Cheap wine

I'm a fan of cheap wine. I've had some tonight, in fact—a glass of the cheapest chianti sold at my neighborhood grocery store. At $6 for a 1.5 liter bottle, it's as cheap in unit cost as Three Buck Chuck. At double the size, the bottle will last Laura and me several weeks. It won't go bad during the time the bottle is open because the wine starts out that way. Every glass delivers on the thrifty promise of cheap table wine.

There's an XKCD comic on the subject of cheap wine. To me, that comic isn't funny so much as it's factual commentary about American life. A lot for what passes for culture and refined taste in these United States is little more than collective failure to resist corporate mass-marketing. This isn't blame; it's tough to tell the difference between what's a commercial and what isn't. Take something like the Food Network. Is there a single minute on that channel that isn't an ad for something? Consume enough of that kind of television, and you're sure to start believing that there's something deficient with your food and drink, that you're missing out on something better. Even if it were true, why would you want to believe it?

The best-tasting food I ever eat is whatever I happen to eat after a long bike ride. I'm talking about the length of ride that goes on for most of a morning, where I burn thousands of calories, and bonk, and that for the last hour or so I can barely navigate home through the thick haze of an incapacity to think of anything other than eating. Hunger is the best flavor-additive, and I'm sure a peanut butter sandwich that ends a huge calorie deficit is a finer food than anything anyone eats at a gourmet restaurant that same day. What a deal.

I drink cheap wine but ride expensive bicycles. That's a quirk of how I allocate my resources. Everyone's different and has unique preferences. But for those of us of limited means, a good universal strategy is to figure out what's important to us and to not waste our life trying to obtain more than that. And to not let others convince us of what's important.