Wineless in Whineattle

Let's start with a premise: Wine is Good.

Here's the flaw in the premise: Bad Wine is not Good.

Here's the revised premise: Bad Wine is Bad.

I love pinot noir, and not just because I watched Sideways. I particularly like pinots from the northwest. One year, for my birthday, I asked for a week with three or four bottles of pinot in the $40 - $60 range. I spread them out at a half-bottle a day for the festive period. Damn, they were good.

I never used to think that much about my wine purchases when I had disposable income. I did, however, think of myself as quite prudent.  I kept my purchases for day-to-day drinking under $20 a bottle.  When our resources started to shrink, I kind of made a game of finding good wine for $10 or less. It was possible.

When the economic whip came down, I thought that maybe I could still enjoy wine. "After all," I told myself, "there are all sorts of wine on the bottom shelf. Some of them cost less than a cup of fancy coffee. People obviously buy them. They must be drinkable."

Reader, they are not.  It only took one bottle of WalMart's $2.97 Cabernet to turn me into a teetotaler. It was truly a foul fluid.  Since I don't drink to get drunk, there was simply no point. Better to buy fresh broccoli.

Now, when I think about that week of pinot noir, I feel ashamed of such carefree spending. Why didn't I hoard the cash instead? The other day, I bought a bottle of wine that cost about $6 to take to an event, and felt horribly guilty - like I was taking food out of PGT's mouth.

That horrible guilt is what I want people to know about.  What it's like to put the same bottle of orange juice in and out of your shopping cart four times because you want fresh squeezed vitamin C but you need something else more. Knowing that PGT will have to get vitamins from a cheap generic multivitamin pill because fresh fruits and vegetables are sometimes just too costly. Feeling like shit because, when it's over 100 degrees outside, you drop two quarters into the Kroger soda machine for a Dr. Pepper Ten because you're extremely thirsty and you still have shopping to do.

Don't think for a minute that I waste money. Think instead that I question every purchase because I don't know if I'll have cash next week. Know that every time I buy fresh vegetables instead of frozen ones, I've stood paralyzed in an aisle weighing the relative merits of fresh green beans for $1.89 a pound versus a bag of tasteless frozen store brand green beans for $1.

And whatever choice I make, I will feel bad. And guilty. And ashamed.

That's what it's like to be poor.