Drink Charitably!

I had a chance to return to one of the really fine Napa Valley restaurants the other day to meet up with an old friend.  ‘Cook‘ in St. Helena is a favorite of many locals and huge find for tourists — very intimate — excellent food.  It is also a marvelous place to order dinner while sitting at the bar and eavesdrop on conversations around you. 

The place is loaded with wine folk and my radar is always up there — either making sure I don’t say anything incriminating, or listening for others who are letting things slip.  Petty, huh?

I overheard this one and simply couldn’t figure it out:

“He spits like a girl.”

Okay — I know this is in reference to wine tasting — but I still don’t get it.  Do men & women spit wine differently?  Curiosity got the better of me, and I just had to go on an observational reconnaissance mission.  Lo and behold, I discovered several different ‘spit-styles’. 

The pursed lip thin stream is the most common by far.  But I also discovered a winemaker who simply leaned over the bucket and opened his mouth wide allowing the wine to slosh from his mouth by gravity — no locomotion behind it.  I had to ask – and he said he learned to do this on purpose — that it seemed to be the most effective way to spit without risk of an errant stream splashing either one’s own, or someone else’s clothes. 

But ultimately, I observed an endless number of spit styles.  You gotta try this out next time you go to a place where people actually spit while wine-tasting.  Actually, I encourage you to take pictures of the various styles and send them on to me.

I will share my own embarrassing spit story.  It happened several years ago while doing wine business in Chile.  Can’t remember where I was — can remember who was with me — but won’t share that info.  You’ll read why. 

The common practice of spitting in Chile seems to be not into a spittoon, but into a 5-gallon bucket about a quarter filled with sawdust.  About five of us circled around this sawdust spittoon and took turns leaning over and spitting.  I was wearing my sunglasses on a tether around my neck and as I leaned to spit, naturally my sunglasses swung away from my body directly in the line of fire of my expectorated wine, splashing over everything.  Fortunately, however, at the exact same time, one of my traveling partners leaned over to spit and missed the bucket completely, leaving a nice red wine stain all over the floor, and effectively taking the attention away from my sun-glass spit and on to him. 

And it has been my little secret all these years.  I so much better now that I’ve come clean.