Mostly Autobiographical

by Rob Gunther

  I’ll sit there and cry and pull the hair at the sides of my head and …

  You know what? This doesn’t really sound like such a good ability after all. Except for the part in the subway. That would have been cool. But worth all of the resulting torment? I don’t think so.

  Wine: The basics

  I really want to get into wine, but I always have the same problems. Whenever I go to the wine store, I have no idea what to buy. I try to ask the owner if she might recommend me something nice, something refined, something just slightly pretentious enough that, if somebody came over my place and saw the bottle, they might look at the label and say, “Hmm … I’ve never heard of this type of wine,” and I could reply nonchalantly something like, “Oh yeah, well, it’s from a small vineyard not too well known around here.” And this person would make an interested face, maybe waiting for me to offer to uncork it so we could both try a little. But I wouldn’t make the first move. If the person asked, then definitely, I’d open it up, but I’d want to hear it asked first. I’d need to feel that person really wanting it. “Rob, would you mind …?”

  But the lady who owns the wine store is, I think, an imposter. She doesn’t know anything about wine. She saw a block with no liquor stores around it and, seeing a great opportunity for a small business, set up shop. Every time I ask her, “Any suggestions?” she just pushes whatever’s not selling fast enough. So instead of having people come over my house and check out my wine selection and say stuff like, “Ooooh!” they wind up glancing at my bottles, then trying to avert their gazes, saying stuff more like, “ooooh …” And then they ask me if I have any cold beers in the fridge.

  I’ll say, “Help yourself,” all the while bent out of shape, worrying that my beer choices might not be all that diverse and, seeing as how I already botched the wine, well, you can understand why I’d be a little nervous.

  Whenever I try to pop open some wine, I end up, half of the time, ruining the cork, ruining the whole bottle. My parents gave me one of those automatic corkscrews for Christmas one year. And it’s great. But one time I was catering a party somewhere, and the wait captain told me to bring a wine key. So I brought this thing, it comes in a big case, like as big as a cookbook. When I got to the reception, I asked where I could put my wine key case, and the captain just looked at me. That’s when I looked around at everyone else with these pocket-knife sized tools, something you have to screw in manually and then yank out.

  Another waiter had an extra. It looked so easy, everyone else twisting in and pulling out. But when it was my turn, I got stuck figuring out how to remove the foil off of the top. When I finally got it off, the person who had asked for the wine had already left for another waiter. I figured I’d open it anyway, get everything ready for the next wine drinker. I twisted the screw in and pulled, but I totally botched it, only the broken-off top-half of the cork came out. So I twisted the key back in to try and get the rest of it out, but all that did was push the remainder inside the bottle. I poured a glass to see if maybe it wouldn’t be so bad, but it was terrible, crumbs of cork floating everywhere. I found a straw and tried to fish out all the individual crumbs, which I thought was a genius plan. But the captain saw me and sent me home, shaking his head in disbelief.

  One time I saw a cooking show or a travel show where the host went to some French village and asked for a bottle of champagne. He told the camera that the easiest way to open a bottle of bubbly was to take a big knife and, with the not-sharp side, slide it up the neck in a fast motion towards the cork. So one time I tried it out, but the actual bottle broke off right below the top, sending not just the cork flying, but the chunk of glass that it was attached to. The champagne in the bottle foamed up and spilled all over the floor.

  My dad was so pissed. “I asked you if you knew how to open up a bottle of champagne and you said yes!” he said. “You insisted!”

  I did insist, I guess. I just saw things going so much smoother and cooler in my head.

  One time I was drinking red wine at an office party and thought I was making such a good impression, telling jokes and charming people and schmoozing and just being a great office-party guest. I imagined my bosses talking amongst themselves after I walked away to mingle with the other guests, saying stuff like, “That Rob is so well-mannered, such poise!” But then when I got home I went to the bathroom and saw that I must have been drinking the red wine wrong, because I had red wine lips extending past my actual lips, giving the impression of a really creepy Joker-like clown, and my teeth looked all gray and stained.

  An intermediate guide to wine

  My old restaurant didn’t have a liquor license, so I didn’t need any knowledge of wines or spirits. Every once in a while, some stuffy Manhattan couple would come in and, before I even had a chance to say hello, they’d instruct me to fetch them a couple of glasses of Sauvignon Blanc. And I would just stand there, staring at them, not saying a word, waiting for them to realize I hadn’t moved. When they would finally give in, look up to me to make eye contact, and say, “Well?”

  I’d flash a crazy smile and say, “Sorry! No alcohol! How about a Diet Pepsi?” It’s the little things that get me through the day.

  I’ve since switched jobs, and the place I’m at now is pretty serious. Like, I have to wear a tie. And they’re all about wine. They pride themselves on their wine list. They do tastings with the staff whenever a new bottle arrives. When I applied for the job, they made me take this whole written wine test, pages and pages. I kind of expected it, but as is my pattern of not taking life seriously enough, I only spent ten seconds online researching wines before I got distracted and started wasting time on reddit.

  Whatever, I told myself, I know enough about wine. Which is only about ten percent true. I used to drink red wine. I know the names of the popular grapes. I figured, just get in there and charm your way through whatever questions they ask. That is, I’d assumed it would just be a manager talking with me about wine for a while. In that scenario, I probably could have done fine. But like I said, they sat me down to take what turned out to be the SATs of wine.

  I knew I was fucked. There were all of these questions about regions and valleys. I know Napa is in California, but that’s about it. Plus, fifty percent of the test was dedicated to white wines. I never drank white wine.

  The last time I took a sip of white was at this Chinese restaurant in the city named Silk Road that everybody went to in college. You sat there, ate Chinese food, and for two hours they gave you free white wine. Yeah it was out of a box. Yeah it was disgusting. But it was free booze. The last time that we went there during our senior year, I was eating Chinese food, pounding back glasses of white wine, feeling fine, and then at the end of the meal I stood up to leave. It was like all of the alcohol had accumulated in my legs, just waiting for me to stand up so it could attack my brain all at the same time. I instantly went from buzzed to blackout drunk, almost. I actually wish I had blacked out because I got sick. Really sick. Everywhere. And I remember all of it. Just thinking about white wine makes me gag.

  Here I was staring at this white wine test. I wouldn’t know how to bullshit my way out of any of these questions. The worst part about the test was that the last few pages were direct photocopies of the restaurant’s wine list. Certain wines were blanked out, and I had to fill them in. Come on. That should have been the easiest part of the test because it was just rote memorization. But I didn’t study.

  I took this test at one of the tables in the back. Five minutes went by and I figured, well, I can either get a zero, hand it in with some half-assed joke about not knowing too much about wines, shake somebody’s hand as they say, “Yeah. Thanks a lot. We’ll definitely be in touch!” Or, I could take out my phone and look all of this stuff up.

  I’m not a good cheater. I could never cheat on anything, even in high school. Not for any moral reasons really, because I think testing is just a bunch of nonsense anyway, but I was mainly afraid of getting caught. I’m the worst, con
stantly looking around, paranoid, sweating, a total giveaway. But nobody ever came over. I had enough time to take out my phone and look up every question.

  I filled out the red section one hundred percent correct. And then I thought to myself, shit, that was probably a mistake. What if they get suspicious and think to themselves, wow, this guy really knew every single question? Did he cheat?

  That’s what I would have thought if I were the one giving the test. But I filled it out in pen. What was I going to do, ask for a brand new copy of the test? They’d ask why. I’d say because I made some mistakes and I wanted to start over. They’d say just cross them out and keep going. And it’s not like I could cross out the obviously correct answer and rewrite an incorrect one to make it look more natural.

  I told you I’m a bad cheater.

  So I figured I’d make up for it by not doing so well on the whites. I made up some incorrect answers. I left some blank. Whatever. And then I handed it in.

  The manager looked it over and said something like, “Wow. You really nailed the reds. I guess we’ll just have to work on the whites.” And I just let out this internal sigh of relief, like I couldn’t believe I actually got away with it, I couldn’t believe nobody even gave me one verbal question to make sure I hadn’t cheated through the whole ordeal.

  But after a few months, I realized that waiters don’t really need to know anything about wine anyway. I still barely know anything about wine. When people ask for a recommendation, I point to a random wine and start going off, really laying it on, “Oh this one is just delightful. Unlike your typical Chardonnay, this one’s got a lot less of those oaky overtones. And there are so many complex aromas. You can detect vanilla, passion fruit, shnozzberry. It’s absolutely wonderful.”

  And even that is super rare. I think I’ve been asked for a recommendation maybe twice. Usually people come in and are just like, “Give me a glass of the house Cabernet.” At this point I’m supposed to direct the guest to our wine list, to show them we have three house Cabernets, that we take our wine very seriously. Whatever. I know what they want, the cheapest, and both the customer and I are both looking to minimize the number of words that have to come out of my mouth.

  The best is bottle service. Somebody buys a bottle of wine, even the cheapest bottle, and it’s already double the price of the check. Some of the other waiters are really good salespeople, adept at hawking off hundred dollar bottles. My strategy is more modest only because I know I could never pull off those rare vintages with a straight face. If someone asks me for a good bottle, I point out the second least expensive. The customer will look at it, think to themselves, well, out of all of these wines, this waiter is pointing me in the direction of a moderately priced bottle. I’ll take it. Which for me is a win, because I’m just assuming that the majority of the people I deal with will naturally default to the cheapest option. That’s what I would do, anyway. And so, in most scenarios, I’m bumping them up to the second cheapest option, which, done regularly enough, that’s not bad.

  The one thing I picked up way too fast was the whole opening the bottle at the table. I say too fast because, after a month or two, I felt so confident in my opening skills that it escaped the realm of my imagination that anything could go wrong.

  One night I had this group of four men. They each had something like three glasses of Scotch at the bar and they started ordering bottles of wine at the table. The first bottle went smoothly. The second went even smoother. So smooth that the cork offered zero resistance as I pulled it out. And not expecting such an easy job, the hand cradling the bottle jerked down a bit. The result was that half of the bottle splashed out directly on top of two of the guys. Like, they were soaked. Like, I couldn’t even try to clean anything up because it was all over the both of them. It looked like they had just gotten out of a red wine shower. What a disaster. I comped the bottle and told the manager that these guys had a little too much to drink at the bar. Crisis averted.

  Maybe one day I’m going to go into work and the boss will just be like, “All right, buddy, this has gone on far enough. You’re not fooling anybody. Name me four types of Chardonnay right now or you’re fired.”

  I’ll have to be like, “Yeah, sure. But can you hold on one second? I need to make an important phone call.” And then I’ll really hope that the wireless network is moving quickly enough as I open up my phone’s browser and try to load the restaurant’s wine list.

  Intermediate to intermediate-advanced wines: An introduction to bottle service

  After six months or so, I grew more comfortable with my wine skills, like I had soaked up some wine knowledge. Well, a little bit. It hadn’t really been a soaking, like a sponge. It was more like a piece of wood kept submerged in a barrel of wine for six months, you’d take it out, and it definitely wouldn’t be soaked with wine, but there’d be a stain, at least the wine made some impact on the wood.

  And that’s what I’m like, stained with wine knowledge. But only slightly. I’m still dealing mostly with “Give me a glass of red,” or “I’ll have some Pinot,” whatever that means. But every once in a while I’ll have customers that sit down and really start mulling over our wine list. When this happens, it’s my cue to stand up a little straighter and do my best to pretend like I know what I’m talking about.

  If you’re ever sitting at one of my tables and you’re looking past the wines that we sell by the glass, you already know more about wine than I do. Asking me a question is only going to prompt me to make something up to sound convincing, and so I’ll be doing you a disservice, doing the wine a disservice, because I’ll say whatever baloney I pull out of my ass with the utmost confidence.

  Worst-case scenario, I’ll get called out on my mistake, which is easy enough to correct. I just start using my really contrite voice, contrite but equally confident, “I’m so sorry sir/ma’am. I don’t know why I said that. I apologize for my mistake.”

  Best-case scenario … look, I like wine and everything, but seriously, who is going to go to a restaurant, order a bottle of wine, and then call out the waiter for not knowing what he’s talking about?

  One time I had this couple ordering by the bottle. I always get nervous because somebody might order the wine based on the location, like “We’ll take a bottle of the Russian River Valley,” and I’ll try to lean down and squint to where the customer is looking without appearing too obvious.

  I’ll say, “I’m sorry, I didn’t hear what you said. Can you repeat that?” After they repeat it, I’ll say, “Excellent choice,” before running to the kitchen with my own menu, hoping I can piece together what they were trying to get at.

  At this table, the guy kept asking me way too many questions. “What vintage is this Cabernet?” and

  I seriously had no clue. But I didn’t want to be like, “Let me check that out for you sir,” because then he would have lost all confidence in my knowledge of wines. Which, to be fair, if he had any confidence in my wine knowledge, it was totally unwarranted.

  “2008,” I told him, totally pulling a random number out of thin air. Come on. The guy was sitting there with a menu of our wines. Don’t you have an iPhone? Just do a quick two-minute Google search and you can probably find volumes written about whatever bottles we have. It’s like when a tourist asks me for directions to some landmark in the city. I want to be like, don’t you have a phone?

  The guy wound up ordering that 2008 bottle of wine. Shit. I hoped he didn’t order that bottle specifically because of the year. I went to the wine closet, found the bottle he was looking for.

  2009.

  Huh. That’s pretty close, actually. Not bad for just making up a random number. I brought the bottle to the table and showed it off. Should I have said something about that whole 2008/2009 thing? Maybe. But I didn’t. Not right away, anyway. I opened it for him. He didn’t object.

  Halfway through the meal I went over to see how everything was going and I said, “Huh, I thought that was a 2008. We must have received a
new vintage.”

  The guy nodded. He probably knew I was full of shit.

  I’ll conclude with another random wine anecdote. If I’m doing bottle service, I always pour only the first glass, and then I leave my customers alone. A lot of the other waiters and waitresses will be constantly refilling their guests’ glasses almost after every sip. If I’m ever called out on this I just say, “Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t want you to feel rushed.” But really I just hate pouring the wine, because there’s always that little drip down the side of the bottle, and a lot of the time I forget to carry around extra linen, and so, what, I’m going to just let it get on the table? Maybe stain their clothes? No, just have at it, because I’m not coming back. Cheers.

  It was the perfect day for a picnic

  I hosted a big picnic in the park last week for all of my friends and family. I’ve always wanted to host a picnic. I feel like nobody does picnics anymore. You never see people carrying around picnic baskets. Nobody talks about picnics on Facebook. The picnic, I feel like it’s in danger of becoming extinct, and I was going to save it by hosting my own.

  Let me just tell you, it was the worst event I’ve ever hosted, a huge disaster.

  Everybody had a huge problem with the chain of command. If I host a party at my place, I’m in charge. Whenever people come over, I like to reinforce this fact by bossing people around, but only slightly, just to kind of, you know, say without saying it, hey, I’m in charge. This is my party. I’ll be like, “Hey, George, would you mind using a coaster?” or “Steve, didn’t I tell everyone to take their shoes off at the front door?” And what are people going to do, start something with me? No. I make sure that all of my rules are tiny, nothing worth getting into a fight over. It is my house, after all, and I’m the host.