I’m not a big fan of wine. I prefer beer or whiskey. Every now and then I will enjoy a glass of wine, particularly when I’m feeling fancy. If I do get wine, it’s usually a chardonnay or sparkling wine. I can’t red wine. No cabernet, no merlot, no blends. My anti-red wine diet began my sophomore year of college. My roommates and I had a toga party. It wasn’t much of a toga party; it was me and my roommates in makeshift bed sheet togas, a bunch of guests in regular street clothes, two bottles of good wine, and four boxes of Franzia. If you don’t know what Franzia is, consider yourself lucky. It’s a brand of boxed wine that comes in three or five liter packages. It’s wine that you buy in bulk. It’s not terrible tasting but you’re not going to impress anyone if you show up to a dinner party with it. Anyway, my roommates and I drank the two bottles of good wine, then we poured the Franzia into the empty bottles, and we served that to our guests so they thought we were giving them the good stuff.
I ended up drinking a lot of the Franzia out of necessity. It was a toga party damnit and we banned all other types of alcohol for some stupid reason. So glass after glass of Franzia went down the hatch until I reached my limit and kept on going. I would love to say that I handled my booze, but I ended up puking and I puked hard. Throwing up red wine is not fun. It looks like blood and intestines. You think you’re dying. I puked all over my bathroom and passed out in my bed while the party raged on around me. To this day I can’t drink red wine.
I know it’s not fair to swear off quality wine because of a decades old incident with a shitty wine, but my body won’t let me near that poison. I can’t touch gin for the same reason. Throwing up red wine is something that I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. Nobody deserves that kind of suffering.
Critically Rated at 8/17
Written, Rated, and Reviewed by Brendan H. Young
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