Aaron Berdofe's Wine and Food Experience

Some friends are evil. They’ll pull at your heart strings, luring you into their cabin of evilness with ideas like: “Let’s go up north for the weekend (It’s something Minnesotans do constantly) and you pick out all the wine!”. This is both a brilliant idea, because you are guaranteed to get some really good wine, but a dangerous idea because you will also get a lot of wine and you will really feel obligated to drink it all. Perhaps this will be after a stop at a bar where one of you knows the owner and who simply will not let you leave without too many drinks on the house. Things happen in the Northland. It is the Vegas of the Midwest after all without all the glitz and well, the Las Vegasy stuff or the heat. Therefore, as my own version of a PSA, in order to save people from some tragic endings in the future, I have compiled a list of revelations that you should take note of.

Your Headache Is From Too Much Alcohol. Nothing Else.
I can’t tell you how many people have come up to me after a class and ask me how to prevent headaches from drinking wine. “I only had two glasses. I swear! It’s only after drinking wine that I get them.” Yeah, but that bottle of whiskey you had before the wine counts too, so don’t blame the wine. Here’s the only solution: Drink equal amounts of water and don’t drink too much. That’s it. It’s not the kind of wine. It’s not the sulfites in the wine. There are more sulfites in a small box of raisins than in your glass of wine so if you don’t have a reaction after consuming raisins, you aren’t allergic to sulfites. Read The Science of Wine, or Wine Science (basically any book with “Wine” and “Science” in the title) before you feel like debating me. If you currently have a headache and are reading this though, you probably don’t believe any of that so go ahead and blame whatever you feel like. Blame me if you’d like. I am the harbinger god of headaches. Happy?

If The Reverse-Thrusters Kick In, You Will Never Drink That Wine Again.
I’ve made mistakes in my youth. I’m not ashamed to say it. One was having waaaaay to much of a low-end wine which we’ll call Tiny Emu that may or may not have resulted in a noise violation at an apartment complex. Now, after seeing Tiny Emu going the wrong way out of my mouth, I will never look at Tiny Emu again. In this case, my wine acumen has developed to the point where Tiny Emu isn’t even an option, but many of you buy the same cheap wines over and over again. So there’s my warning. Wine puke.

Bacon Sandwiches Are Your Friends The Next Morning
The British are known for a few things including habits of imperialism, dry senses of humor, and being hungover constantly. Therefore, they put some scientists on the important question of what cures a hangover. The answer they found was bacon sandwiches. Fortunately, this coincides with what a lot of young gentlemen Brits have in their ice boxes (they still call them that, right?). The carbohydrates are there to kick-start the metabolism to help you process everything faster and the protein breaks down into make-you-feel-better amino acids. It’s really best not to question theses things. Especially delicious things.

Playing Drinking Games With Wine Does Not Make It Classy
First off, always sip and swish your wine no matter what. Chew your drink, drink your food as the old saying goes. This should remain true if a deck of playing cards come out and you’ve found yourself in a death-match of wits where wine is your poison.
Look, I’m all for classing things up. My wine and food pairing experience is a classy alternative to the typical tawdry bachelorette party for example (and I’ve had numerous highly satisfied customers!), but replacing inferior beverages with wine does not make one classy. A wine-o perhaps, but I’m classy because of my other attributes and my wine drinking factor just happens to look good next to them. While sipping and swishing is certainly a better alternative to chugging, let’s be honest. It’s a drinking game and will most likely end in tears.

Drunk Is Drunk Is Drunk
You may be drunk on wine, but don’t tell me you are “Wine Drunk.” You make the same faces when you’re Beer Drunk or Gin Drunk or Pappy’s Moonshine Drunk. Yes, we metabolize different drinks in different fashions, but don’t go around saying one makes you a happy drunk and another makes you cower in a corner, sobbing for hours. But consult Yahoo! Answers if you want. I personally find the advice of a woman who goes by the nom de plume of “slinkies” the best:

Brilliant, slinkies. You are the source of all knowledge.