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The winetasting

I’m going to get real narrative in the next few posts. This was a pretty incredible weekend, a milestone of sorts in that I think it’s one of the only days ever when I wasn’t in contact with my computer to make a post. Yikes.

I shall begin with the winetasting.

I forget who heard about this event first, but by sometime last week it was pretty well decided that we would push back our weekend in Prague until the last week of October, so that we could make sure to hit up the supposedly-very-cheap winetasting. And man am I glad we did.

Tickets for the winetasting were 15€, but if you came as a group, the were only 10€, plus it was valid for both Saturday and Sunday. Not too shabby a start. We then proceeded to make our way around the indoor running track where the event was set up, hitting up some dark wines and moving on down toward rosés and white wines. I don’t know whether it makes sense to do things in that order, but the dark wines were next to the stairs where we entered, and I assume the layout was planned with the location of the stairs kept firmly in mind.

I can’t believe how much I learned about wine. I guess it’s easy to learn a lot about something when you have absolutely no previous knowledge, but I’m still all psyched about this. The staff at every single table was extremely willing to discuss the nuances of the wines, as well as select one to match my preferences. Armed with a few marketing phrases, Alex (my doppelganger) and I very quickly began to review the wines in cryptically oblique snippets of wannabe-connoisseurism. For example:

“This wine is particularly friendly.”
“A wonderfully tall wine, to be sure.”
“Deeply rich corners bolster this wine’s fittingness across the board.”
“The aftertaste is more or less orthogonal to that of most red wines.”

There was another particularly choice conversation which cropped up after yet more wine was consumed. The lot of us had gotten onto the subject of who was older, as we’re not all in the same year of study. Matt is seems is the youngest, with me a month or two older, and Carl then a month or two older than I. Somebody starts ripping on Matt for being a baby, and he turns to Carl and says, “You’re headed for oblivion before me, buddy.” Which I must say was rather antithetical to the atmosphere of gaiety we’d been trying to culture all afternoon.

But this jab made me realize that I had a real leg-up on Carl here. I began to fantasize about the cyborgial augmentations and accoutrements which the future holds in store for me.

“Yeah, man! Matt and I are gonna live long enough to take advantage of the technological and medical affordances which will come into being merely days after your death. Then I’ll be ramping over your grave in my racecar of life, speeding ever onward into greater virility and power.”

A few of us debated the plausibility of this for a while, until Alex interrupted to ask:

“Dude, where did you get this ‘racecar of life’? I feel like I’m stuck over here with rollerskates of life. They have sweet bearings, though.”

Oh, humor. You slay me every time. I really did find that so hilarious that I had to make sure to reproduce it here. I’m sorry if it falls flat on its face without twelve glasses of wine. Although if you’re reading this blog without having first had twelve glasses of wine, joke’s on you.

That was pretty much the thing. Half of us cut out early for different reasons, I to go hang with Sascha and possibly find a guitar.

View all photos here.