Drunk Girl / High Guy Cultural Reviews: A Fancy Wine Tasting

This is the fifth edition of Drunk Girl/High Guy Cultural Reviews wherein Sarah gets really drunk, Noah gets really high, and then they go to an event and talk about their vastly different experiences. You may read these reviews on Sarah Walker's blog

or Noah Garfinkel's blog

. In this installment, we attend a fancy industry wine tasting at The Bowery Hotel. ‘

How We Decided To Go
Sarah: Our friend Tim, composer of the awesome remix for my soon to be Grammy nominated song,

also works at a really nice Italian restaurant in New York. He’s the sommelier, which is a fancy word for a wine picker outer, so he invited us to an exclusive industry wine tasting at The Bowery Hotel, which, if you didn’t know, is one of the expensive and chic hotels that spearheaded the gentrification of the formerly crack-addled Bowery. Don’t worry, you can still find crack on The Bowery. Promise. Anyway, I decided to wear a fun lady drinking hat like I did in our first outing to the

(Go Lady Libs!!) This hat is less stupid, but it still implies fun and drinking and maybe witchcraft and definitely some light marijuana use, which I did not do, because unlike some Noah’s, I adhere to our rules. (Sidenote: As ever, I apologize for the poor quality of our photos, but if anything, it proves how STUPID effed up we are at the time of their taking. We're the real deal!)

Noah: One time when I was hanging out with Sarah, she introduced me to her friend Tim, who is a Somalian, which is a fancy word for a guy from Somalia. Unlike the Somalians you see on TV, Tim is a dashing, tall white man with good diction. He also knows so much about wine. Tim offered to take us to a fancy wine tasting for Drunk Girl / High Guy, which was very nice and dashing of him. We accepted! ‘
How Sarah Got Drunk
This event took place during the day. A Tuesday, to be exact. I think I’ve established that I love drinking, and I would never imply otherwise, but it’s just hard to get geared up to get drunk at 1:30 on a Tuesday when you aspire to be a functioning member of society, as I do from time to time. It’s also embarrassing to walk into a wine store at noon and buy a bottle of Pinot Noir. I tried to distract the clerk when I walked in and heard “November Rain” playing by yelling, “Too soon!” He then gave me a weird look (fair) and I stuttered, “B-because it-it’s October.” So then he was frightened of me, which nicely distracted from the aforementioned “it was a Tuesday at noon and I was buying wine like a wino” fact.
Noah came over and we ate leftover risotto that my mom had made (awww!) and I drank some red wine while Noah smoked. At first we tried to brainstorm about how we could parlay these here outings into an all expenses paid trip to Europe (or Australia, we’re not picky), loosely based around the idea of

Dantes Peak/Volcano
Deep Impact/Armageddon
Broke Down Palace/Return to Paradise
Copote/Notorious
Black Dahlia/Hollywood Land
Lake Placid/Deep Blue Sea
‘ ‘
That last one isn’t so much true, but they both involve scary amphibious creatures eating people. So. Relax.
Then Noah spent some time staring at the yellow tape in my tape player. Let’s just skip over the fact that I’m the dick with a tape player and move on. ‘
How Noah Got High
I smoked at Sarah’s apartment while she pre-drank. I immediately got terrified. I was going to have to talk to wine people. Gross. Oh, also, a little back story ‘ I don’t know anything about wine. At all. I don’t particularly like it either. It tastes like it’s supposed to be sweet and then somebody fucked it up. Remember when your mom would be baking, and you’d see a thing of baker's chocolate on the counter and you’d sneakily eat it only to discover that that it was unsweetened and tasted like soil? That’s how wine tastes to me. Also, It’s not as good as the thing it originally is, which is grapes. You’re just ruining grapes, wine makers! You know who’s doing it right? Whiskey makers. I don’t want to eat fermented grain juice or barrels, but you put those two things together for a couple of months and before you know it, it tastes smoky and you’re sleeping with somebody new. But, we’ve got these assholes in the world who want a guy to stomp on their fruit with his feet so it can be put in an easy-to-knock-over glass and give you a headache. I don’t like these assholes and I don’t like talking to them. I was pretty worked up, but Sarah calmed me down with some risotto, and then we left her apartment.

‘
Getting There
Sarah: By this time Tim had joined us, and while we walked to the Bowery Hotel I asked Noah to show Tim photos that he had taken of journal entries that he had written when he was seven because they’re super cute. And he had literally just showed them to me in my apartment. At the exact same time they were both like, “Ew, no. Dudes don’t do that.” And then, seriously, they proceeded to exclude me from the conversation and share everything about themselves to each other over the course of the five minute walk over, save for looking at a dumb misspelled journal entry about snakes that Noah did when he was seven. Men are from Mars, Women are from The Planet Where Normal People Who Request Normal Things Live, I guess.
Noah: Interesting thing about Sarah: The girl has no concept of how male human beings normally interact with one another. A few weeks ago, my mom sent me all this stuff I had written as a kid: a journal from 2nd grade, a journal from 4th grade, and a bunch of short stories from slightly later on in life. I had taken pictures of a couple of them because I thought they were funny. And, yes, also cute. They are very cute. I was killing it at being a kid when I was a kid. Look!

So here’s how that should have just worked for you: If you are a girl you probably saw that and said, “Awwwww.” But if you’re a guy, you probably just said, “Asshole didn’t know how to spell ‘spend.'” So when Sarah was like, “Noah, show Tim your childhood writings!” we both got uncomfortable and then spent the next 10 minutes subtly trying to reassert our heterosexuality. Or at least that’s what stoned me was doing. Un-stoned Tim was probably just acting like a normal un-stoned person.

The Wine Tasting

Sarah: Oh my gosh was this nice. The Bowery Hotel looks like the inside of the mansion from Clue, my favorite movie, and wine, well, we all know how I feel about wine, so this was GREAT. But it got BETTER because there was a table full of Italian apps, including mortadella. When I asked what mortadella was Tim told me it was like “Italian bologna.” I thought bologna was Italian bologna, but you learn something new every wine tasting. There was a huge bowl in the center of the table that we thought was full of chunks of bread but it turned out to be CHUNKS OF PARMESAN. Best bait and switch EVER. This is Noah looking at the table:

We tasted wine and pretended to know what people were talking about via nodding enthusiastically. I could probably have appeared more authentic if I had spit the wine out into the spittoons provided, but I didn’t because, gross. Also what a waste of wine. Thank goodness Tim was there to cover up our ignorance and say words like “varietals.” I learned that I don’t like organic wine or super Tuscans, and, honestly, my favorite wine at this Italian wine tasting came from Argentina. I apologize to everyone in Italy: Silvio Berlusconi, George Clooney and whoever else is there.

Then I realized that I was not at a wine tasting, but rather Bro Fest 2011, attended and founded by Tim and Noah. Going back to my previous point of how I cannot grasp the subtle nuances of the Bro Rules Of Conduct, I felt left out. So I walked over to a wine seller who was either handsome or gay or handsome and gay. Either way, he was coming in hot at the ripe old age (wine joke) of 23. He was selling wines from Sicily. We were just getting to know each other when Noah wandered over. I asked Handsome Wine Seller where he was from in Italy and he said, “Turino.” Noah said, “Oh, is that where Amanda Knox was?” He said, “Excuse-ah me-ah?” And I quickly tried to cover it up by being all, “Yeah, weren’t the winter Olympics there?” and he said, “Ah-yes-ah in two thousand-ah six-ah.” And then Noah pulled out his phone, quickly Googled Amanda Knox and yelled “Perugia!” at him. I hustled Noah back over to the Parmesan and Italian Meats table.

I wanted to leave but there was a rumor that a roast pig was going to come out. So we kept drinking and either bro-ing or observing the bro-ing as the case may be. We refused coffee because, as Tim said, “coffee before pig, then up is the jig.” Finally, the pig came out. It was delicious, I think. I was hammered. And it was a Tuesday at 5 or something, I don’t know. It was definitely I Feel Like An Irresponsible Alcoholic O’Clock.

Noah: We got to the Bowery Hotel and it was all very well put together. There was a lot of exposed brick and earth tones. There was also a table in the center with bread, a huge wheel of parmesan, and some meats. So that was pretty great. What was not great was what I consider to be a CRIMINAL lack of water. Jesus Christ, I wanted water so badly. And you know what makes you want even more water than you would normally want it after getting stoned and eating salted Italian meats? Drinking wine for fucking 5 hours in a row. Drunk Girl / High Guy slowly devolved into Drunk Girl / Stoned And Drunk Guy Who Is So Thirsty He Can Taste The Back Of His Own Throat.

But we just kept drinking. And, by the way, we were fooling nobody. Everyone could see that Sarah and I didn’t belong at an industry wine tasting. Some well dressed bearded man would take ten minutes explaining the climate his grapes were grown in and how there’s a special combination of the grapes that the owner of the vineyard only uses once every 12 years to make some very special blend, and then we’d be like, “Yeah, it’s good!”

We had heard at the beginning of the event that there would eventually be porchetta sandwiches. The tasting was supposed to be over by 5:00. 5:00 came and went. Tim and I demanded to stay until we got our sandwiches. Finally at around 6:30 they came out. The guy who had paid for and run the event was carving the roasted suckling pig. He gave me a dirty look and then gave me a sandwich with half as much meat in it as everyone else got. Fair enough, wine guy. Fair enough. As we left, I could feel the beginning rumblings of a massive headache.

Epilogue

Sarah: I wish I could say that at this point I went home. I did not. I met up with my friend Jess and we went to a place called Burp Castle, which despite the unfortunate name is cool in that it serves interesting beers and plays exclusively Gregorian Chants. Needless to say after maybe fifteen minutes of Gregorian Chants I got SUPER DEPRESSED but then somehow ended up at The Horrors concert at Webster Hall, which was actually great because I was drunk enough to just VIBE to the music. And there were fun lights. I think. Wait, did I actually go? In conclusion: Super solid day.

Noah: As I walked to the train, my head began throbbing. Within minutes nausea had kicked in as well. I spent the subway ride home trying to meditate myself out of throwing up. I was successful. I finally got home, took migraine medication, and slept for 13 hours. If only 10 year old me could see 27 year old me.

Ha! That’s not gonna last.

Follow Noah on Twitter @noahgarfinkel

Follow Sarah on Twitter @swalks