Forgot to tell you all: I’m on vacation. You won’t see me again…until two weeks from now.

While you wait for me, here’s an angry rant about wine troubles from today’s guest, Gerald Weber:

If there is one thing I love, it’s getting drunk on a good bottle of wine.  But sometimes, my enjoyment of the sacred process is ruined.  And that gets me mad.  Here are some of the nasty wine-enjoyment-ruining things that really piss me off.

8. Wine bottles

OK, let’s be clear.  I love the wine in the bottle.  But the bottles suck.  Come on, 750 millilitres?  What kind of a bottle size is that?  To get a decent drunk, I’ll need three bottles.   I have only two hands.  That leaves me with some less than ideal options:

• Drink the bottles consecutively, but where’s the fun in that?
• Pour the wine into glasses, but that slows down the process.  Just the kind of inefficiency that is destroying this country.
• Ask for help holding the third bottle, but that means I’ll have to share.  Nothing doing.

7. People
Yes, people can really spoil my wine.  And it’s not just some people.  All kinds of people can ruin a perfectly good wine drunk.  For instance:

People who talk.  Shut up, I can’t hear myself getting drunk with all that blah blah blah.

People who drink beer.  No offence, but beer and wine don’t mix.  Go find your own corner.

People who don’t drink.  Sanctimonious Teletubby clones who think they are better than me just because they haven’t mastered the fine art of drunking.

Atheists.  Jesus turned water into wine.  Imagine if he was alive today?  Puny bottles wouldn’t even bother me if I could just turn on the tap to get my wine.  I could just lie on my back in the bathtub and open my mouth.  Jesus is my hero.

Wine connoisseurs. They taste the wine on the tips of their tongues and swirl it around in their mouths. They are so frustrating.  Stop playing with it and just swallow already!

People who bring their own bottles.  Umm, actually I like those people.

6. Heat
It gets really hot in Arizona summers and the heat spoils the wine.  I know that wine connoisseurs will babble on about how the bouquet or the balance or the ambience or things like that are off balance when the wine gets too hot.  Who cares?

I care that the heat makes the wine funny.  Look what it did to Wile E. Coyote. He’s always drunk, but he still can’t handle explosives or aim a rocket.  What’s his problem? And he never catches the Road Runner, even though coyotes have a top speed of 43 mph, more than twice that of road runners.  And the hallucinations!  He sees a five-foot tall grinning cartoon character, when road runners are dull-looking birds no more than two feet tall.  I wish I could get hallucinations like that.

5. Selfies
Deep down, I know half of those selfie girls are ugly.  It’s just the wine that makes them look good.  I don’t like being tricked.  There oughta be a law: only hot chicks should be allowed to take selfies.

4. Cheese
You know, as in wine and cheese.  Get real.  Who wants food to dilute the wine?

3. Spaghetti sauce
Have you noticed how many recipes for spaghetti sauce call for wine as an ingredient?  That is an outrage.  When you taste it, you don’t taste the wine.  All you taste are vegetables and spices.  Yuck!  And when you go to rinse your mouth out, the wine bottle is empty.  It’s a double whammy (and I don’t even know what a single whammy is).

2. Naked women
Yeah, I know.  Some of you might be saying whoa, what’s wrong with naked women?  Nothing, actually. Especially if they bring their own bottle of wine. I was just thinking of naked women right now, and – hey – I got distracted just by thinking of naked women.  Not only do they distract me from my drinking, but they just distracted me from my writing.  I love naked women, but they are so distracting.  But they are so delicious.  And so distracting.  And so… Oh, this is torture!!!

1. Drive-throughs
Please tell me what’s wrong with this picture.  You order a burger.  You order fries.  You order soda.  Why the **** would I want to drink soda?!  What is wrong with drive-throughs, anyway?  Why don’t they serve wine?

That’s it.  There are tons of things that soil a perfectly good bottle of wine, and one of them is whining about them.  So I’m going off to my corner to enjoy another three bottles.  Feel free to join me if you’ve got your own bottles. And don’t forget to bring the naked women.