Friday, 08 February 2002 | Works well with pizza

Written on the label of the bottle of wine I bought yesterday: ...is also a great wine—best served with friends and good humor (pizza or red meat will also do nicely). I have a bottle of wine that suggests I drink it with pizza.

It's not bad wine, but what do I know? It has to be pretty bad for me to notice. One such case happened in France, when I was there studying abroad. Another American student and I reasoned that French wine couldn't be bad; France is the wine country, right? Well I think that European wine must be something like European film—sure, all of it's good, because only the good stuff is exported. The difference that I failed to notice was that I wasn't choosing from exported wine—I was standing in a French corner market choosing from the cheapest bottles I could find. (I think I paid the equivalent of two dollars for the bottle I ended up buying.)

We tried with unreasonable commitment to drink that bottle of wine—big gulps, little sips, from the bottle, from wine glasses, drinking it with food, chasing it with water—I vaguely remember even pouring some of it in plastic bottles, so that we could drink it on-the-go. Of course with each attempt we'd break down in fits of laughter, cursing the taste in disbelief. I don't know why we were so dedicated, why we didn't immediately buy another, slightly more expensive bottle to replace it, why we missed the point entirely, that is, to enjoy the wine. Eventually we admitted defeat and poured the remains down the sink.