Let's see what's behind door number 3!
It’s holiday party season, and we’re making the rounds to various holiday gatherings again.
Whether it’s a dinner party or a cocktails and hors d’oeuvres gathering, the wine typically flows generously. At some point in the evening, typically after the main course and while the ladies are clearing (!) and preparing for desert or after all the guests have arrived and the cocktail party is well underway, the question is inevitably asked, “What are we drinking tonight, Dave?”
“Well,” Dave will say, “let’s take a tour of our wine cellar, and check it out. Shall we?”
This is the 1%ers way of saying, “let me whip out my manhood and show you how large it is!”
“No, really,” I say. “Thanks anyway. I’ll catch up with you later.”
I don’t tour wine cellars. In particular, I don’t tour “cellars” that are merely rooms in suburban basements and ones not large enough to fit four full-grown adults, like the one I recently encountered. (I spotted it early in the evening when shopping for an unused bathroom.) A room that small does not require a “tour.”
Yes, I understand you have a bunch of wine. Good for you. I like wine. I like to drink wine. I have previously seen large quantities of wine bottles. I’ve been to vineyards and seen even larger quantities of wine. You possess wine. Excellent. I am occasionally thirsty and now I know where to go to quench that thirst.
I have a large collection of books, and yet somehow when you’re at my home, I manage to not to conduct tours of my book shelves and regale visitors with the sagas of how I acquired a particularly rare edition of a Teddy Roosevelt biography, or where I was when I read Orwell’s “Shooting An Elephant”, or how blue the sky was over the nearby mountains when I read The Echo Maker.
I’ve got a decent collection of scorecards from rounds that I’ve played on some of this planet’s finest golf courses, yet I somehow manage to (mostly!) not hijack the party to talk about the 6-iron I stiffed at the 8th at Pebble in a gale or the 2-iron that tore the flag out of the 17th hole at Merion. And even if I tell those stories, I don’t drag you downstairs to show you the card. You believe me, just as I believe you. You have a bunch of wine and no matter how long the party goes, we won’t be thirsty.
And for that, I am thankful. Now where’s the corkscrew?
The Local Paper 
Thank you so much for this post. It made me smile. While I understand why people cellar wine, I also don’t enjoy like wine show offs. –Just open some why and let’s drink it!