silk dress and my date’s bright red hockey socks. I was recounting that unfortunate episode on Saturday night, and had anyone been in the know, they might just have gestured across the room to the wine tasting counter and said, “That guy?”
Because there he was. What are the odds?
And before I could remember if our association had ended awkwardly (which, um, it might have) I ran right over to say hello. And you thought my eye/hand coordination was bad. It gets even muckier when decision making skills are involved. By the time I got back to my friends, after a good round of oh, ha ha, remember so-and-so, I still couldn’t remember exactly how it ended other than, at the time, I was nursing a broken heart and that I probably had those red hockey socks in a drawer somewhere. All signs point to some degree of awkward. For a second, I wanted to face palm myself and then I thought, Hey! We’re in a winery. He has no idea I’m sober and embarrassed. In fact, given our surroundings, he might just be assuming I’m toasted and shameless.
And then, I went with that. Toasted and shameless. It’s really how I do my best work, anyway.
Toasted and shameless is the ONLY way to go. I once hit on a guy at a party and talked to him for ten minutes before he let me in on the fact that I’d SLEPT with him, more than once, the summer before. Oops. Talk about a face-palm.
(in my defense, he’d grown his hair out and dyed it)
Best. Ever.
You get five toasted and shameless bonus points. No, make that 10.
That’s thinking off your feet, Heather. When you return to NYC, visit City Winery on Varick. They bottle their own. Their Chablis is deelish and they’re sponsoring and have a kiosk at Central Park SummerStage where the vino is flowing (Rumsey playfield).
“Toasted and Shameless” just replaced “I wish my job had an evacuation slide and a beer cart” as my phrase for the day.