On the Ball

On Tuesday of our South American adventure, we took a bus ride-- a very long bus ride, I might add-- to a vineyard in Casablanca.

Now, if you know me, you know how I feel about Casablanca. Imagine my excitement when every other word I picked up while Emily was making reservations in Spanish was 'Casablanca.' I'm no whiz at geography, so I let my imagination take off... Casablanca?! Could it be?! Will Rick be there?! Louis, too?! Holy night, my first time in the Southern hemisphere and I'm unexpectedly going to Casablanca too?! This is too good to be true!, my pea-brain thought.

And, of course, it was indeed too good to be true. As it turns out, there's more than one Casablanca. It's one of those right place, wrong time kind of things... Right name, wrong continent. Story of my life.

Pity party aside, we headed to Casablanca for a tour of a winery and a wine tasting. I'm not one for wine really, but my friend and my cousin are fans so I took one for the team. I tried to be a good sport at first, although my comrades hardly thought my holding my nose and shooting expensive wine was the correct etiquette for such an event, but I soon fell off the wagon.

In Chile, they have an expression that roughly translates to 'on the ball.' That is, 'I've drank just enough to feel like I'm standing on a ball.' Having little previous interest in wine, it only took a glass or two before I realized I had stepped off solid ground and onto a big, bouncy ball.

To cleanse the palette between glasses, the winery offers a vase of hard bread sticks to munch on. The winos around me assured me that a bite or two would do it, but I felt sure that in order to get off the aforementioned ball, I needed to take charge of the bread sticks. And so I did, further impressing the rest of the group with my sophisticated nature.

After I shot-gunned my third glass and followed it quickly by cramming multiple cracker sticks into my mouth to suppress my gag reflex, a darling man from Boston kindly offered to take my extra wine off my hands. We were, after all, moving into the more expensive bottles and he hated to see them go to waste on me... So from then on, I took one wretched sip for the experience and then passed the glass on to Mr. Massachusetts.

While Chasley and Em posed with pictures of their wine glasses held just so, I swept cracker crumbs off the front of my shirt and accepted the grim reality that I will never be so chic as to appreciate the woodsy aromas of dark reds or the citrusy undertones of chilled whites... And that's okay, I guess. I'll just sip my Coke Zero out of a pretty glass and keep my feet on firmer ground, away from the ball.