Out of all the alcoholic beverages served at restaurants, I think my favourite has got to be wine. Wine is great. As if I need to tell you. Not only is it delicious and drunk-inducing, it is probably the most versatile of the alcohols. It can be poured into a fancy, respectable glass, or it can be poured down your throat right out of the bottle. You can bring it to your parents’ dinner party, or you can bring it to your friend’s place at two in the morning. It can cost anywhere from eight dollars, to like … hundreds of dollars (though I have no idea what that would taste like, and I probably never will, and I’m comfortable with that).
It’s also such a great thing to bring as a host or hostess gift. I have a post dedicated to the caliber of wine you should probably bring to various kinds of dinner parties, so I won’t get into it too much now, but it’s just a nice safety net to know that if you don’t really know when to bring to someone’s house to say thanks for feeding us dinner, a bottle of wine will almost always send that message across very nicely. It adds an air of sophistication to your evening that a six pack or a bottle of vodka just can’t.
In the same vein, I feel like wine is a grown up alcohol, but can still get you drunk, if need be. When kids are in high school and experimenting with booze, as far as I observed (because I was a good kid and didn’t drink underage), it was with gross, cheap beer and hard liquor. Wine, on the other hand, is something that you try for the first time at the dinner table, with your parents’ permission. And I think that idea that wine is a more adult alcohol kind of sticks with us, at least in North America.
That said! I find it’s also the go-to when you’ve had a shit day and need to forget it, real hard. At least for those of us who have a hard time with hard core hard liquor. And maybe it’s because we grew up with that idea that wine was classy, that now, when we get drunk off of wine, it somehow feels more socially acceptable to admit that than it would be to tell people that you got wasted on bourbon by yourself. Downing a bottle (or box) or wine while you binge Netflix kind of feels like the norm for our generation, whereas should a friend tell me that they drank rum from the bottle all night, I’d start planning the intervention.
Not saying that these stereotypes are accurate, just saying that they exist. And in doing so, I’m pointing out that wine is, as I said above, the most socially accepted versatile alcohol. Bring it to a dinner party, have a cheap bottle on hand for when your girlfriend comes over, drink a bottle all by yourself in one night. Whatever! It’s wine. The possibilities are endless.