Wine Whine

Recently, I ate dinner at a Vietnamese restaurant without a liquor license. The staff permits you to BYOB, so my friends supplied multiple bottles of wine and beer to accompany our meal. It was actually embarrassing how much booze we had sitting on our table.

As we ate and drank, with a greater emphasis on the latter, an unfamiliar couple approached our table. The woman held a half-empty bottle of wine and said, "We have to go and we can't finish this, so we thought we'd give it to you." I immediately laughed out loud, because it was clear that we already had plenty of alcohol. She seemed to take offense and said, "No, it's a really great wine, we just can't finish it." Attempting to apologize, Dan explained that the laughter was just because we already had so much, but that we appreciated it. She still seemed defensive and proceeded to explain that the wine is expensive and from an impressive vineyard she has personally visited. She wasn't grasping that our hesitancy to accept the wine had nothing to do with the quality (which should have been evident from our own collection) and everything to do with the fact we weren't going to be able to finish our own stock. Why not give it to one of the other tables that wasn't drowning in alcohol? Finally, we just accepted the booze and thanked her.

Once she was out of earshot, we made fun of her. We developed elaborate theories that she had roofied the wine and was now waiting outside the restaurant to rape us. Then we poked fun at her pretentious nature after disclosing the wine's value. Every time the subject changed, we'd inevitably get back to the woman and mock her some more.

It wasn't until we were leaving and someone made another crack about "feeling roofied" that I actually reflected on what had just happened. Even if she had been a little strange and pompous, she was still someone who kindly gifted expensive wine to strangers... who then gladly drank it while ripping into her for nearly an hour.

Sometimes we can be awful people.... but not as awful as that woman, am-I-right?