Wine, at Last, Tops the List of American Beverages...

Greetings Voigneir, and kind readers,

 

Imagine if you will a man, of limited means, working ever longer hours, watching the fruits of his labors going toward an ever inflating adjustable mortgage payment, his wife's ever expanding shoe collection, and his children's "I-Pod" subscription, along with sky rocketing bills for cable, telephone, and heat.  All this before his weekly fuel expense to get to a job, where he works until mid May each year to pay his taxes, in a country where spending on conflicts with madmen in the dessert, and cleaning recent natural hazards in the south will certainly require increases.

 

Imagine this chap's monthly, or weekly trip to that place which houses purveyors of wines and liquors.  Now, the question is this:  what do you imagine he is most likely to select for his condition. For decades, it's been beer, (eg, "great taste" and "less filling" and noble steeds pulling beer wagons on snowy streets at Christmas time).  The money and time American spent on beer commercials were matched by the nation's preoccupation with suds as Man's best beverage, if you will, as he looks forward to his NASCAR, his tee times, or Football match.

 

Now, this week, Gallup polling brings to our attention to the fact that Wine has replaced beer as most American's first choice, in an extraordinary turn of events, as more than 38% of Americans chose wine over beer, with beer at 36%.

 

Merlot postulates this advancement of America civilization has too many "causes" if you will, to ascribe this or that reason or rational. To make a dark, if apt metaphysical comparison, we'd assert that doing so would be like concluding that Napoleon's psychological disorders alone, where the sole "cause" of the attrocities he laid at the feet of nobles of feudal Europe in the 18th century, when in fact events are seldom the result of one or two "root causes", as the media would have us believe.  To be sure, Napoleon's mentality was a factor in that dark chapter of history, however, one cannot lay the blame entirely on Napoleon's ego. Doing so would discount the countless acts of barbarism of his minions and their followers, and the rolls they played in Europe's cultural revolutions. Take, for example the French "philosphs," chief among them being Francois Voltaire,  Baron de Montesquieu, and Jean Jacques Rousseau whose writings planted the requisite seeds in the minds of the revolutionaries, who turned Europe and by extension America away from vile Feudalism, where subjects take direction from royals, to citizenship, where free peoples vote with their own best interest in mind, much the way Merlot an d Viognier further the advancement of culture to bring boxed wine to the American table, if you will.

 

Suffice it to say, that we delighted to see Wine take its rightful place at the top of the set of life choice American's make to ease there countless vicissitudes that make American living perhaps the world's greatest paradox. And we can only hope boxed wine gains the creditability it so rightfully deserves in American kitchens, dining areas, and sitting rooms.  Let every home take as a model, Merlot's majestic home on the Hudson, which is filled with casks of boxed wine from which to choose on request.