Wine Guy

I was always a beer guy. I liked wine equally but gripping a beer bottle felt more masculine than daintily balancing a fragile wine glass between thumb and forefinger.  Plus with beer, you could spill on yourself and wear the same shirt the next day.

Then I traveled to Argentina where recently wine has been declared the national drink—and drinking it is truly a manly act.

Soccer hooligans famous for their team allegiance, profane cheers and violent acts consume quantities of wine from leather flasks smuggled into stadiums.  Grizzled workers sit around construction sites at midday quaffing wine while piles of meat sear on improvised grills made of overturned oil cans.  And no gaucho cook-out on the vast Argentine plain is complete without a bottle or two of Malbec to wash down the blood sausage and kidneys.

I moved on across the river where the Tannat grape is the staple.

Though I have been fortunate in my lifetime to have had some nice Californian, French and great Italian wine, my most memorable wine moments always occur in surroundings not associated with fine wine—like the petrol station.

The country petrol station is the gathering place for the local farmers.  Burley men sit around in jeans and John Deere hats checking out the massive pieces of farm equipment moving along the road and talk about the harvest, their guns and who was caught by whom at the local brothel.

While the little store attached to the petrol station carries the basics, the back room has the good stuff.  Artisan cheeses, locally cured meats and big glass jugs of bulk wine.  Take in an empty glass bottle, get a liter or two of hearty red and head back to the farm to watch the sun set over the rolling fields while thick steaks sizzle over an open fire.

It does not get any better than this.  Being a man in a macho country and drinking wine in a manly manner.  And if I spill on myself, who the hell cares.