I'm whining for wine.

Last week I went to the liquor store, because everyone knows (or at least, now everyone will know) that my mom LOVES red wine, she drinks it like it's going out of style. Okay, no she doesn't.... but everyone wishes they could look as stylish as my mom drinking wine. Or something.

Anyways, as I was buying this cleverly named little French wine, The Arrogant Frog, for my partly French-blooded mother for Mother's Day, I decided that I needed a little nip of wine for myself. Since there were a bunch of various wines for sale near the till (and no I did not buy a 6 dollar bottle of wine for my mother for Mother's Day... what do you think I am, a cheapo?), I decided to purchase one. It was an Australian wine, it had a picture of a gecko on the bottle, and I think geckos are cute. That is what I base my purchases on; the level of cuteness. So sue me.

I didn't open the bottle that night, I decided to save it for when I really wanted it. That just happened to be the very next night. I was very tired and sore after a really long, exhausting day at work, and all I wanted was to sit on the couch and enjoy a glass of wine before bed.

Well... first things first, I had to get the bottle open. I began to play around the paper seal at the top of the bottle, where there is usually a small tab that you pull on to get the paper to peel away. After a fruitless search, I realized there was no tab. My wine was stuck.
Only slightly annoyed at this point, I reached for my scissors, and pried away at the seal, trying to get enough of it cut that I could pull it off with my fingers. I finally get some worked away from the bottle, and just as I was saying "Aha" to myself, the scissors slip, and my fingers are scraped.
My annoyance level went from .03 to 1.0 at that particular moment, but I shook it off.
The bottle was corked, so I grabbed my corkscrew from the drawer, and proceeded to dig it into the cork.
"La la la" I was thinking.
The corkscrew was in far enough, so I went to pull out the cork. I heard a slight crack, and suddenly the cork broke in half, half of it still in the bottle, keeping my wine away from me.
My "expressing sounds of annoyance" cells in my brain kicked it up a notch from "sigh" to "growl".
Relentlessly I began to dig the corkscrew into the second half of the broken cork. No way was I going to let a little piece of soon-to-be garbage push me around.
I had only given the corkscrew two turns when the other half suddenly burst into a hundred pieces, most of them falling into the bottle, filling my wine with flotsam and jetsam.
"Growl" became "Curse CURSE CUSS!"
Not to be outdone, I grabbed my wine glass, and put a clean dishcloth tight over the rim. I thought that perhaps I could pour the wine through the cloth, filtering out the tiny pieces of cork from my drink. It was not to be, for the cloth proved very absorbent.. it just sucked up my wine like a tiny little drunk who was kept in court-ordered rehab for three weeks.
At this point, I began to complain (rather loudly) in the general direction of the living room, where my non-wine-drinking husband was contentedly watching hockey. He, being a gracious man, came into the kitchen to see what the heck was wrong with me.
I hurriedly told him the whole story, and he gave me a look halfway between a smile and a frown, and said "Why don't you just use a coffee filter?"
Ohhhh.
My husband is a genius!
So I did, I cleaned out my coffee pot, put a fresh filter in, and poured my damaged wine through.
It worked! It came out clean, free of miniscule pieces of indigestable junk.
Triumphantly, I poured myself a glass, and tra-la-laed into the living room, beaming from ear to ear.
I planted myself beside my husband, snuggled into the crook of his arm, and took my first sip of my hard-earned beverage.
And spit it out again.
And spit the taste out for good measure.
IT was AWFUL. Horrible. Terrible. Comepletely and totally the worst wine I have ever tasted in my entire life. I know I'm young, but I've tasted a lot of wine! It was sour, bitter, heavy, and disgusting.
I couldn't believe it. I sat on the couch with a dumb look on my face, as my husband laughed at me. The man.
Defeated, I dumped that stupid wine down the sink, and what was left in the bottle, too.
Then I went to bed.