I love wine. Correction: I love super crappy wine. I am realizing this as I read the headline of the Huffington Post: The Rocky Mountain High just got a whole lot higher. “God, I love America,” I laugh to myself as I guzzle down my sixth glass of the evening. I swirl the reddish nectar around in the glass and begin to float off into that deep introspective space your mind sometimes takes you to, especially when you’ve been drinking too much wine.
As I wander off, I begin to ponder what place wine holds in relation to the college booze culture. Beer has obviously made a name for itself, there is no denying that. But it has always been a drink consumed in large quantities. Even liquor, the most rotten and foul of all booze, is cherished by many. But wine is something different altogether. It represents a change in drinking etiquette. We have taken the bourgeois aspect out of wine drinking and replaced it with our beastly binge drinking instincts.
We are heathen gods when it comes to downing wine. Have you ever witnessed a round of slap the bag? It’s barbaric: slapping the bladder of wine, while sucking on the nipple like baby animals. We consume the liquid as if it were milk.
You don’t even have to know what a cabernet sauvignon or shiraz is. College kids have simplified it: red or white. Have you ever actually acknowledged the variety you are purchasing at your local quickie mart? I would imagine you haven’t. As long as it was the biggest, cheapest bottle you could find, you put it in the cart.
Jack Kerouac knew all too well where this was headed. “A wine alcoholic is worse than a whiskey alcoholic,” he wrote. Once a drinker gets hooked on wine, there is no going back. The sinful fruity beverage has been adapted to fit our needs, and it does this with ease.
The days of drinking repression are over. Our generation has begun to reject the common practices of elegant drinking mannerisms. No longer shall we subject ourselves to the four ounces of sweet nectar and then limit ourselves for the remainder of the evening. No more will we pinch the stems of impractical crystal glassware with our index finger and thumb. Rather we’d like our glasses filled to the top, please. Garcon, fill them to the brim and keep ‘em coming. Cheers!
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