This past weekend, a very good friend of mine visited from Chicago. She was the maid of honor in our wedding, and this was her first trip to Nashville.
Being a chick, I planned all sorts of activities for us, and by that, I mean shit I’d been dying to check out. One of our stops was at a local winery called Long Hollow Winery. She and I are both addicted to some wine we’d purchased close to where I was raised in Southern Illinois, so I thought we might stumble across a local Tennessee gem.
When we walk in, the gal working the tasting counter was helping a middle-aged couple, so we take a gander at all of the useless shit for sale, then sidle up for our own samplings. I should note we were bursting from a huge meal we’d just enjoyed at Noshville, so we didn’t want to eat the cheese and crackers offered by the tasting gal. She was pretty insistent about it, and we didn’t know if these items were meant to compliment the wine or merely cleanse our palates for the next sample. She seemed thrown off by our cheese and cracker resistance, but whatever.
My friend and look at the wine list, and decide to try the semi-sweet wines first. The list had dry wines first, then semi-sweet, then sweet. Okay, grouping them is good. Little did we know that you are supposed to try wines in the order in which they appear on the list. Does it really matter? Oh, apparently it does. When an older hag with teased hair circa 1972 begins helping other customers, she sees our sampling order and summarily informs us that we should have started with the dry wines because drinking the sweet wines (which made Boone’s Farm taste like Merlot, I might add) first compromises (my word, not this bitch’s) the flavor. I recognized this old bat from several photos posted in the store area, and I conclude that she is the owner’s wife. Her shitty demeanor and outdated hairstyle rile me up just enough to say, “I don’t think I care for all of these rules.” Meanwhile, my friend tries another craptacular wine, and says, “WHERE IS THE SPITTING BUCKET?” I almost lose it and had the distinct sense that we were both on the verge of behaving rather inappropriately. I do my best to stop laughing, and we decide that we not only hate every wine they make, we don’t need this attitude from some hick who thinks she belongs on the cover of Wine Afficionado.
The whole escapade lasted about 15 minutes, door to door.
