After a poetically emasculating work day, I like to pick up a few bottles of Trader Joe’s finest cheap wines. A nice musky sub-ten dollar vino sanding the palette is among life’s best ways to rejuvenate the once strapping hairs surrounding male nipples.
I typically buy a Cotillion Pinot Noir for its playful label illustrating Animal Farm’s night of Eyes Wide Shut.
But…tonight…this ole bottle, never hath I gandered, leapt out at me…
Toad Hollow. Just look at that toad! He’s trampling grape vines in a velvet red vest while peering through tears of the lightest vino…with his pinky out. It could only further transcend if his cane were also a mid-century sheathed sword. A must buy. The toad looked too pretentious to pass on.
Even…my goodness…even the vineyard is named after gold (famously the most pompous of metals). It’s also from the RUSSIAN River Valley. There could be no more poignant way to don the inauguration of 2017 than with this gaudy sardonic noir.
The back label rambles on to describe Pinot Noir as “the diva of the reds who loves to sleep late and awaken slowly as the sun gently warms her flesh.” Sun. Gently warms. HER. Flesh. Pissshhh. We all know that of all the alcohols…whisky is the lady – strong, warming, and beautifully complex. Wine’s a man – overcrowded, boastful about reputation, better with age, yet most often a disappointment.
What kind of ostentatious wine even has the audacity to tell me to “Please recycle”? Bitch, you get me drunk. Don’t get me sloshed and then preach about Mother Nature, yo. You’z less than ten dollars. Know your place.
I go to uncork and again the toad greets me embossed at the cap. I get it already. You gold. Cool cane bro.
Slow with care, I gradually raise the cork out the top and AGAIN…Don Toad vandalizes my retina. For fuck’s sake…
The anticipation of taste becomes overwhelming. I can’t wait to point my nose in the clouds then sip, slurp, and swirl the hype down this ole gullet. One raise above the brow, one long sensual introduction at the nose, and…tastes like shit.
Will I ever buy this tawdry diva again? Meh. We’ll see if it’s appropriate again in another four years.
