Wine, of the fancy pants variety

For years now Wendy and I have gotten our wine via bottle-it-yourself places.  If you bottle your wine yourself you don't pay the extremely large tax rate, which I assume was meant to apply to people making their own wine at home.  I feel strange using such a service because they are so obviously a ridiculous tax dodge that brings no value whatsoever.  They do all the work up until I show up at their door and use their machines to put wine into my bottles.  If I am bad at bottling, they will basically do it for me, removing even the paper thin excuse for tax avoidance.

I don't much like patronising businesses whose entire model is 'tax loophole!' but it does save me a lot on wine costs and I also hate paying full price.  Hatred and bitterness either way, I guess.

One thing that has come up over the years is the terrible ugliness of the wine bottles.  I put labels on them each time so we know what they are, but I have no desire to spend hours scrubbing and scraping to get the labels off, so the labels just stack up as I put new ones over top of the old ones.  This time round some of the labels were five deep on the bottles and they began to peel off, creating quite a mess.

This is what comes of years of labels of different sizes slapped onto bottles and eventually stripped off in a slapdash sort of fashion.  I put new labels on these of course but the new labels did not cover up the mess at all.  Every bottle still has lots of shredded paper and glue sticking out from under the new label, and naturally the labels aren't sticking perfectly so the new ones peel off some on their own.

I don't mind this in the least.

Hell, I like it.  I take a perverse pride in using things as long as possible.  If my shoes look a ruin but are functional I take it as a point of pride - I am not wasting materials by buying new shoes!  I like to reuse bottles and I don't care at all that it shows, rather I am happy to model the behaviour I want to see in the world - reusing of stuff.

Wendy is not on board with this.  In theory she loves the idea of conservation and reusing things, but in practice she cringes at the idea of serving wine to guests in a bottle covered in ripped paper and glue stains.  I am filled with glee at the idea of serving wine while saying "See this haggard old bottle?  The wine in here was CHEAP.  Woo, inexpensive inebriation!"

Other people don't seem to buy into that so much.  They usually like the idea of reuse, but they really seem to think I ought to put a little more effort into my presentation.

The trouble is it isn't a matter of laziness.  I don't eschew presentation because I can't be bothered.  I do it rough and ready because I actually prefer it that way.  If someone offered to make all my bottles of wine pretty and high class for free I would turn it down - that isn't what I want.

I am going to continue down this path, I think, peeling off huge masses of labels only once they become totally unworkable.  I would happily just stop using labels altogether but other people have strictly forbidden me to do this on the basis that they want to know what they are drinking.  I figure it is all red wine right, so who cares?  You aren't going to turn it away because it is Barolo instead of Cabarnet, are you?  So just drink it!  But others have this thing about wanting to have a name for the stuff they are about to pour down their throats.  Fancy pants attitude, that.