Beware of your mom when she seems to want to engage in your pursuits, understand your passion, unwittingly destroy all that you’ve built….oops…I digress. Let me begin again.
A few years back, before I was fully ensconced in all things wine (no blogging as there wasn’t even a www yet) my husband Eddie and I invited both of our mothers to our apartment for a wine tasting.
My mother brought something really dismal, and in today’s standards, it would be akin to 2 Buck Chuck. She was very pleased with herself to have found something that was a bargain. We served what we thought was a bargain too, I don’t recall but it might have cost about $20.
When my husband’s mother, the one that adores her son, tasted our selection it was hands-down, she liked ours better. My mother, on the other hand, and where this apple fell closest to sometimes, kept her stubborn opinion that price is a large consideration in the value one puts on their wine choices.
I think about that stubborn opinion now and then. Like every time I’m pained during a blind tasting lest I chose the inexpensive wine over the wine du jour. I say I’m no snob but, hello, of course price is a consideration when we buy wine. If the $100 bottle tastes 20 points greater than mine for $30, that’s a huge gap. But if I only see a 3-5 point difference, the bigger gap is in the poor pricing and judgement.
A near sommelier friend of mine recounted for me recently that Two Buck Chuck did extremely well in a blind tasting she had attended. She didn’t go as far as to admit that, yes, she rated it highly. But she did smile a little at the retelling. I’ve tried the stuff myself and, though not a fan, am not a fan of criticizing others or my mother, over their personal tastes.
In fact today, some 20 years past our first tasting, my mom now supplements her little wooden 6 bottle rack with wine from the 99 cents store too. And just when I’m about to give in to try it to just make my dear mom happy, she’ll say something like, “I don’t drink the stuff. I just serve it to guests.”