MY EX-COWORKER, DANIEL

Hello, my name is Daniel and I love wine.  If you do not believe me, just ask people who I serve wine to and they will tell you that I love it.

I used to work with Dave at a restaurant that served wine.   Wine involves smashing grapes and putting their juices in a bottle.  There are many reasons that wine should replace other interesting things.  You can talk about wine.  You can smell wine.  You can claim the wine is corked and dump it down the drain to show the manager that you are knowledgeable about wine and do not care about profits.  You can come to my restaurant and I will use words like oaky, jammy and tannins and then you will think I’m smart and trust me to recommend a glass of wine for you that is way overpriced.

Here are some rules to follow about wine if you are not as great as me and don’t know about wine:

1.  Ask to have the wine poured into a giant glass container that looks like a goldfish bowl so the wine can breathe, like a goldfish.

2.  Sniff the wine like you’re a cocaine whore who is not only addicted to cocaine, but who also wants cocaine all the time.

3.  Throw out arbitrary fruits and spices that you think the wine smells like and I will do the same because there is no wrong answer. You might detect hints of blackberry, wood and leather.  I might notice small traces of vomit, stool samples and unwashed feet.  We are both right because we are not wrong.

4.  Swirl the wine around the glass and see if it makes the glass dirty.  This is called the “legs” and it is called that because it is a sexy thing to do.

5. Taste the wine and make a disgusting gurgling sound through your teeth before swallowing it.

6.  Do some other stuff with wine that makes no sense.

If you don’t like wine, it’s ok.  Wine is for sophisticated people like me.  And winos.  If you are not a wino or a sophisticator, you can still come to my restaurant and listen to me talk about wine and watch other people sniff and drink wine.  Be sure to reserve a large window of time because it takes four hours to drink wine.  Three of those hours involves swirling the wine and telling amazing wine stories about other times you tasted wine.

I do not like Dave very much because he makes fun of me for talking about wine.  Dave needs to be kinder to me if he wants to be invited to my bunco games where we drink wine and talk about wine and sometimes roll dice in which the winner wins a bottle of wine.

If anyone knows who invented wine, please give me their name and address so I can send a letter of appreciation and request a photo of him or her so that I can make it into a poster and pin it on my bedroom ceiling.  My letter would look like this:

Dear Inventor of Wine:

Thank you for inventing wine.  It tastes and smells like wine.  Please send me a photo of you so I can make it into a poster and pin it on my bedroom ceiling.

Sincerely,

Daniel, Wine Demigod and Master of the Universe