Wine . . . Pouring . . . Down Her Front . . .

I’ve been on a Domaine Serene bender of late. I’ve had a number of their newer and older wines in the last few weeks (more on that in my next post), but I’ve never had a stranger imbibing experience than the one I had with a Domaine Serene wine this last weekend.

Actually, it had nothing whatsoever to do with the wine, and frankly, it was mostly my wife’s experience—but I was a part of it and it was all rather odd nevertheless.

Things went down like this: I stood in my cellar debating with myself (as I always do) which Pinot to open for a straightforward Saturday-night-at-home meal. I looked at my choices and found all sorts of reasons not to choose every wine I looked at (I’m saving that ‘02 Arcus for an Archery Summit vertical . . . there’s only two bottles left of that St. Innocent ‘98—Parker’s favorite from that vintage, as I recall . . . it’s too early to drink that Freedom Hill . . .and so on).

I spied a 1998 Domaine Serene Reserve, counted off five additional bottles in the racks, and decided I could live large with that one. I took it upstairs, opened the cabinet where we keep the Riedel, and pulled out two glasses: an ordinary Riedel burgundy glass and a Riedel Oregon pinot noir glass that had the Domaine Serene label etched on it. That was my glass—heck, why not? Andrea could have the standard glass.

I opened the wine, poured a bit into one of the glasses, smelled it, and poured a serving out into each glass. One in each hand, I took them downstairs where Andrea was sitting reading the paper. I handed her her glass and turned to go into the other room to get something.

Suddenly Andrea sharply exclaimed “AHHH! What happened?” I whirled around to see a pained and puzzled expression on her face as she rather frantically waved her hand with the wine glass—that was empty. “Is there a hole in my glass, or what?” she asked with a panicky edge.

Ha, ha, I thought, very funny. Yes, there’s a big hole in your glass, it’s right up there at the top.

I was about to tell her how irritated I was that she downed that fine, aged, and rare pinot noir in a single slug when she pleadingly said. “I never had any wine! It never reached my mouth! What happened?”

I was trying to understand what she was babbling on about. What did she mean she never had any wine? Her glass was empty. She didn’t pour it out over her shoulder . . . did she?

“It just disappeared,” she said plaintively, “I never tasted it!”

It was then that I noticed a hefty drip of red liquid coming off her arm and spilling onto the rug and not knowing what to say, I just pointed. She looked down, and we both saw a large red stain across her arm, and then a splatter of wine across her chest. The fact that she was wearing a red sweater had at first obscured the spilled wine.

“I didn’t spill it!” she said.

“Yes,” I replied casually, “I’m afraid you did.”

“But I didn’t! I just raised the glass to my mouth and there was nothing there.”

Uh huh. At that point I was getting a little worried. Had she suffered some kind of mini-stroke and was not aware of how her hand must have just missed her mouth as she poured the wine down her front?

“I . . . did . . . NOT . . . spill it," she said with firmness tinged by rising fury, "I don’t know what happened.”

With some concern I gently took the empty glass from her hand. “You just sit there and I’ll clean up things.”

I took the glass and held it up to the light. It looked normal. I turned it a bit. It was fine. A little water on that side perhaps, where a slight reflection caught my attention. I turned to look at the spot. Everything was normal . . . wait, is that . . .?

I turned the glass again and brought it closer. Right there at the widest point of the bowl a small, neat, kidney shaped hole could just be seen. It was reasonably large, but remarkably difficult to see. There WAS a hole in the glass: a strange, unaccountable and barely visible hole in the Riedel glass.

Andrea was right; she hadn’t spilled the wine. The wine had spilled itself!

Apparently the nearly invisible hole had been positioned just right, so that when she tipped the glass to her mouth the wine neatly poured out of the hole so that none of it got to her lips. The bulk and color of her sweater meant that she neither felt nor saw the wine pour out of the glass.

How the tidy little hole got there we’ll never know. But we’re both happy—in the end—that we found it . . . it explained a lot of things that were beginning to become worryingly puzzling.

And the wine? Well, once we got things cleaned up, laughed off a lot of relived tension, and sat back with a new and more carefully inspected glass, the wine proved wonderful (more on this wine, and other Domaine Serene releases I've been reveling in, soon)!