I’m just going to preface this by saying: I hate wine.
Now, I haven’t always hated wine. Up until one fateful night when I was 21 that my friends still refer to as “wine night,” I drank wine all the time. Not the good shit, obviously, but I’ve had my share of Franzia and other assorted cheap wines. And I’ve had a few good ones too. But I could never tell the good wine from the bad. It all kinda tasted like shit to me, but it did the job so I drank it. I even had a theory that all wine was the same and people just bought the more expensive bottles to flex on their friends and act like they could tell a difference.
Well, it looks like I might have been right.
A New York restaurant recently made a costly mistake and accidentally switched a $2,000 bottle of wine with an $18 bottle. The staff at Balthazar, an upscale French restaurant in Lower Manhattan, poured both wines in identical decanters. Then when they went to deliver the wines to their tables, the waiter took the $2,000 bottle of Mouton Rothschild 1989 to the table of a young couple that had ordered an $18 bottle of Pinot. The Pinot, meanwhile, went to a table of four Wall Street businessmen who were obviously trying to impress somebody with how much money they make or close a big deal or whatever Wall Street businessmen do when they go to dinner.
Now obviously this is a pretty shitty situation for the restaurant. A group of wealthy Wall Street businessmen come in and order the most expensive bottle of wine on the menu and you serve them something that you’d find at a college fraternity house’s Catalina Wine Mixer night. Not great.
But nobody even noticed.
According to Decanter, the host of the business dinner complimented the cheap swill’s “purity,” while the young couple who just unknowingly hit the jackpot “jokingly pretended to be drinking an expensive wine.”
See? It. All. Tastes. The. Same.
After the manager realized the restaurant’s mistake, he called the owner, who rushed down to apologize to both tables for the mixup. And it was only the businessman replied that he had “thought the wine wasn’t a Mouton.” Ok, sure. You thought you got shafted on a $2,000 bottle of wine, but you don’t say anything until the restaurant fesses up? Just admit you can’t tell the difference and you only dropped the money to big dick the other guys at dinner.
The young couple, on the other hand, was “ecstatic” by the mistake, especially because the owner let them keep the expensive wine.
I’ve been saying it all along, and this just proves it: All wine tastes the same. And to me, it’s all shit. Even if it costs $2,000 per bottle.