This Bottle of Wine I Got Free from Work

One of the coolest parts of my job as a copy editor/page designer at a newspaper in Northern California is that I occasionally get free wine. See, we have a wine critic, and if she actually drank the full bottle of every wine she reviews, she'd need a liver transplant about every week. So rather than put herself at that kind of risk, she samples each wine and passes off the partial bottles on the newsroom staff.

If you act quickly, you often can get a pretty good bottle of wine that would retail for $50 or so. Now, I'm no connoisseur, so I usually go with our columnist's ratings and look for bottles with more than a few swills left because who wants just one glass of wine with dinner?

This week, I scored a bottle of Windsor Vineyards' 1998 Merlot. A full bottle. Retails for $25. Rated 3 stars, which according to our ratings system is "good."

Now I should preface this review with a note about my wine preferences. I tend not to like Merlot that's particularly dry. In fact, I much prefer white wine, but I grabbed the red this time out because I'm trying to acquire more of a taste for it, seeing as how it's allegedly healthy and all.

On first sip, Windsor's merlot tastes a bit drier than I normally like 'em, but it's not so bad and hey, it's free. I'll have it with cheese and crackers while I edit some upcoming Flak content and prepare the budget of this week's articles.

Well, a couple of articles — and a coule of glasses of wine later — OI'ms feeling pretty good aboutt his whole free wine thing. Ican't really tell you much more about the wine other than ti tastes' pretty good, and it's eespecialy good with these cheese and crackers I'm eating. I bought em at Traverso's deli, where my friend Aaron's dad works.

Shit. I've edited all of Flak's artils now and this wine is fucking great. U hyst polisthed off teh bottle. You know what i like most about Flak? I can drink whie while I'm editing the web site and no one every notices or complains. Not that that's really a barrier for my regular work. I think this bottle represents the first drinking I've done this month. It's Oct. 20. Just throwing that bit of info in thare becuasue my mom reads this stuff sometime and I don't want her to get to worry.

The other thing I like about working on Flak is that every body's fucking great. I mean, Jim and Jessica00 live in Boston, I live in the SF Bayh area, Clay lives in Chicago, Sean lives in Madison and Julia lives somewhere in Michigan and we put out a magazine every goddamn day and it reads well most of the time and usually doesn't have too many mistakes in it and well, it's just so wonderful to be involved with it. There, I wanted to say that. I don't say it enough.

I. Love. Flak. Magazine.

Not that my day jb is so terible. Hey, they give me free wine ane everyone's pretty cool and all. It's nice to be back working with gnus.... heh, that's news... copy again. Wait, I'm supposed to be reviewing the wine. Well, it's pretty grapey and it'll get you drunk if that's important to you. Otherwise, I suppose it's ap retty good merlot. I gotta go tob ed or eat a snack or call up an ex-girlfriend or somethinng.

— Eric Wittmershaus (ericw at flakmag dot com)