Harry Potter and the Expensive Regift

Last night, Susan and I went to a friend’s annual Christmakwanzakkah party out in Hoboken, N.J. This friend’s a classy sort of broad and provides both food (including sushi!) and booze. Still, I don’t like showing up at a party without some sort of alcohol in tow, especially considering the amount I drink. So we grabbed a bottle of red down from the shelf. Perhaps you have a similar shelf–bottles of decent wines that friends give you as gifts or bring over and some day you’ll get around to drinking them, but really you don’t entertain THAT much and when you do, the same people bring over more bottles.

So you end up giving the bottles away at other parties.

So we brought a bottle of red wine. We get to Hoboken, put the bottle down and someone opens it shortly. I have a glass. OK, not a glass. I have a green plastic Solo cup of wine. Good stuff. Tasty. It certainly doesn’t have the faint flavor of ox blood you get from your cheaper wines. I start stuffing my face and, wine finished, decide to move on to Jack Daniels and shots of Black Haus. Like I said, we’re a classy sort.

Then I hear someone asking, “Who brought THIS bottle of wine? This is really good stuff.”

“It IS good, right?” I say.

“No, I mean, it’s GOOD,” she said. Translation: “It ain’t cheap.”

Interesting. Very interesting. So I say, “How good? Like so good that if I knew the price of what we just drank out of plastic cups, I might feel like an idiot.”

“Let’s look it up,” she says and someone whips out an iPhone.

Survey says: $185.

And that ain’t the inflated restaurant price.

So, yeah. We drank an almost-$200 bottle of wine out of plastic cups and almost didn’t know we did it.

I guess it could have been worse. It was the very first thing I drank last night. I could have kept the bottle at home and opened it after getting drunk on Miller Lite and Boone’s Farm. But like I said. Classy guy.

(Sorry. Contrary to the headline, Harry Potter will not be making an appearance in this post.)