I agree.
Don’t sweat the small stuff. My wife can drink anything in OUR cellar that she wants. She can also give away bottles as gifts. With no prompting from me, she knows that before she does the latter, she asks me about it. So thus, this past Christmas, she pulled a bottle and said “How about if I give this to X at my office as a Christmas gift?” She held up a bottle of 2009 Mas de Boislauzon Châteauneuf-du-Pape Cuvée du Quet. I asked what the price point of the gift was supposed to be. She said $15-$20. I said, “you’re way over your limit.” She said, “So get you butt down to the cellar and find me something in that range that I can give away.” I pulled a Viticcio Chianti Classico Riserva. She said, “No, I like that, pick something else!” We settled on some random 2005 Cru Bourgeois Bordeaux.
PS - That’s how you stay married for 36 years.
Same here. And at 44, my problem is not “what if they drink all my wine?” but “who can I get to help drink all this wine?” You may even find that non-winos like the better stuff whether or not they care about the oak treatment and weather at harvest.
Protocolo rose and red. $5 per.
An interesting topic.
Over the many years that I have cellared wines, i have continued
to follow the view that all of the wines in my cellar must be those
which I personally enjoy drinking. This runs from the purchases of
singular bottles acquired for special occasions down through my
everyday drinking wines.
Insofar as my wife drawing wines from my cellar to share with her
bridge club or book club members, etc., she is free to choose. The only stipulation
is that my small collection of La Tache, and possibly one or two other
groupings, are exempted, as these have been acquired for specific occasion
use. She is also free to choose from my cache at the golf club dining room,
where she may be having a ladies luncheon. She has a few favorites and I make
certain there is a supply of those wines, both at home and at the golf club.
“Cellar defenders” is a term I don’t care for. It suggests that one wishes to
hold wines for those guests that may not appreciate quality wines. How else
are these people going to be exposed to the better wines, I wonder? As
I said above, I’m happy to share my wines and my cellar choices must be
wines that I enjoy drinking, too.
Hank ![[cheers.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/0/0ff9bfcdb0964982cd3240b6159868fbdf215b1a.gif "cheers"){kind=small}
I feel this debate often comes down to semantics, as I would argue you’ve described holding “cellar defenders” in the omitted section of your reply. I think it makes sense to purchase wines at many price points, and that are in need of many different aging plans, such that you have wine to fit many different occasions. I don’t think it makes sense to buy wine you wouldn’t drink to share with others, though maybe I’m in the minority there.
My wife has a dedicated case for “Girls Night”. The stock is constantly rotating. Almost every bottle is a wine that I’ve tasted or we both have. Avg. price range of $15 - $20. I typically buy them for her. Sometimes she adds her own. If not for being dedicated to Girls Nights, I’d gladly pop a bottle on an average weeknight.
As the wife of a “wine guy”, she’s reportedly expected to provide some or all of the wines. Initially, it seemed like a fair amount of decent juice was being wasted (not on my wife ofcourse!). Over time, that’s changed…or so I’d like to think.
RT
I don’t see the two as inconsistent.
There are plenty of inexpensive wines I’m happy to drink, even though they may not be exciting and new.
Those are the ones to stock for unexpected guests, BYOBs, and other non-special occasions.
Hey, Merrill and Happy New Year to you. I was just thinking about you the other day. Hope all is well with you out left!
I commented on this above, but to reiterate: my tale was a specific one involving specific women who do not have the same relationship w wine as the majority of this board does. Any attempt to extrapolate some sort of deep-rooted sexism is futile as there is none there…it would only reveal the reader’s own hyper-sensitivity towards potentially sexist comments.
Hi, Rich.
Frankly, the post struck me as distasteful on several levels – but I’m here for the wine talk-- not to debate whether or not you are a deep-rooted sexist or I’m a person hyper-sensitive to “potentially” sexist comments.
Peace!
Why? If the women call it girls night, which my wife does ( and she has asked me to give her a shelf in the wine cellar that she can take from without asking when non wine wine geeks come over, she has an idea about some of the bottles but I buy most of the wine) and the story is factual why should it be re worded? I could see if he was expressing it as a hypothetical and stereotyping the women then it would be an issue. Would you be offended if one of the female posters had posted a story about her husband and his non wine drinking friends doing the same thing being posted as boys night at home?
Kim–If you feel the post is “distasteful,” then you ought to be willing to explain why. Not to cast stones at the original poster, of course, but just to explain your perspective. Sometimes it’s helpful for folks to get a different perspective,even if they don’t necessarily agree with it.
Having said that, I don’t see a problem with the phrase “girls night,” if that’s the source of one of your concerns. I know many groups of women who get together to socialize who themselves refer to it as a “girls night out” or some similar phrase. My girlfriend and her group of close female friends use that phrase…
Bruce
I can say first off that my wife would not appreciate being called a “girl” and would never refer to a get-together with her friends as a “girl’s night”. That said, I think it’s probably an innocent thing to say on Rich’s part and likely his wife does refer to her group that way, regardless of any sexist overtone. The problem arises from “girls and guys” to refer to adults and “girls and boys” more likely children. It puts the women on the same level as children. Sure, I know guys might also have “boys night” I guess, but we don’t have those either. This is neither a reflection on Rich or the person calling him on it, but something very deeply ingrained in a society with a strong history of sexism.
To the question, I don’t see anything sexist about it, since the problem can be restated as a wine geek supplying wine for a less-geeky spouse and his or her non-geeky social group. First, it’s inevitable that in a marriage, one is more geeky on wine than the other. It also follows that the geek will have some expensive or otherwise special bottles being saved for aging or special occasion, and that the non-geek can’t tell them apart from normal bottles. We have a system to deal with this in my house: There’s a dedicated shelf in the cellar (or anything on the floor or in the fridge) where everything is fair game. These are low-price cellar defenders and bottles it turned out we didn’t like as much as we thought we would. However, I would not stock Apothic Red, Cupcake, Yellow Tail, white zin, etc. for guests. Nothing we wouldn’t drink ourselves on a weeknight.
We don’t get any call for these sweet grocery store wines anyway. Living in wine country, most people around here consider themselves to be fairly sophisticated. Any crowd we run with has tasted enough wine to appreciate quality, and they’d feel right at home with a decent dry red or white (a bigger problem for me is getting people to try a good dry rosé, since they assume it’s a sweet zin).
Must be an age thing? When we get together (we as in my guy friends) we will say “guy’s night” out or “boy’s night”. I know my wife would think it sounds old to say “ladies’ night” out.
Agree with Charles. Age thing… wife is early 30s and hangs with early/mid 30s crowd of women, refer to themselves as ‘girls’ frequently - ‘girls night out’, ‘girls weekend to vegas’ etc…
“women’s night”? - not that old. “lady’s night”? - not going to a male strip club.
It takes a lot to surprise me and the negative feedback from some on this thread has accomplished that. I don’t understand what I am supposed to do; it is a story and I told it. Am I to say, my wife had androgynous people over whose sex I could not ascertain?..and then proceed w/ the story. Am I to omit that detail of the story for fear that someone might be offended that my wife hangs out w women? I honestly do not get it at all. Typically when someone takes issue w something I say or, in this instance, type, I try to understand their P.O.V. I am at a loss in this instance as to what some are getting, even if mildly so, worked up over.
The only thing I can see is the use of the term ‘girl’, but that is not sexist at all; it is an accepted colloquial term used by women to describe a night out or in w their female friends…like the gentleman above me alluded to, they refer to it as such. Other than that one disconnect, I cannot find one logical reason to take issue w/ it.
edit: I brought this reply up about 30 mins ago and had to attend to some work stuff before posting and missed appx 5 posts above this, sorry if a little redundant.
Nope. Women in their 50’s…they still call it “Girls Night”. A very close late friend used to refer to them playfully as “The Man-Hater’s Club”.
RT