A Bit of My Life » A Wine Tasting and A Mail Order Bride

A Wine Tasting and A Mail Order Bride - Does She Do It Sideways?

Anywhere Doug and I go is guaranteed to be interesting. We seem to attract odd people and events like magnets of blood and bone. Last late summer around this time was certainly no exception.

Spurred on by a need to imbibe vast quantities of alcohol, as usual, we decided to take a Sunday drive one day and stop by Peller Estates. Peller Estates is one of the premier producers of wine in the Niagara region, even though last year they had to buy a shiteload of their grapes from South America because the crops were so horrid for 2006 and 2007. This hardly affected the quality of the wine, merely its carbon footprint.

We signed up for a wine tour and tasting, with a wine and food pairing class to follow with one of the employees of the winery. As it has been a while I can’t remember the poor man’s title, but it was something equivalent to brewmaster. We went on the tour and it was quite informative; we learned how to “chuff” wine. I almost lost my cookies when the tour guide started chuffing, until I realized that it was “OK” - amazing what socialization will do. Chuffing involves essentially gargling the wine at the back of your throat to get the full flavour. Wine enthusiasts are probably passing out from the simplicity of that explanation; to pacify them I will say that there is probably more to it than that.

The lady from the front desk came striding down the stairs on a mission. That mission was to get us away from the tour group and send us up to our classroom, pronto. We asked her if it was starting early, as we had thought that it was timed to start with the end of the tour. She smiled blankly and just begged us to come upstairs. We deduced later that the instructor must have hit the panic button under the boardroom table and this was her answer to it.

We walked into the room and there were wineglasses set up for us, each for a different type of wine. There were also little plates of appetizers, each containing different combination of meats and cheeses. There was a very scared looking instructor, and only one other couple. The couple, of course, is why I am writing this for you, my eager readers.

The woman was stunning. I don’t mean that kind of airbrushed stunning that you see in a magazine, but that real life, flesh and blood stunning that makes women like her extremely rare jewels. She was casually dressed in an informal outfit - not jeans and a t-shirt but not over the top either. Her hair and makeup were perfectly done.

The guy was a different story. Tall and lanky, this guy got more than a few wedgies in high school. Heck, we wanted to give him one about ten minutes after meeting him. Outspoken and strident, to look at them you would think that there was no way the guy could have netted this lady unless he was a porn star.

We reserved judgment, made small talk, and I noticed that the lady had an accent. I asked her what her background was and she said that she had recently immigrated from Russia, with a furtive glance at her husband. That’s when the sun dawned on both of our little mental beaches - she was a mail order bride.

What ensued could have been a Mad TV or SNL skit, only I don’t think that they could have made this shit up. The instructor, who was very low key and unpretentious, found himself having to deal with multiple outbursts from the lanky weirdo, who claimed to know one of the Peller kids. The instructor asked him which one and he gave a name that the instructor had never heard of. The instructor wrote it off to “Peller” being a common name, but you could tell he was trying to put the smackdown on this pretentious git. He then went on about making his own wine on the balcony of his condo in Toronto, and essentially took over the conversation from there. All the while he was twirling his Masonic ring, which we had been informed belonged to his father, who was “quite high up” in the organization. I have never in my life met someone so keen to impress people.

When his lovely wife upstaged him with a rare remark, he essentially told her to be quiet. This wasn’t one of those “be quiet honey, you shouldn’t really be telling anyone about that mole on my nutsack” sort of quiet, it was more the “be quiet or I’ll ship you back to Russia, you good for nothing whore” kind of be quiet.

The instructor rushed through the session as quickly as possible to just get them out of the room. I’m sure we learned many wondrous things that day, such as the fact that wine goes with whatever you want it to go with and the traditional pairings of white with chicken and fish and red with steak had been tossed out aeons ago. Mr. Wannabe Mason didn’t like that piece of advice at all - he had brought his mail order wife to that class so that they would look very educated and cool at the dinner parties that they probably held for his loud, obnoxious friends and he wanted to know what went with what, goddamit. He actually resorted to picking up each wine and asking the instructor to tell him what he would serve with it - I believe the wife was writing it down. It was a pity because the whole point of the class was how to enjoy wine with food, not how to classify wine with food. We got it, and have since applied the lesson generously.

When we left we waited until they left the room, then the instructor left, then us. I tapped the instructor on the shoulder and said “were you thinking what we were thinking” and he looked at me and said “hell, yes.” We had a good laugh and he talked to us for a further 10-15 minutes about his job and the estate, and we shook hands and parted ways in bemusement over our shared experience.

The moral here? Guys, if you have to do the mail order bride thing, don’t treat her like one in public. It’s extremely creepy and not to mention disrespectful to her. I wanted to grab the poor thing and enroll her in a Woman’s Studies course at the University of Toronto just so she could get more of a sense that she didn’t have to sit there and take that, regardless of how she got over here. I guess that the message for mail order brides is that if the guy you married is an asshole in general when you get here, you don’t owe him jack. Nothing. Leave, and go to a halfway house where he can’t find you. The way most of you look you will have no trouble getting a job anywhere, in this lady’s case she could have been a supermodel. I may not have been able to help her, but I’m hoping someone reads this who is in a similar situation and it gives them the gumption to get out. It may have been funny, but it was also very sad.

I’m sure she’s not allowed to chuff.