On Thursday, I was at a tasting with a friend who lives in Manhattan, and gave him a very special bottle for a celebration dinner the following day which we would both attend. I had wrapped the bottle, so we could taste it blind.
Unfortunately,a few yards from his building, he slipped on some black ice, and he, and my bottle fell heavily. The bottle broke, a shard of glass went into his finger, and the wound started bleeding copiously. Meanwhile the wine started flowing gently into the snow.
The following day he asked me what the bottle was. I told him that a true wine geek, bleeding finger and all, would have been on his hands and knees licking the snow between the pieces of glass, and would have known the wine. He claimed that he would never have been able to identify the wine in two day old New York snow. That may be, but a true geek would have tried.
A wine lover would not open 5 bottle of Pegau on a weekday for a stranger but a berserker would
Cristian Zeitler our Berserker in Geneva Switzerland (actually the French side…)
Not only opened all that CnP but helped his wonderful wife cook an amazing dinner for
some strangers from America.
Oh yea just a FG course to start things off…
I did not shoot the main course of rack of Lamb but I managed to shoot the
cheese course
This presents the true delemma: Do you ignore the near by dog droppings, get down on your hands and knees (blood dripping all over) and sniff/lick your way across the sidewalk out of a sense of hommage to the now glass shard infested, muddy puddle that is the only remnant of the tragically deceased '61, ignoring the absolute certainty that your neighbors, witnessing the spectacle, but undoubtedly not aware of its nature as an act of hommage, would probably call the police, and certainly call the building’s board of directors to move to have you expelled as a resident of the building on obvious grounds of (i) insanity and (ii) an apparent disdain for hygene, OR quietly limp on to your apartment, bandage yourself, and open an old Chave Hermitage to soothe your wounds?
i. Berserker implies insanity, so neighbors would hardly be shocked by the sight of one on hands and knees, carefully avoiding dog poop and licking snow. It all seems perfectly logical to me.
ii. the question of hygiene is a little less cut and dried. The fact that my friend had an open wound may at first glance seem sufficient mitigation to allow him to limp back home without Berserker status being questioned but… honestly, any true blue berserker would have been on the ground, toungue in the snow, trying to figure out whether it was a Pauillac or St. Julien.
The true Berserker would have gotten down on their knees, carefully peeled back the paper bag that surrounded the broken bottle, and attempted to find any concave piece of glass still cupping 5-10ml of the nectar. You would have then pulled the tie from your bleeding friends neck, used the fat end as a makeshift “Cheesecloth” to filter for glass that which you poured into your mouth, then you would have tied off the skinny end of the tie on your buddy’s finger. On the walk home, you would have periodically grabbed the tie, smelled it, and said “OMG, smell the nose now! This would have been sooooo goood!”
![[rofl.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/a/a7452fcd8e675af869f8da01174474a545b03944.gif "rofl"){kind=small}
![[berserker.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/8/8600bbd4810d342b8fbd4ffb62b4f0026275fd37.gif "berserker"){kind=small}