I’m getting tired of people my age banging on about wine.

 

For some reason, every bastard is bloody obsessed with wine, and not the fun champagne rip-off kind. It’s the kind of wine that’s room temperature with no hint of carbonation. My generation’s fixation on it is inescabable. Every second meme you see about female-type people in their 20s has a wine component. “Everyone’s getting married and I’m just here with my wine” or “Tonight I’m going to Netflix and chill … with my wine” or the slightly more honest “look how different I am from other girls because I don’t care about uncool stuff like love or having children or being responsible with my money and like to drink wine, and aren’t I so self aware and hilarious and, let’s just say it, quirky for pointing it out? Hahahah… YOU SHOULD TOTALLY LOVE ME I’M SUCH A FUCKING CATCH! PLEASE VALIDATE MY MISERY BY LIKING MY PICTURE”.

 

Well here’s a truth bomb for your turnt fam squad goals. Wine actually tastes awful. I don’t care how juvenile it makes me look; I don’t care about being a traitor to my cynical generation of hermits. I’m just going to say it: most wines are yucky. Maybe I’m wrong. But maybe most wines taste like a mix of that water you find in olive jars blended with equal parts of distain and haughtiness, with overtones of liquid whiteout. Maybe I like the look of holding a wine glass, but don’t exactly enjoy the feeling of having my tastebuds scraped off with a blunt potato peeler.

 

I just want wines to taste the way I thought they would when I was watching the two kinds on Disney’s Sleeping Beauty get absolutely blotto to celebrate forcing their children into an unwanted marriage. It was a red variety, and looked hearty but sweet. My innocent mind imagined the two crown-wearing arseholes were drinking a nectary, plumy fruit drink. Of course, I was a pup of a child and didn’t understand that there would be other reasons to drink something other than the sweet taste.

 

You might say I lived a sheltered life growing up in my quaint country town where almost everyone knew your name and you could play multiple rounds of Spotlight up your street without fear of being stuffed into an unmarked van. Say what you like, but I did have a vague idea of what “getting high” meant. In fact, I knew it first hand. Sometimes my friends and I would get together in little clumps and spin around and around really fast to laugh at how incapacitated we were immediately after the stopped twirling. It turned out that was a gateway activity that led to more dangerous highs, like rolling down hills. Needless to say, I understood the notion of doing something silly for the good feels afterwards.

 

But the idea of putting something into your mouth that wasn’t nice tasting just because it made you feel good was completely out of my capacity of thought. The only not nice tasting thing you would put into you mouth to feel good (eventually, anyway) I knew of was medicine and it didn’t look like either of the two men on my family’s slightly green television set were suffering from any cold or flu symptoms. This was a time when my favourite food was hot chip and chicken sandwiches (let’s be honest, it’s still one of my top five meals) and I would consume the small amount of vegetables on my plate by swallowing them whole and washing them down with big gulps of milk, like an Echinacea tablet. When it came to matters of the mouth, it was all about taste, so it never crossed my mind that these irresponsible parents would be drinking anything other than zingy grape juice.

 

Don’t get me wrong, I love the idea of wine. I love the glasses with the stall stems, I love the fact that it’s premixed, negating the need for a Lido mix-in and I love the look of sophisticated judgement that radiates from drinkers. I love it all. But if wine were a man and all those traits about them were reasons to love him, the taste would have to equate to his membership of the Shooters and Fishers Party or him supporting the Canterbury Bulldogs in the NRL. It’s something you try to put up with for a while and try to focus on all the other good things about him, but ultimately you decide you just can’t accept it inside you. Sometimes you might be in a pinch and need to get a quick buzz so you brace yourself and drink it quickly, but you can’t do it to yourself every weekend. It’s something you want to get over and done with which leaves a bad taste in your mouth and is best down while holding your nose.

 

That is not what I wanted wine to be. I wanted to be like a young, taut Courtney Cox in Cougartown pounding the grape like a tank. I wanted to be like the bitchy aunties you see at most weddings, tearing apart the bride’s whoreish dress over several bottle of sav blanc. Hell, I’d settle for the fat emperor man who drinks wine with a loose cannon donkey in Disney’s Fantasia. But it tastes awful. That’s not to say I wouldn’t drink it for the … health benefits. A friend and I would go to every single one of our brother college’s formal dinners in uni just because of the unlimited access to wine guests were privy to. I liked being drunk, and at that time I didn’t mind the looks of disgust I got as I mixed lemonade into my glass of red (like a shandy, only more shameful!) and happily bastardised a “good wine” with sugar while Kerry O’Brien addressed the room.

 

But I can’t do that now. Now I have to give off some kind of air of sophistication, and for some reason that means drinking room temperature horse piss and pretending to like it. Year 9 Dannielle would be horrified, but I do conform to the norm at times. I like to join the crowd, because then there’s plenty of people around to see when I do something cool. And I reckon there may be a few closet scrubbers like me who want to look classy, but can’t stomach a merlot. So here’s a tip. And you can trust my absolute sincerity on this one because heavens knows I haven’t got the reach to attract offers to write sponsored posts. The answer is Banrock Station’s Crimson Cabernet.

 

If you think it doesn’t sound like an actual type of wine, you’re probably right, but that’s the beauty of it.; it’s not a “proper wine”. A little while ago, my sister and I walked into a bottle shop and asked the assistant to recommend “a wine that looks like wine for people who don’t like wine”. This unnamed changed our lives. He presented us with a wine-shaped bottle of red liquid, which promised to be sweet, fruity and lightly spritzed. Sure, it’s a nectary drop, it’s probably about as thick as a piece of steak and most people to see my drinking it scrunch up their nose in disgust, but it’s everything seven-year-old me thought wine would be.

My sister made it the “house red” at her wedding and everyone hated her for it. Cheers!