1 Tuesday Wine

Sixteen-year-olds just don’t appreciate wine.  Nor should they.  Sitting in my mundane 20-something work space, my mind flipped back to my first attempts at “wine-ing.”  Can I even call it wine?  In reality it was all boones, berries, and hangovers. 

That is, until a fateful day sometime in April 1997.  My usual liquor store guy wasn’t working.  And for a 16-year-old Kansan girl, this meant no Boones, no Berries, and no fun on a Saturday night.  My naturally rebellious spirit was not about to succumb to fateful boredom, so I had to be resourceful… I called in the troops.

Luckily, a fellow Wine Blonde, lets call her “Brunie Blonde,” had just the solution…a sophisticated mother who loved and collected red wine, with heaps of the stuff just lying around.  Now Brunie’s mom had two types of red wines – the “Keepers” and what she called “Tuesday” wine.  The seemingly insurmountable task for Bruine Blonde and me was to determine which was a Keeper and which was a Tuesday Wine. 

We both knew the risks of mistaking the two:  more time spent in the adolescent prison known as “grounded.”  It was an unspoken rule, of course, but if a few bottles of Tuesday wine went missing no one made a fuss.  If a Keeper disappeared, someones’ head was going to roll. 

With this daunting task in mind, we entered the basement wine cellar and began our careful selection.  After consulting one another on what we thought was the proper criteria was for choosing a Tuesday wine, we came up with our standards.  A Tuesday wine had a simple, no-frills label, and certainly, under no circumstances, could it be a Merlot.  (It was 1997). 

Simple enough: don’t pick a busy label, or a Merlot, and we were good as gold…or so we thought.  As we carefully pulled at the necks of 10 or so bottles, we settled on a bottle of red which simply said, “Caymus.”  The label was not fussy, it didn’t say Merlot, so we were happy as hogs as we stealthfully made our way out the back door of the house and hopped in our mobile apartments (i.e. car) on the way to the party.