The Top Ten Reasons I Hate Wine - One, The Unconscionable Expense

Some of you may know me from my wine article series "I Love Italian Wine and Food, " similar French and German series, and travel articles that always manage to discuss local wine and food. It’s true; I really do love wine and food from Italy, France, Germany, and other countries as well. But I also hate wine and many aspects of the wine scene. Let me explain my top ten reasons for this love-hate relationship.

The unconscionable expense. Don’t let anybody kid you. Good wine is expensive. Great wine is even more expensive. There are bargains, but finding them is like kissing scads of frogs to find a prince. You have to kiss a lot of frogs (yechh) before you get to kiss a prince. And to top it off, I don’t even want to kiss any princes.

I do, however, want to drink fine wine. And the more fine wine that I drink, the more fine wine I want to drink. Before I started writing wine reviews, twenty dollars was more or less my limit for a bottle; now I almost feel like apologizing when I spend less than twenty. Having tasted some excellent wines in the forty-dollar range, I am dying to know how sixty-dollar wines taste. Needless to say, some will be disappointing. But in some ways it is worse to find an excellent sixty-dollar wine. I can’t go around spending sixty dollars a bottle on a regular basis.

I got permission from my wife to buy a single one hundred dollar bottle of wine per year. Such a bottle will cost me at least two hundred dollars; my wife is not a wine lover, and she will want a one hundred dollar item for herself. But that’s not the end of my wine expense problems. One of the most wine-savvy people I know recently described the pleasures of a $600 bottle of Chateau Petrus; a top of the line French red wine. I asked him if it was worth the money. His response was short and sweet, absolutely. I haven’t yet gotten near that price point, but…

Here are the other reasons: The embarrassing lack of knowledge, No wine cellar, I can’t get the … bottle opened, The insomnia, Food problems, Wine snobs, Those smells and those tastes, Those colors, Home brew, One more problem and yes, The Solution.