Scott Davies

Red Wine Isn't That Special

The only reason to drink red wine is so that you can tell people you drink red wine. 

Regardless of the wines bouquet, nose, colour, oaky undertones or whatever the fuck the liars that drink it might tell you, red wine just isn’t that special.

Red wine does exactly the same job as white or rosé wine: it gets you drunk. 

You might get a little bit rowdier after a bottle of rosé versus a bottle of red. I think that’s a fair observation. You aren’t likely, for example, to see many 50 year old men scrapping on the golf course car park after they have split a nice bottle of red. You would, however, be very likely indeed to see two twenty-something year old women biting chunks out of one another around the back of a pub after they have consumed two bottles of rosé each. But red wine is no better than rosé, and drinking it doesn’t make you a better calibre of person.

Red wine is nothing on white wine. Red wine leaves the stains that white wine cleans up, for starters. 

I will concede that white wine is the chosen drink of teenage girls sitting on the perimeter of a park on a Friday night, and that drinking wine when you are too young to tolerate its high ABV percentage might lead to the odd disagreement on said park, and certainly a few pavement puke-pizzas. That said, you are much less likely to sit next to a teenage girl after a bottle of white wine and be bored to tears by her regaling you with a long story, which you have heard many times before, about how she once saved a cat on the motorway and rehomed it. Or how she once won a trampolining medal as a child and got in the local newspaper.

Unlike you, Uncle Dave.

Unlike Uncle Dave who, after half a bottle of red, will tell you those precise stories whether you like it or not. Whether you make eye contact, or make encouraging sounds. It doesn’t matter. He’s telling you. And that is down to the red wine. 

Red wine doesn’t make you sophisticated. It makes you a bore.

And it gets on your teeth. 

Given the choice between red wine and not going to the party at all, I would pick staying at home with my children any day of the week. Not because I love my children, don’t get my words twisted, but because I absolutely hate people who drink red wine. More specifically I hate who people become when they drink red wine. 

At a wedding you are expected to serve a bottle of white and a bottle of red on each table. Invariably, you are then left with enough red wine to bathe in. This allows the three self-identified ‘red wine drinkers’, including Uncle Dave, to get absolutely shitfaced and spit when they talk.

Red wine just isn’t that special, but maybe my problem isn’t with red wine at all. 

Maybe my problem is with Uncle Dave.

Beer on wine makes you fine,
wine on beer makes you...