Day 220: fake wine.

It has been another quite mind-boggling week, so tonight I went home, pulled the cork on a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon, poured myself a glass and drank it. I'm not kidding. I actually did what I just said I did. It was a 2007 bottle from the Nappa Valley, California, organic, vegan and sulphite free. And it tasted very much like the wine I used to know so well. Because it was wine. Wine with no alcohol in it. Sorry. That was quite a lame little build up. Forgive me. This is the closest I've come to drinking wine in 220 days. I couldn't let the moment pass without letting you think for at least a minute that I'd lost my sober nerve and fallen sort of not very dramatically off the wagon. As it happened in fact, my not falling off the wagon was doubly lame, in that I didn't actually fall off at all and that I only drank one glass of my non-alcoholic tipple. I exercised moderation in the thick of continued sobriety. Radical. Because what I think I discovered is that wine isn't very more-ish when it doesn't have alcohol in it. Weirdly enough, when you take the addictive stuff out of it, it kind of loses its um, appeal? This fake wine though, could serve a purpose. It definitely smelled like wine, and the flavour was just a touch more grapey than the boozy variety. But having it in a wine glass along with the other people in my house drinking their real stuff, I did feel a lot more like one of the gang. And if you didn't want to drink at a party, this would be a pretty awesome way of doing it undercover. So by all means give it a whirl if you're so inclined. When I bought the red I also bought a white, which has apparently won a Gold medal against other whites with alcohol in. I might try that one tomorrow. Woo. I can hardly wait.