Friday, May 9, 2014

Life Lessons From the Bottle

I started this post back in March but was sidetracked by school.  I'm posting it now!

I have a group of friends, a foursome, who I study with regularly on Tuesday nights.  We all bring individual work, study, and chat a bit.  Some nights we chat more than others.  Some Tuesday nights are more productive than the last.  The one constant of each week is that we split a bottle of wine amongst the four of us.  And thus, I give you life lessons from my journey in taking up wine.

1) To let life really happen, you've got to uncork it.  Some wines need to breathe, I learned that in the last two weeks.  I still don't quite understand the science behind it, but uncorking a bottle and allowing it to sit and breathe made it much more enjoyable.  So uncork your life.  Push your boundaries, take in new sights, smells, and ideas, blow off some steam. 

2) Sometimes you have a good year (or season, or month, or week, or day, or holiday, or you get the point) and sometimes you have a bad one.  I've seen in the movies where someone in a restaurant will order a bottle of wine and the server will say something to the effect of, "Ah, yes.  Very good choice (insert form of address), a very good year!"  What does that even mean?!  I'm new to the whole wine drinking arena, but I've yet to find something I find completely unpalatable. But I guess it means that we all have good times and we all have bad times. NOTE: what one person considers a bad time might not be something another person would consider a bad time.  I'm not making a blanket statement that compares one's position of comfort/despair to another persons. 

3) You get what you pay for.  If you want a really nice bottle of wine, you're likely going to need to spend more than $7.99 (not that $7.99 wines are bad, some are actually quite fine).  Anyway, in life you get out of something what you put in.  If you want that promotion at work, you'd best work your tail off and prove you want it (and have earned it)!

4) But at the same time, looks can be deceiving.  Cork or twist top? Dark intriguing label or the pretty bright one?  I'm a fan of the cork tops mainly because I have an affinity for using a corkscrew.  Call me weird, it's okay.  But I also know that I've had some fairly decent wines which came from a twist-off bottle.  This speaks to me about not casting someone off as useless based upon the exterior presentation.

5) Life is better when spent in numbers.  It is largely safer to share a bottle of wine among friends than to drink it alone.  I've experienced drinking an entire bottle on my own in a sitting.  I was not pleasant to be around the next day..  If you share the bottle with people, it also means you can make connections over a common interest...namely, drinking wine.

I'll wrap this up here...What have YOU learned from a bottle of wine?