Loaded for a living

This afternoon, Husbandly One and I attended the Grand Tasting at the "World Wine & Food Expo" in our city. What this means, essentially, is that over 400 wines were available to sample.

We attend this event every year, for two reasons: one, to find new wines to enjoy in our home; and two (much more importantly), to find new wines to add to our wine list at work.

Husbandly One is the designated driver, but he is also the one who chooses the wine list for our hotel. He ALSO trusts my palate, so the way it works is that he makes me try the wines he is interested in. If I feel very strongly about them, he will taste them. Got that so far?

At a wine tasting event, you chose which wines you want to try (you could never get through 400 wines!) and you are given about two tablespoons of the stuff. This is just enough to fully create the nose of the wine (the way it smells) and then you taste it. In most cases, you drink about a teaspoon of it and then dump the rest out, unless it is a wine you are really interested in. At that point, you may end up drinking about a tablespoon of the stuff. And if it was good enough for me to drink a full tablespoon? THEN Husbandly One would ask for a sample and have a quick teaspoon of it.

We did a lot of work this afternoon, found some great wines to add to our list, and we did it all between 1pm and 3:30pm. And then Husbandly One said, "Okay, let's get back to the office and put our orders together."

Please understand he had tried about 15 wines in delicate little sips at this point. I, his guinea pig, had tried over seventy.

"Dude, I can't go back to work, I'm HAMMERED." In two and a half hours, I had probably consumed ten glasses of wine for heaven's sake! He found it FUNNY that I was now too intoxicated to talk to clients, even though he put me in that situation!

So here I sit at home, drunk, while he is back at work being productive. The things I do for my company....