Tell me, do you know anything about wine? No, seriously - if so, then I do envy you, because the level of my receptors allows me to navigate only the categories “red, white, dry, and semi-sweet.” However, I’m not particularly discouraged, because in fact, the vast majority of people are like me on our planet.
Therefore, the universal indicator of wine quality remains - the price per bottle. The more expensive it is, the better it is. It’s quite possible that the stepmom of the user u/DumplingBandit, the author of the story we’re going to tell you today, was guided by the same evaluation criteria. And the result was a real wedding drama.
More info: Reddit
The author of the post is a bride-to-be and her stepmom recently approached her to discuss the alcohol at the reception
Image credits: lee c (not the actual photo)
The author said that it would be just typical wines from the venue, but the stepmother wasn't satisfied with this reply at all
Image credits: u/DumplingBandit
Image credits: Asad Photo Maldives (not the actual photo)
The stepmother said that she and her friends are big wine connoisseurs so she wondered if she could drag her own cooler with several bottles
Image credits: u/DumplingBandit
Image credits: Quinn Dombrowski (not the actual photo)
This idea purely violated the venue's rules so the bride-to-be simply said no
Image credits: u/DumplingBandit
However, the woman was tormented with remorse about whether she did the right thing in rejecting the stepmom's idea
In fact, wine is perhaps the best way to be branded a snob. It’s quite enough to raise your glass, roll a sip of the drink on your tongue, and then with a wise and thoughtful look say something like “Yes, 1984 was a very good year!”
And here the most important thing is that your glass at that moment doesn’t contain some cheap 'Cardboardeau' from the local store, and the interlocutor doesn’t turn out to be a real wine expert. However, the likelihood of this is really negligible. There are many advantages here - others will consider you a sophisticated wine connoisseur. Even if deep down you are a born beer lover.
Well, the Original poster (OP), a 29-year-old woman, had about the same “luck” with her stepmother - while discussing the menu at the author’s upcoming wedding, the woman wondered what kind of wine would be at the reception. The author of the post, apparently, shared my criteria for evaluating wines, so she reasonably answered - it would be a house red and white. And then the stepmom turned the wine snob mode on.
According to the woman, she and her well-off friends are very picky about wine, so they’d like to know in advance what they are going to drink. To this, the bride-to-be replied that she and her groom had prepared a surprise for the dad and stepmom - 2 bottles of a great Chardonnay from the venue. At $80 dollars a bottle, by the way. Moreover, the OP’s dad contributed a generous amount to the wedding.
This news, however, did not particularly inspire the stepmother, and she noticed that 2 bottles for them with their dad and friends was not enough. And then she made up a ‘brilliant’ idea - what if she took with her a whole cooler with several bottles of her favorite wine?
Of course, the rules of the wedding venue don’t allow anyone to bring their own booze. Of course, it seemed damn rude to assume in advance that the wine that would be served at the reception would be of poor quality, so that the stepmom’s sophisticated friends wouldn’t even touch it. But our heroine simply told her stepmother "no".
Interestingly, a couple of weeks later, the author’s dad approached her with a question about alcohol at the reception. But here the reaction was diametrically opposite. The man simply was like, “Okay, no problem!” And so, our heroine was left tormented by the question - how right was she in her conversation with the stepmother?
Image credits: Karolina Kaboompics (not the actual photo)
In fact, of course, the original poster is completely right - especially since numerous studies confirm that the price of a wine significantly affects the perception of its taste. For example, professor Jens Glaab and his colleagues from the Faculty of Psychology at the University of Basel (Switzerland) conducted an experiment where 140 participants were offered a choice of three types of Italian wine of different prices.
Surprisingly, every time respondents indicated that more expensive wine tasted way better. Even when they drank the cheapest of wines - but before that they were told that it was the most expensive one. "I know how important the context is. The mind is able to reinterpret reality so that it matches one's expectations," Magazine Wein Plus website quotes professor Glaab.
“The exciting question is whether you can train the reward system [in the brain] to make it less receptive to such placebo marketing effects,” Decanter quotes professor Dr. Bernd Weber from the Center for Economics and Neuroscience at the University of Bonn (Germany). In other words, perhaps our heroine should simply pour cheap wine into glasses and say that it’s damn expensive?
However, commenters on the original post claimed that the author’s stepmom simply was 100% inappropriate and even rude here. "Give her the venue's details and tell her to call them up and order her own bottles off their wine list, I am sure they will be happy to oblige her at $80 a bottle," one of the responders aptly wrote.
In addition, people in the comments reasonably noted that the stepmother’s idea can actually bring a lot of problems to the newlyweds. "Most venues would consider byob a breach of contract," someone noted. "Unbelievably rude to drag cooler of your preferred wine to someone else's wedding (unless byob coolers is the wedding vibe!)" another commenter added. And what do you, our dear readers, think about all this?
People in the comments unanimously sided with the author, saying that her stepmom was completely inappropriate and even rude here
