Well over a year ago I joined the Greenville Wine Meetup. As the name implies, it's a social organization based on wine.
If you organized a root canal around wine, I'd be there.
Joining, of course, is different than going. I had never been to a meeting.
Greenville's Wine Meetup averages roughly two get-togethers a month. A bit of math tells me that I had probably missed no fewer than 18 meetings in a row, and probably more like 25.
Some of those meetings were on dates when I was traveling and others fell on a night when I had other things planned.
There were also some wine dinners at $75 to $100 a pop. I'd look at the menu, running down the list of appetizers, salads, main courses and so forth. As I went, I'd mentally check off each one: Nope, I'm not going to eat that, or that or that, that one maybe, that one no way...
When I go to a wine tasting, I want to sip or drink or swill wine, not eat food. It's my policy.
Fifteen or twenty bucks to taste some wine and I'm in; seventy-five to one-hundred bucks for food I'm not going to eat? Get a grip.
Several months ago I also joined something called the Sniffer Society, which is a wine club of sorts sponsored by the Nose Dive. Nose Dive is one of four restaurants operated by Greenville's Table 301 that also owns my favorite downtown joint Soby's.
As it turns out, Richard Peck, the guy who honchos the Greenville Wine Meetup, is the sommelier for Table 301. As such, he also runs the Sniffer Society.
This is some riveting stuff, no?
Hey, it's a blog; I've got to fill it with something.
Where was I? Oh yeah...The Sniffer Society now does mini wine tastings on the first Thursday of the month at Nose Dive to showoff a special selection of wines it offers Society members at a discount.
Wine Meetup members are invited as well.
I tell you all of this as prologue to announcing that I attended my first Wine Meetup gathering last night, even if it was really a Sniffer Society function.
The wine was very good. They had a nice spread of hors d'oeuvres, which I didn't sample, by the way. I am philosophically opposed to eating standing up. I might spear a cheese cube with a toothpick, but that's the extent of my grazing. This is also my policy.
The upstairs lounge at Nose Dive, with its several sofas and easy chairs, is a terrific space for such a function.
I met a nice couple and we had an engaging conversation about wine and pet sitters.
See, I can be social.
As it turns out they are from Florida's west coast. You can't swing a dead cat in Greenville without hitting a half dozen former Floridians. We are like human kudzu here.
Now that I got my toe wet, I'll partake in more of these little shindigs. It's not like I have anything else to do.
Of course, I already know I'll be out of town the first Thursday of next month.
Drat! I should have told my new buds that I'd see them in a year and a half.
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