`Christmas Wine 2020

 Expletive Deleted

Well, it certainly seems like years since I stared at a blank blog page. So this is what one looks like.

For some reason putting together this little posting seems even more daunting than usual, it's more difficult to compose my thoughts in order to do homage to this year's wine. 

Yes, I said homage. 

As we're all aware much has changed in this past year. The world may look the same but it is radically different and on many levels. I'll just leave that at that. 

And now....back to our regularly scheduled programme.

For the 2020 wine Ralph wanted to use 'KISS' as the watchword, and he and I did just that. I'm pretty sure you understand what that means. The second 'S', if you can't guess, stands for stupid. That seems to be another watchword with us.

Ralph decided to concentrate on doing just a single batch of wine this year, the red. I'm guessing he wanted to see if it became stable enough to bottle, or even stay in the same room with. 

(This did not go without notice, the white wine crowd put up quite the fuss.)

I must say he did exemplary work. He didn't even blow up the carboy when he added oak to the fermenting mixture. I almost have the nerve up to pop a cork and sample the wine. Almost but not quite.

Of course keeping it simple creates other issues. Ralph found that because of this whole damn virus thing he couldn't use the clogging group that he hung around with to mash the grapes like he was used to doing. He had to go back to the old tried and true method and mash them with the car. It's really hard on the tires.

My part in keeping it simple was to refuse to buy the colour cartridges for the printer. If Black & White was good enough for a blended scotch it was good enough for me.

We're not cheap, we're Scotts.

When it finally came time for me to play my role as chief putting things on paper guy Ralph came over to spend the weekend (he's in my bubble). I asked Ralph what he'd like to see as a label. We hashed ideas around and eventually came up with 'Expletive Deleted'. That phrase kind of says it all.

Expletive Deleted, the wine

Once the labels were created, argued over, torn up, redid, torn up again and finally printed out for good, we sat side by each as I typed on the computer and worked on a little story, or commentary really. Okay, maybe a bit of a warning. Both of us came up with suggestions as the words flowed onto the paper. It didn't take long. We both think it was funny. We still do.

When I gave out some of the wine I wanted to include the 'warning' and so I took the 'story' page and wrapped it over the neck of the bottle. Something like you see here. 

A fine wrapping job

And what did it say?

The note

It's probably a bit awkward to read like that so, never fear, I'll print the text out separately here.

Hmmm...It doesn't appear that Blogger allows me to use the same font as what was used for the handout. That's okay, I can work with that. 

The original idea, of course, was wanting something that looked like a hand printed note. This was what we came up with.

Hey, Campbell brothers…

What’s up with you guys?

Every year it’s the same damn thing, you give us this stuff you call  ‘expletive deleted’ wine. Well it Ain’t.

We don’t dare drink it. We tried that once and lost consciousness. The dog did and he died. The cat tried it too, and lost all his fur. All the other cats laugh at him. Tried to use it as a spot remover on the floor and it did that okay, but also burnt a hole through to the basement. I had to replace the damn water heater. Why pick on us? What did we ever do to you? My son Ronny suggested we use it as fuel for the truck. It ran the engine so hot that it seized. Have you ever seen melted valve covers under a vehicle before? And now you have the nerve to ask for a testimonial. And fumes? Don’t even go near there. It smells so bad that skunks pack up and leave. And the purple cloud bleached my wife Ethel’s hair, and then it fell out too. You thought she was difficult to live with before…

The sooner we never see you again the better it’ll be when we next meet. And I suggest you stuff the ‘expletive deleted’ wine. You know where.

So that's the story of this year's wine. I hope you enjoy.

Be safe.