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Love in the Cellar: Cold & Wet

Written by Madeline Puckette

"Love in the Cellar" a bad wine

El Dorado wine country

A trip to a barrel tasting deep in the Sierra Nevada Mountains where gold has been long gone for a century.  Now the locals utilize the old stone buildings to make wine. 


A smiling Irish man is holding a wine thief full of a deep purple liquid.  I want to call the wine Alice because she looks young and playful.  He gestures towards me to hold up my glass and in goes dark Alice.  The man doesn’t say much about her pedigree, he just looks at me with a half smirk and asks,

“You want a standing orgasm?”

I put her in my mouth.  Greeted with a thick, sweet and gooey texture I feel completely useless against the intensity of flavor on my tongue.

[superquote]“Hello Alice.”[/superquote]

Placerville is the wine tourism hot spot in El Dorado Wine Country
Placerville Soda Works has old mining caves inside
It’s a frigid February deep in the Sierra Nevada mountains but I’m being warmed from the inside out.  No point swishing-and-spitting this satin clad succubus.  I’m going to need to find a hotel room.

About a half year after my trip to El Dorado wine country, a case arrives of my drunk-love wine. The bottle looks like something your grandma might sew on to a perfectly good sweater.  Little alarms go off in my head as I judge who this wine must be marketed for.  I assume since I liked her before, that it’s clearly just a silly label with amazing juice inside.

I’m eager to feel Alice again in my mouth so I pop a bottle immediately. Ugh, the aroma stinks of Marie Callendar’s blueberry pie. I break a sweat as I bring the tawdry-smelling wine closer to my mouth.  It tastes like sweaty fat lips and flabby legs that reminds me of a tootsie-roll pop.  Alice went from a beautiful goddess of the mountains to a truck-stop slut in nine months flat.

I waited about a year before opening another bottle having regifted some of Alice to non-wine-drinkers (sorry mom). But then on one cold afternoon I realized what Alice was good for.  She’ll warm me up on winter’s day.  Guaranteed.

The waterfall lives by the 50 in between Lake Tahoe & Placerville, CA
We spotted this waterfall by the I50 in between Lake Tahoe & Placerville, CA

Written byMadeline Puckette

James Beard Award-winning author and Wine Communicator of the Year. I co-founded Wine Folly to help people learn about wine. @WineFolly


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