How Do You Not Call It Grateful Red?

Sharp-eyed Enthusiasts will notice that the Grateful Dead wine has been placed next to the Vampire wine, which has the tagline “Sip the blood” and comes in a cardboard coffin. I feel this is an appropriate shelving.

(Seriously: Vampire wine. In fact, you get a free book about Sexy Dracula when you buy a bottle. You think I’m making that up.

You all need to apologize to me.

Stop yelling at the nice people.

I wasn’t yelling. Now I’m yelling! Different punctuation, different thought.

Written language is a mindfucker. Speaking of which: do you think the same person who wrote that little blurb also wrote the novel?

I hope so.

And wouldn’t a book about draculas titled A Walk in the Sun necessarily be a very short book?

Yeah: I opened my coffin, walked out the door, and FWOOMP. Book over.

You realize we’re still in parentheses?

I never closed those?

No.

I’d lose my head if it weren’t attached.)

What bothers me about this is the lack of effort. Say what you will about that Vampire swill, at least they tried: there’s bats and fire and roses and all sorts of weird lady-shit. (This genre of vampire–Sexy Dracula–has an almost exclusively female fan base: it’s the genderswapped version of war reconstruction. That is for dudes.) Seriously, who designed this?

“Jenkins!”

“Boss?”

“When I say ‘Grateful Dead,’ what’s the first thing that comes to mind?”

“Oh, I gu–”

“Wine, Jenkins!”

“You weren’t planning on letting me finish my sentence, were you?”

“No. Lured you into a conversational trap for my own amusement.”

“Well done, sir.”

“I was dominant over you, Jenkins.”

“We’re off-topic, sir.”

“Wine!”

“There it is.”

“Everyone knows the Grateful Dead and wine go together like a thing and other stuff.”

“That should be the slogan, sir.”

“Thank heavens I thought it up, then! Write that down, and then come up with something better than that, but still give me credit.”

“Yes, sir. The usual, sir.”

“Do you know anything about terroir, Jenkins?”

“It’s a French word, sir.”

“I’ll continue as though you were of human intelligence: it’s a theory that a wine’s character and flavor comes from a mixture–a gestalt–of the soil, air, altitude, days of rain, what language you curse at the grape vines at, whatnot. Plus, of course, the seed plant and the farmer and whatnot. There’s a lot of whatnot in this theory, Jenkins.”

“I’m getting that, sir.”

“It assigns to a time and place a particularity that can, by definition, not be matched by anywhere else; this thereby imbues the wine created from that particularity its very own uniquity.”

“That sounds like nonsense, sir.”

“Utter! Gallic twaddle! It’s like ever other French theory: half magic, half redefining words to mean what you want them to mean.”

“How did we get on this, sir?”

…

“Wine!”

“Wine, right.”

“Ah! I was telling you about the terroir to illuminate the fact that the wine business is just the worst.”

“Worse than the music business, sir?”

“Oh, obviously I meant besides the music business, Jenkins!”

“Yes, sir.”

“So: we’re going to buy the leftovers from whoever’ll sell them to us the cheapest, blend them together and slap a Stealie on the bottle.”

“Yes, sir. Once again, the ‘Slap A Stealie On It’ itch is scratched.”

“But it’s just so easy, Jenkins!”

“I know, sir.”

“Baby onesie? Slap a Stealie on it! Non-dairy creamer? Slap a Stealie on it! Colostomy bag? Stealie slap!”

“Colostomy bag?”

“Steal your poop, Jenkins.”

“Ah.”

“Slapping Stealies on knickknacks and bricabrack is the Grateful Dead way, Jenkins! I won’t have your sauciness. Am I French cuisine?”

“No, sir.”

“Then why all the sauce, Jenkins?”

“I apologize, sir.”

“Rotten meat. That’s why they invented all those sauces, the French. Couldn’t keep cows alive, Jenkins. Needed to cover it up with a pound of melted butter. Incompetent farmers and uncircumcised transit strikers, the French.”

“Can we stop talking about the French, sir?”

“We weren’t. I was.”

“The wine, sir.”

“Wine!”

“Since we’ll be putting vin du ordinaire in the bottle, perhaps we should concentrate on the bottle itself.”

“Glass!”

“Yes, sir.”

“And none of that screw-top folderol. Makes me feel like a wino.”

“Yes, sir. And the label?”

“We should have one.”

“Noted. Should there be a design, perhaps?”

…

“Nope! Slap a Stealie on it!”

“Yes, sir.”