Wine Attack!

"There are too many of them! I don't know what to do!"

My psyche was crying out, screaming, clamoring inside my skull. "Make 'em stop! I can't deal with any more labels!"

I was standing in the wine aisle at the supermarket. It was not even a wine superstore, and yet I was overwhelmed. Thank God I hadn’t driven over to the Wine-and-Save.

What the hell did I know about wine? I was eighteen, just above the legal limit. All I knew was that she wanted a Merlot. It was to be our first real date, and she wanted to celebrate with something nice, something smooth, something that would go down slowly. I wanted the same things, but not with the same object in mind.

When she’d asked, I couldn’t have even spelled ‘merlot’. There was no Internet, no Google search, no Wikipedia of Wines. I suppose I could have asked the store clerk, but – hey – what eighteen year old wants to show that they need help, or don’t know something?

I could have asked my parents for help. It would have been eminently embarrassing, but they knew my girlfriend. They knew about our relationship. They even liked her, I think. But what did adults know about Merlot in western New York? If it wasn’t white, or at worst pink, they had no experience with it. And something French besides? No way! Maybe a Gewurztraminer or a Liebfraumilch, but none of that frenchy stuff.

Labels, labels, labels. I’d stopped reading the backs. All the reviews and the lofty words ran together like a puddle, a puddle of blood squeezed from my head onto the wine store floor. If I didn’t come up with a choice soon, I really would keel over. The only qualifications were it had to be a Merlot and it had to fit into my budget. I had ten dollars in my wallet. I’d left the other twenty dollars at home, reserved as a gift for her of something other than wine, and to remove the temptation to spend it all on one bottle.

Finally I closed my eyes and reached out to the shelves. All the bottles in this section were Merlots. It didn’t matter which one. The upper shelves were too expensive, the lowest ones too cheap. So I reached straight out. I grabbed one by the neck and shook it. It did not resist. Barely opening my eyes, I turned to the left and walked toward the checkout counter, holding it in front of me like a dead animal by the tail.

The clerk looked up, at first bored as usual I guess. Then a smile washed over her face, changing a mundane woman into a beauty. It reminded me of the scene in the movie with the clerk in the drug store and the teenager buying condoms. Thankfully that was not me. I told my brain that I had no reason to be embarrassed, and a smile of my own crept from one lip to the other, from the left cheek to the right cheek.

“Are you happy with your purchase?” she asked. “Did you find everything you needed?”

“Uh, yea,” I muttered. I mustered the smile but not the words. I paid my nine dollars and change and walked out with a brown paper bag in my hand. I shoved it into my back pack and mounted my bicycle. A driver’s license was still in my future. Such was the nature of dating this eighteen year old. Oh well.

I got back to my house and put the wine in the refrigerator, right up there with the bottle of white already there from Mom and Dad. I hoped that the two would get along – the wines, not my parents – and that the white would imbue the red with some smarts. Then I moved on to prepare dinner.

Mom and Dad had agreed to go out to a restaurant themselves. That left me alone in the house. I had already picked up the clothes scattered here and there, done up the dishes, and generally tidied up. I had bought the groceries that morning, working from a recipe. At first I had had grand plans for a wonderful French meal, course after course of fine cuisine – you know, to go with the French wine. But reality had hit me in the head and I was falling back on an old standby I’d made many times: steak and baked potatoes.

An hour later, Mom called to ask how everything was going. It was good that she called because there were a few things I couldn’t find in her kitchen. She helped with that, and then paused to say goodbye. In a moment of weakness, or perhaps superhuman strength, I blurted out, “I bought a bottle of wine.”

“Oh really,” she replied. “What did you get?”

“A Merlot.” I did not allow as to how I’d had little choice about the lineage, only about the label.

“That should be nice with steak and potatoes, dear,” she confirmed.

“I put it in the fridge, next to your bottle of white.” I hoped she would see the wisdom, the advanced thinking, involved in that act.

“Oh, honey, it should be room temperature. It’s okay, you have time. But I have to go. The movie is about to start. Remember, Dad and I will be home by eleven.” She was undoubtedly grinning as she hung up the phone. Young enough to remember young love, my Mom was having a fun time of it.

I therefore pulled the Merlot out of the grasp of the Liebfraumilch and set her (or him?) on the counter. I took the moment to pull two wine glasses from the cabinet and check them for fingerprints. Then I shoveled around in the junk drawer until I found the wine bottle opener. It was there, beneath the three or four beer bottle openers.

My gal was driving herself over to my place for dinner. She was not relegated to a bicycle. I could hardly have carried her on mine, and besides, Mom and Dad had our only vehicle with them. It was a bit of a let down to wait for her to pull up on her own, but I hoped it was a compromise worth making. Neither one of us could afford a real restaurant meal, and she would have to drive and therefore not drink. We had decided that the wine could go with dinner, then a movie afterward, and by then the alcohol would have left her system and mine. By the moment my parents came home, we would have said good night, avoided any embarrassment or explanatory conversations, and gone to bed.

The potatoes were in the oven. The asparagus was on the stove, waiting for the burner to light. The steaks were done and dusted.

I went upstairs to change. It didn’t take long. There were not many choices. I checked my teeth, my hair, my breath. The latter was coming in short gasps as I came back down the stairs, stepping quicjly to the front door. The bell had just rung.

She looked wonderful. I can visualize her in every detail even today, decades later.

“Thanks for dropping by,” I said, off the cuff.

A little laugh escaped her lips and she stepped across the threshold.

“Would you care for a glass of wine? We are offering a fine Merlot.”

“Why yes, I would.”

And the rest is history.

Copyright 2021 by William Altmann, all rights reserved.