A Note to Roscoe

Dear Roscoe,

As you’ve no doubt noticed, you’re one of the very few who has chosen to offer comments on what I have to say about wine. I’m very grateful for your interest and kind words.

Unfortunately you’ve never given me your email address, so I’ve been unable to contact you directly to thank you or reply to your questions. If you’d like to give me your address, just click on my “complete profile” to the left and then on Contact/email.

Now, with regards to your most recent question: nothing, absolutely nothing, better sets the stage, particularly with a beautiful lady who knows wine, then Champagne. The more timid and less imaginative would begin with a glass or two each. I, on the other hand, would opt for a full bottle right from the git-go, confident that, under the influence of my personal charm and the magic of the bubbly, whatever else might follow would be a piece of cake.

No one I know is quite sure what it is about sparkling wine, but it does the trick – if you catch my drift – so, by time you get around to ordering the meal, if you’re the smooth fellow I think you are, you can not make a mistake. The ground work having been well laid, whatever wine you select will work as if by magic with whatever it is she orders.

The wonderful thing about wine is this wizardry it works. It can make fools seem wise, the ugly beautiful, and the challenged whole. So trust me, Roscoe, more often than not it’s not what wine you select, but that you’re having wine at all that’s important.

In the end, in a variation on Shakespear’s “To thine own self be true,” I’d say order what makes you happy and bet that, as night follows day, your date will be happy as well. If for some reason she’s not, a least you, who is footing the bill, will be.