Last night, for the first time in over a month, my #WineWednesday partner-in-crime was too busy with work (what’s that like?) to help me celebrate our favorite weekly holiday. Instead of crying about it (I totally cried about it), I’ve elected to channel my pain into a celebration of wine. O Sauvignon, O Sauvignon, how grapey are your glug glugs?

Wine: how do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

-Wine begins with W, which provides a perfect alliteration-based excuse to consume 1-2 liters of alcohol on a school night. #WineWednesday should be its own separate sick leave code. The last line on my resume is “Oh, and don’t expect much from me on Thursdays.”

-Wine puts the “fun” in “functional alcoholic”. Sitting at home drinking lots of beer is for watching sports; sitting at home drinking lots of straight liquor has, as far as I know, never actually occurred in a home- rather, by oneself under a bridge that is more than 1000 feet from a church or elementary school. But sitting at home drinking lots of wine? “Wine night”. Wine night is one of the only drinking events that is wholly self-supporting. You can have wine night with your girls. Wine night with your cat. Wine night with yourself if the cat is being a piece of shit. Wine night without yourself, after 2 bottles. Doesn’t matter. You can still tell your coworkers that you’re hungover because of “wine night” and boom! You’re less of a debaucherous asshole, and more of a classy asshole (I dare say… classhole?)

-Cheap liquor tastes like asshole bleach. Cheap beer tastes like the urine of someone who’s been drinking better beer. Cheap wine tastes pretty much the same as expensive wine. If you’re a *~FrUgALiStA*~, like I tell myself I am at the end of each month while selling my valuables on Craigslist to make rent, wine is the obvious choice.

*College students are exempt from this hard-and-fast rule. If you’re looking for College Drunk (and you are), your desired inebriation levels and your price point are going to intersect directly at the gates of Crystal Palace. Even if somehow you can afford enough wine to “get you there”, I suggest drinking cheap vodka anyway. Your eventual kids will require a truly genuine horror story from you about why top-shelf is worth the extra $20.

-WINE TASTINGS. true story: when I was 19, my whole extended family and I went on a week-long cruise to Alaska. One of the optional activities was a wine tasting, which 6 of us decided to participate in, because fucking duh. We were sat in the middle of the ballroom- a terrible choice, as everyone would soon find out- with 6 mostly-full glasses of wine in front of each of us. My cousin and I immediately take the equivalent of 2 glasses to the face as dignified older couples fill in the tables around us. The sommelier starts off by welcoming us all to the afternoon’s tasting- apparently, this was an inappropriate time for a resounding “WOOOOO!” and vigorous glass-clinking from our whole table.

He recovers from this jarring offense to his sensibilities, and starts guiding the rest of the tables through each wine as we begin negotiating wine trades like we’re at a Fantasy Football draft- “I’ll give you my Malbec and a 5 minute shoulder rub for your Pinot Grigio. You know I don’t like reds… Oh come on. You don’t even DRINK Pinot Grigio!!!” Horrified, the sommelier tries to interact with the other guests by asking questions that he thinks we can’t answer: “What kind of BODY do you sense in this wine? What NOTES are you getting?” Waving my hand in the air and unsurprisingly being ignored, I lean over the table and snort-yell “….THIS ONE TASTES LIKE GRAPES.” Let’s just say that if it were possible to eject passengers from a cruise ship for something other than a violent felony, we all would’ve been on a tugboat back to Seattle real fuckin’ quick.

-This leads me to my next point (kind of): the red vs. white debate. Watching staunch red drinkers and staunch white drinkers argue about wine is like watching Yankees and Red Sox fans argue about baseball- angry; sweaty; quickly evolving into punches being thrown and rioting in the streets.

I saw an article the other day called “girls who drink white wine vs. girls who drink red wine”. It starts off slightly innocuous- “white wine girls would rather be on the beach; red wine girls would rather be on the couch!” etc etc, but quickly devolves into statements like “white wine girls are sweet and bubbly; red wine girls are boring and jaded!”; “white wine girls are beautiful princesses from heaven; red wine girls use discount hairdye and cut their toenails with chainsaws!” Much like the thousands of “12 REASONS Y U SHOULD DATE A GURL WHO LOVES WHISKEY” articles that have sprouted up as of late, I am enthralled by the idea that the items one chooses to put in one’s face wholly define one’s personality (you know… within reason.)

I especially enjoy this argument because I am a dedicated Wine Bisexual. I like reds and I also like whites. I’m happy drinking either and can’t really explain why sometimes I want one more than the other. So… does loving wine mean that I can be a fabulous princess and also a semi-gross, antisocial couch troll? Because if so, #carlysintothat.