Four Dollar Wine Critic: AMERICA!

This week I am so many emotions that a book about a lost bunny rabbit I read while babysitting made me cry. In order to drink and forget midterm season/impending autumn and its attendant anxieties—Is it now too cold to go braless? Does my neck look weird in this? Do you want to snuggle with me tonight?—I and my posse are off again to Cambridge Wine and Spirits for more jugs of cheap, industrial-sized wine. May this harvest season bring you autumnal Sam Adams dioramas and rivers clogged with rowers, and may all your commodity fetishes be pumpkin spice.  

Carlo Rossi Chianti
$6.99/1.5 liters; that’s $3.50 a bottle!
Cambridge Wine and Spirits.

Cambridge Wine and Spirits Guy is a lovely soul, and I twitch my eyelashes at him frenetically because I have been socialized to think that suggesting sexual interest will get me access to shit: free drinks, victim blaming, extra milkshakes at B. Good. Today I am feeling like a fly piece of Cantabrigian femininity; on the way here drivers in the Square kept craning their heads to look at me being alluringly eco-friendly on my bicycle, such that I was somewhat worried they would crash their trucks. Cambridge Wine and Spirits Guy suggests Carlo Rossi—a name shared by both the preferred wine brand and childhood bestie of my grandfather—and I can only imagine my grandmother’s fear at what I have become. The wine itself, I discover later, has notes of artificial maple syrup, with brief wisps of pomegranate. It tastes like good balsamic vinegar, or rather, like good balsamic vinegar’s freshman year sexual performance: still an awkward mouthfeel, but with promising hints of what aging might bring.

Liberty Creek White Zinfandel$7.99/1.5 liters; that’s $4 a bottle! Cambridge Wine and Spirits.
In lieu of a review of Liberty Creek—a wine that is as delicious as it is a tool of American hegemony—I’ve made some improvements (they're bold) to the initial label.

At Liberty Creek we craft our wines upholding the ideals of a bygone time. A time when traditions were esteemed and principles were hard-won and women and people of color couldn’t vote, and homosexuals were tried in secret courts and kicked out of Harvard.

Our long tradition of winemaking is rooted in the rich soils of California, which were taken from Mexico in 1848, because our nation is an imperialist power and Manifest Destiny a white supremacist myth. And every bottle of Liberty Creek rings faithful to the principle we hold true—that quality wines should be accessible to all former Reagan voters. Our White Zinfandel is refreshingly sweet with cranberry and watermelon fruit gushers flavors and lively notes of the flavor formerly known as fresh strawberry and cherry. Enjoy chilled. Pairs perfectly with all types of foods from the crisp salads that make women smile to spicy Asian or Latin cuisine—so ethnic!

Livingston Chablis Blanc
$6.99/1.5 liters; that’s $3.50 a bottle!
Cambridge Wine and Spirits.

This is delicious. It is juicy and pleasant and tastes like crisp green grapes sprinkled with sparkly pink sugar, and is almost yummy enough to make up for the fact that I haven’t gotten laid in a month. Almost. Do I TMI? Very well then, I TMI. (I am large, I contain multitudes; this is sometimes socially stigmatized.) Livingston Chablis Blanc is mild and luscious and lovely, almost as lovely as biking back with my roommate from Cambridge Wine and Spirits. We crackled over the newly fallen leaves raising moss-scent, notes of dark chocolate, hints of imminent rot. And I was thinking it’s now, it’s here, it’s this moment, and isn’t that unendurably sweet. Like low-end white wine. The kind of night that feels like butter, melts down gut-hot into your heart or your soul or your stomach and makes you deeper, rich. We cycled through the muffled-velvet streets of Cambridge, her in front and me following after, and I was guided by her blown-back hair. And I loved her so much I could hardly look at her, in that way that hurts a little, in that way that you love your friends.

The Crimson’s Resident Lesbian Sex Icon Reina A.E. Gattuso ’15 is a literature and studies of women, gender, and sexuality concentrator in Adams House.