Wine, Wine, Wine
A Pinot Noir from Germany showed up in our wine rack today. I have no idea how it got there; neither Elle nor I remember buying it or receiving it as a gift. But we were having fish for dinner, with brussels sprouts and a creamy gnocchi-like polenta dish from Trader Joe’s, and when Elle asked what kind of wine to have with it I said, “Something light. Not the Silver Oak (I have no idea when we’re going to have occasion to drink that).” She found the German pinot. I was totally expecting it to be not so sweet, like French wine. But this is German, the same people who make cloyingly sweet riesling, and this pinot was both hot and sweet, and perfect. I drank it too fast. I love when awesome wine appears magically in our apartment.
I should be sleepier, but I’m not. A almost wish I were, because tomorrow’s an early day and I would like to want to be sleeping.
So yeah, Elle and I are walking that fine line between appreciating the art of wine, and being annoying wine snobs (not that all wine snobs are annoying, but I have a feeling I would be). I can spell gewurtztraminer, for example, but I don’t know how it’s different from a pinot grigio except for where they’re usually made. I know the kinds of wine we generally like and the kinds we generally don’t. I also know that doesn’t really matter, because there are exceptions to every rule, and we’re always trying to find them.
A great place to experiment with your wine palate is the wine store at Trader Joe’s. I don’t know how they get away with it, but TJ’s manages to offer really good food, and really good wine to go with it, at amazing prices. (I feel like I should be standing in front of a striped awning, wearing a tweed coat and waving my arms while I say that, while “Buy now!” flashes across the bottom of the screen.)
We go to TJ’s Wine every month or two, to stock up. Buy our faves and try a few new things. They sell these wine totes, that hold six bottles each, for less than a dollar, so we usually bring one or two (or three if we’re feeling madcap) totes to the wine store and bring ‘em home filled. The next stop after the wine store, though, is always Trader Joe’s proper, the food store.
You want to have a buddy, shopping at Joe’s. One person to get in line right away, the other to flit through the aisles grabbing all the groceries, then finding you in line and dropping the stuff off. Two advantages: You don’t spend a boring forty five minutes in a line with a grocery cart full of thawing frozen goods, and you don’t have to negotiate the humanity-filled aisles of Trader Joe’s with a wide-load shopping cart. This is advanced grocery shopping, not for the faint of heart. The risk equals the reward, though, and the food is almost always awesome (but don’t get the pre-packaged four cheese lasagna).
So the other day we were on a TJ-run. We’d gotten home from Belize, home to an empty refrigerator and Mother Hubbard style bare cupboards. Planning a major haul to restock our larders, we even brought the laundry cart from home, after a strategy session on how we’d manhandle a laundry cart full of groceries from 14th Street and Third Avenue, through three subway stations, to our apartment on 176th Street – the Manhattan equivalent of the North Pole, or at the very least Greenland. Tricky. Ambitious. Some would say foolhardy. But we jammed our eco-friendly shopping bags into our knapsacks, wheeled the laundry cart out into the sidewalk, and sallied forth.
First the wine store. Only a one-tote trip, but we found three whites (including a sauvignon blanc – a risky move for my finicky palate, but our hopes and spirits remained high), a familiar red and a random unfamiliar one, and a rose (goes great with goat cheese).
Then to the grocery store. We shopped hungry, usually a bad idea. We even tried knocking off the edge of our apprtites with a slice of pizza each, but it didn’t really help. We were very indulgent in our shopping, and by the time we rolled our cart outside, we even had a few things stuffed in our knapsacks for want of space. The wine tote had no chance of fitting into the cart, so we carried it.
On the uptown A platform, we left the wine behind.
We were doing so well! Working together, we muscled the cart down the steps to the L train. We got to the elevator at the transfer point, and down another flight of stairs. We were high on achievement. Go team! Maybe it was the traffic, maybe it was that chatty couple on the platform that distracted us from each making sure the other had the wine in hand. Whatever it was, we were on the train, hot and tired, when it hit us that we’d left the tote on the platform.
Not that the wine was super duper expensive or anything, but we bought this awesome goat cheese and now the rose’s gone. You know?
I tried tracking the tote down with the MTA’s lost and found service. Admittedly, a long shot. Predictably, no luck. Some lucky commuter got shitfaced that night.
Now that the shame and frustration from the event has passed, I can write about it with sort of a chuckle. I mean it was only wine, it was only a few bucks. It ain’t like we left the laundry cart full of groceries behind. And heck, if we’d brought that wine home, we would have had a bottle of white with the fish tonight, and who knows how many years it may have been before we discovered that really awesome German Pinot Noir in our wine rack? So, really, it all turned out for the best.
Still, though. You know? Damn.
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