And the winner is....

Allison Menegoni--you win the knuckle duster corkscrew!  Congratulations!  Thank you very much to all who entered; I truly enjoyed reading your wine anecdotes. 

Allison-- you're a rock star!  I'll be contacting you shortly.  Everyone else--if you haven't had the chance to read the winning entry, please enjoy the following:

"It was 1995 and I was piss-poor, living in the heart of the Okanagan Valley wine region in Penticton, British Columbia, working as a server at a local restaurant.



In a desperate effort to educate the slightly hooligan-esque serving staff, our Manager had convinced a Vintner from one of the local wineries to offer us a wine tasting. We were duly seated, a polite, albeit ignorant audience of twenty, breathless in the anticipation of getting hammed for free on a weekday at 10am.


The Vintner was a tall, elegant woman with sharp features and expensive shoes. We were captivated by this strange and alien creature. It all started smoothly. She taught us how to hold our glasses, how to swirl and marvel at the sugary legs, and how to enjoy the bouquet of the wine by sticking one’s entire snot-locker right into the glass. We were impressed.


For the first while, we followed correct wine-tasting etiquette; a few refined sips from the vintage being presented, then into the swill bucket with the remainder. A new glass, a new wine. Riesling, Gewürztraminer, Pinot Gris, Chianti, Cabernet… this was the “No Wine Left Behind” tasting.


We were well on our way to being nicely drunk when the tasting took a left turn.


The Vintner, having really hit her stride, took a particularly enthusiastic slurp of wine and held it in her mouth, drawing air over it with the classic wine snob’s “puckered slurp”. We looked on with mild interest as the unfortunate Vintner then got a panicked look on her face. Her colour went increasingly deeper shades of crimson, and then she choked completely, blowing a firehose of wine out of her nose, soaking both her delicate white blouse, and the entire first row of her audience in a jaunty Beaujolais.


The tension broken, we cheered with delight, losing whatever faux-dignity we had managed to pull off to that point, clapping and hooting wildly. Mayhem ensued. Bottles were passed mouth to mouth as we milled around, hysterical with giggles, stealing bottles off each other’s tables.


After blowing her nose in a tea-towel the completely flustered Vintner tried to regain order, but it was no use. I signaled the formal end to the wine tasting by standing on a chair, tipping a swill bucket up to my lips and drinking the contents.


It had been a very educational wine-tasting indeed."
 
My hero!
 
'Til next time,
 
Barb