England has been a bit more tolerant of the human need to be inebriated. Consider this quotation from a book review on the Waugh literary legacy:
Alexander’s and Auberon’s books also give us a taste of London journalism, which in Auberon’s time was very gloves-off. Stabs in the back, vendettas, letter-writing campaigns, lawsuits: what drama! Writers called people piss pots, poltroons, dog sodomists—almost everything but drunks. (Drunkenness was not considered a vice.) English journalism is much the same today.
Drunkenness was not considered a vice. Today, England talks of the trouble of overdrinking, but they talk about it sensibly by changing their too-short pub hours of operation. America used to be very tolerant, too. Obviously some things should not be tolerated, such as drunk driving.
But drinking in America today has a whispering secret-society feeling about it today. I once had a teacher who told me if you drink to get drunk you are an alcoholic. This is illogical by any standard; the whole point of booze is to change your consciousness. Non-alcoholic beer and decaffeinated coffee are exercises in futility. As David Letterman referred to decaffeinated coffee, it’s what their drinking in hell.
I bring all this up because of an article in the New York Times about the battle between the slobs and the snobs in the wine country of New York. Evidently, people are getting drunk at wine tastings:
There also are reports of tastings gone wild involving intoxicated visitors who have tossed back full glasses of wine without regard to nose or body until they grabbed the brass spittoon for baser purposes…The latest additions to local lore include a story about members of an inebriated group at the Palmer Vineyards here who hopped off a hayride and began gallivanting naked through the vines. Then there were the drunken customers at the Pugliese Vineyards in Cutchogue who jumped into the shimmering lake next to the elegant outdoor tasting area. And the bachelorette parties that often culminate in tabletop dances, to the horror of nearby oenophiles sniffing or sipping the local chardonnays.
Okay, I have sympathy for the people trying to get into the whole wine experience and being annoyed by the drunken louts. But this lays bare the hypocrisy that has grown around wine. Just because there is great craft gone into winemaking and the prices are high and there is a whole oenophile (wine connoisseur) language, does not mean that you are free from the baser instincts that wine brings forth. In vino veritas indeed.
But what will the vineyards do to fight the deadly drunken mobs?
In response to the raucous behavior, more associated with that South Fork bastion known as the Hamptons, almost all of the wineries have ended free tastings and now generally charge $5 for a flight of carefully measured samples. (Palmer is one of the few still pouring without charge, if only for selected wines.) Many tasting rooms have banned bachelorette parties and tightened cutoff policies on serving the inebriated.
I have a feeling the charging is more about greed than dealing with drunks. And banning bachelorette parties? Don’t these people know you don’t fuck with the bacchanal? Don’t they remember what happened to Pentheus when he tried to end the Dionysian celebrations? He was pulled apart by the ecstatic women (including his own mother!) You can’t ban the bachelorette parties.
As the movie Sideways demonstrates, you can be an oenophile and still be a drunk. But even regulars at bar know there are certain rules. Number one rule: you should be polite. It’s not rocket science. Unfortunately, amateur drunks are not very good at that rule, so they have to be reminded. The article ends with quotations from a local wine mag:
The Long Island Wine Press, a local magazine, has begun printing wine tasting etiquette guidelines and rules of proper behavior, including the need to refrain from putting tips in the wine spittoon…Do not “shout that something’s disgusting because you don’t happen to like it,” the list says, and “don’t take the three-ounce pours of wine as if they were shots.”
Yeah, save that for the tequila.
Alexander’s and Auberon’s books also give us a taste of London journalism, which in Auberon’s time was very gloves-off. Stabs in the back, vendettas, letter-writing campaigns, lawsuits: what drama! Writers called people piss pots, poltroons, dog sodomists—almost everything but drunks. (Drunkenness was not considered a vice.) English journalism is much the same today.
Drunkenness was not considered a vice. Today, England talks of the trouble of overdrinking, but they talk about it sensibly by changing their too-short pub hours of operation. America used to be very tolerant, too. Obviously some things should not be tolerated, such as drunk driving.
But drinking in America today has a whispering secret-society feeling about it today. I once had a teacher who told me if you drink to get drunk you are an alcoholic. This is illogical by any standard; the whole point of booze is to change your consciousness. Non-alcoholic beer and decaffeinated coffee are exercises in futility. As David Letterman referred to decaffeinated coffee, it’s what their drinking in hell.
I bring all this up because of an article in the New York Times about the battle between the slobs and the snobs in the wine country of New York. Evidently, people are getting drunk at wine tastings:
There also are reports of tastings gone wild involving intoxicated visitors who have tossed back full glasses of wine without regard to nose or body until they grabbed the brass spittoon for baser purposes…The latest additions to local lore include a story about members of an inebriated group at the Palmer Vineyards here who hopped off a hayride and began gallivanting naked through the vines. Then there were the drunken customers at the Pugliese Vineyards in Cutchogue who jumped into the shimmering lake next to the elegant outdoor tasting area. And the bachelorette parties that often culminate in tabletop dances, to the horror of nearby oenophiles sniffing or sipping the local chardonnays.
Okay, I have sympathy for the people trying to get into the whole wine experience and being annoyed by the drunken louts. But this lays bare the hypocrisy that has grown around wine. Just because there is great craft gone into winemaking and the prices are high and there is a whole oenophile (wine connoisseur) language, does not mean that you are free from the baser instincts that wine brings forth. In vino veritas indeed.
But what will the vineyards do to fight the deadly drunken mobs?
In response to the raucous behavior, more associated with that South Fork bastion known as the Hamptons, almost all of the wineries have ended free tastings and now generally charge $5 for a flight of carefully measured samples. (Palmer is one of the few still pouring without charge, if only for selected wines.) Many tasting rooms have banned bachelorette parties and tightened cutoff policies on serving the inebriated.
I have a feeling the charging is more about greed than dealing with drunks. And banning bachelorette parties? Don’t these people know you don’t fuck with the bacchanal? Don’t they remember what happened to Pentheus when he tried to end the Dionysian celebrations? He was pulled apart by the ecstatic women (including his own mother!) You can’t ban the bachelorette parties.
As the movie Sideways demonstrates, you can be an oenophile and still be a drunk. But even regulars at bar know there are certain rules. Number one rule: you should be polite. It’s not rocket science. Unfortunately, amateur drunks are not very good at that rule, so they have to be reminded. The article ends with quotations from a local wine mag:
The Long Island Wine Press, a local magazine, has begun printing wine tasting etiquette guidelines and rules of proper behavior, including the need to refrain from putting tips in the wine spittoon…Do not “shout that something’s disgusting because you don’t happen to like it,” the list says, and “don’t take the three-ounce pours of wine as if they were shots.”
Yeah, save that for the tequila.
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