No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

I've got this friend, Debbie, who does a lot of volunteer work with a local charity. Debbie's most recent project was a fund-raising auction. A few days before the auction catalog closed, she and the committee got together to discuss obvious items that weren't yet included. One of the items that came up was a wine tasting.

In previous years, a local, wine-intensive restaurant has donated a tasting in its private dining room. Last fall, the restaurant went out of business. So this year Debbie came to me and asked if I'd stage a tasting. Debbie doesn't know a thing about wines. She's the kind of giddy choco-tini drinker that people like me spend happy hours throwing peanuts at. But Debbie knew that I had recently taken a wine class, and she thought maybe I'd do a favor for a good cause.

The idea of staging a tasting intrigued me. It was for charity, after all, and it's hard to see how expectations could be lower. Debbie assured me that the previous tastings had sold for a couple of hundred dollars to cheerful dilettantes, the kind of people who are just getting into wine and like the bottles with the cute animals on them.

The combination of low expectations and being able to show off is irresistible to me. I said I'd do it.

My first idea was to do a tasting of Rhone wines. "Up the Rhone" I thought I'd call it, starting with a deep pink Tavel as a palette freshener and paddling upstream through Chateauneuf du Pape all the way to imposing Cote Rotie. Try this, you shiraz-swigging lightweights, I imagined myself saying while hefting a Brune et Blonde onto the table.

It would have been a hell of a tasting, but when I put together a decent list I saw that the wine was going to cost me $500. Because I believe that rich people should buy good wine for me, rather than me buying good wine for rich people, I came up with a new idea: Great Wines You've Never Heard Of.

The concept was, if I say so myself, brilliant. It made a nice write-up in the auction catalog and the list was a set of interesting wines that could be had at bargain prices. (Since no one has heard of them, the markets haven't overheated the way they have for more fashionable wines.) I put together three whites and three reds with a total cost of maybe $125. For the sake of show business -- and, honestly, because I felt a little guilty about such a low-budget tasting -- I tacked-on a French pseudo-Port and chocolate grand finale that will leave everyone feeling sweetly dopey. Of the seven wines involved, I've got five already in my basement, paid for and ready to go.

So yesterday Debbie calls me and tells me that the wine tasting was a big hit. Not the biggest hit; VIP tickets and tent space for the upcoming Ryder Cup went for $10,000. But a hit nonetheless, coming in at $2,000. "That's more than 10 times as much as last year!" she enthused. The buyer is a partner in a local accounting firm who casually mentioned that he has a significant cellar of his own. My wine tasting is, in fact, going to take place in that cellar at the monthly meeting of his tasting club. Last month the club kicked-off it's 2008 season with "Terrible Twos: Second-Growth Bordeaux, 22 Years Later," a tasting from the noteworthy 1986 Vintage.

I'm so screwed I can hardly believe it. This tasting could be the most uncomfortable 90 minutes of my life.

Comments

[Wally]

See, you should leave this stuff to the professionals. Call me, I'll set you up. Can you say Bonardo?

[Frank]

The good news is that the worse this goes, the better the story we get to laugh at when you tell us every embarrassing detail.

[Adam]

You had better write up how this goes; teasing us like this is too cruel.