Stocking Up

We went up to the Giant Wine Store yesterday to stock up before Tariff McTariffson decides to reimpose Prohibition in the name of his dimwitted trade war.

This is a strange sort of thing for us, really, as we are not all that much of a drinking group. We ended up with maybe ten bottles of nice mid-range Italian wine – mostly red, almost all from southern Italy (Aglianicos from Basilicata, for example, which have become my favorites of late) – as well as a couple of other non-wine things that struck us as interesting.  The wines will likely last us until the end of 2026 at current consumption rates though to be honest the news headlines these days would seem to require more than that just to survive.

It is a strange thing to realize that if you want to have a small treat you have to outwit your own government to do so.

Not that outwitting this crew of nitwits is all that hard, in principle. It just takes a bit of money (and not all that much of that – not one of those wines was more than $20, and since we bought more than eight bottles we got a 15% discount on the lot) and some planning, and if you have any ability to plan you’re one step ahead of the current regime anyway. They seem to careen from snap decision to overreaction to panicked backtracking and back again in a way that I haven’t really had to deal with since before my kids were old enough to go to daycare.  Even as toddlers they knew how to plan better than the current administration.

Of course, not everyone has a bit of money in this economy – we are fortunate that way, at least for now, though as educators we do have a big red target on our backs and may well find ourselves either out of work or jailed for daring to teach actual knowledge instead of the white-supremacist-washed propaganda that is fast becoming a requirement. And if the majority of Americans had any ability to plan we wouldn’t be in this situation in the first place.

The Giant Wine Store is a fascinating place, on its own terms. It’s as big as an aircraft hangar, stocks almost but not quite everything alcohol-related that you could possibly want (my vague quest to find chinotto liqueur remains unfulfilled – it’s not exactly a pressing thing, though, more like an unfocused sort of “hey, wouldn’t it be cool?” kind of side quest) and more than a few things that I’m not sure that anyone actually wants (Malort?), and they give you free samples from the moment you walk in the door. Yesterday they were running a deal where if you bought two six-packs of Irish beer they’d give you a free glass and engrave it for you while you waited. The glass will go to one of Lauren’s friends as a gift, and now we have Irish beer. I’m not a beer drinker, so perhaps we’ll have a party.

We celebrated with some Thai food afterward, because there haven’t been any moves to make that illegal yet and it tastes good.

Sláinte!