You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy™
The beer bash at the wine festival.
It’s high brow, picnic baskets, pink polo shirts and dock shoes.
This is snooty nose, upturned, Grey Poupon, Valet my Maserati please!
How dare you bring Mexican beer to a vineyard?
But yes, that is exactly what I am doing.
The parking at the vineyard is free. The music at the vineyard is free. To sit on the grass and drink wine at the vineyard is free.
As long as you are drinking the wine from the vineyard, that is.
If you don’t have wine, the Vineyard is more than happy to sell you a bottle of vino made right there.
Seems like a reasonable business stratagem. Bring them to the vineyard for free.
Get them to buy a bottle of vino.
But what if you don’t like wine? What then?
Why come to a vineyard, free or not, if they only allow wine, their wine and you don’t like wine.
I know it sounds like I’m whining about wine, but truly, it’s a really good question.
I pull in off the highway and travel a country road that is barely bigger than the farm machine I have to pass to get by.
The parking lot is free. The sign says park at your own risk.
“what’s that mean?” the girlfriend asks.
“It means they aren’t responsible if someone hits your car,” I retort.
I look at the cars in the parking lot.
It’s a lot of high-end metal parked in the neatly manicured grass.
I grab my chairs and a bag full of iced down Corona Light Beer.
I am 21 years old. I am a citizen of the United States of America. This is a free destination open to the public.
So why do I feel like I am a drug mule carrying contraband over the border.
The cooler is over my shoulder. With every step I take up the steep hill, I hear the bottles clinking against themselves.
I look for police. I see none. I look for border agents. There are none to be found.
I look for people wearing wine uniforms. I see only sundresses and pink polo shirts.
What would a vineyard guard even look like?
My eyes search the crowd, looking for burly armed commandos in purple camouflage pants and vests that say WINE instead of police across the front
These imaginary enforcers of the grape carry Smith & Wesson sommelier knives that can pop a cork and quiet a disruptive mob high on the fermentation process.
I walk up the hill, pulling the bag close to my side. I am nervous, like a Mexican without a green card at a border crossing.
I walk up the hill and a friend waves from the lush lawn.
He has cigars and cheese and grapes and expensive sausage.
It’s all so sweet and effeminate.
If my friend and I didn’t have girlfriends, I would swear he was courting me straight from the Vineyard Handbook of love.
We exchange pleasantries and set up our chairs.
“What a beautiful chunk of land,” I say gazing over the hill that stretches to the valley beyond.
The hill is something out of the Sound of Music, minus the Matahorn in the distance.
I listen to the whisper of a melodic jazz band at the top of the hill. I think I hear the moo of a cow, carried on a soft breeze rising up from the pasture land below.
I see families on blankets beside me. They are drinking wine, basking in a glorious sunset, all of it over looking a bucolic stretch of milk and honey Americana.
The hill is Ireland Green and the sky a setting sun of orange swirls in a purple wisp of dusk.
The fusion jazz filtering down from the white tent on the grassy knoll above bathes my ears in soft easiness.
It’s perfect for wine. But what about beer?
Below me is the vineyard. I see row after row of grapes on the vine.
I see children running through the perfectly straight rows, darting behind the plants, playing hide and go seek, perhaps picking grapes as they play.
“Did you bring your own beers?” my buddy asks in a hushed whisper.
I look around feeling like a drug mule again.
“Yes. What do you think? Is it cool?”
“There’s definitely a guy walking around checking to make sure that nobody brought in their own alcohol,” he says.
I open my cooler a few inches, just enough to slide my hand inside.
I feel the ice, and touch a cold bottle.
My friend hands me a wine glass.
“Pour slowly and it’ll look like wine.”
Again, I feel like I’m breaking the law, simply by opening the top to my beer.
I open the bottle and then awkwardly pour the contents into the wine goblet slowly, minimizing the foam.
“foamy wine is probably not considered a good wine, is it?” I muse.
As I watch the golden nectar slowly fill the vessel, I laugh.
Beer in a wine glass? How absurd?
Why don’t they allow other alcohol here? Why not at least sell their own version of aristocratic beer?
There is no answer, no one to ask.
Wouldn’t it just be easier to drink wine?
The answer is yes. If I liked wine, there are so many more social circles and cliques I can be a part of.
Why don’t I like wine, I think to myself.
I just never have. I have tried to drink it and it makes me queasy.
I’m old enough now that I just don’t care. Why bother. I like what I like.
Wine can be and often is consumed by pretentious citizens who carry themselves with an air of superiority.
Wine people often act like they are in the sky box of life while we beer drinkers are below, savagely fighting for life’s scraps with the rats and gutter vermin.
But wine people are also good people, regular people.
I bet many of these wine people are also beer people, just like me.
Though whether they feel like a border crosser is anyone’s guess.
At the end of the night, there is no checkpoint, no wine security, not even a weird stare.
The night at the vineyard is lovely.
We listen to the music and engage in stories and smoke cigars.
And when the sky finally opens up and the rains come down, the crowd disperses and the hill empties.
We sit in the tent and play trivia and watch the band pack up.
Rain and music and beer and wine.
It’s a great evening whether you are a wine snob or a border crosser slumming it with Mexican beer.
Maybe next time Vineyard police. Maybe next time.
Life’s crazy™