A Touch of Sophistication

When exactly does the primal instinct to drink beer and eat pizza transform into an urge to taste wine and snack on tiny pieces of cheese? Is there an age when all of a sudden cheese is too good to socialize with sauce and crust, when swirling wine around in your mouth like it's Listerine is more manly than owning the competition at the Beirut table?

And why oh why is this tranformation considered sophisticated? Let's take wine, for example. You know how they make wine? They step on grapes. Some asshole's feet were in that shit. And chances are it was some migrant worker making $5 a month, and you know damn well that guy can't afford Tough Actin' Tinactin (BOOM!) because he's got to feed his wife, his sixteen kids, and his burro. Drinking Pablo's foot juice is classy? And what about the cheese, most of which smells like Pablo's feet? No matter how many crackers you slather it on, no matter how much J$ tries to convince you it deserves to be prayed to five times a day while facing Wisconsin, cheese is not a meal. Cheese is old milk. Cheese is cheese because it's two days away from turning into a steaming pile of festering bacteria with a mind of its own and a license to kill.

Sophistication is also supposed to go hand in hand with intelligence. The two are generally inseperable. So why, then, does one drink wine that will make one drunk while simultaneously eating cheese that will give one the shits? Choosing which end of your body should be positioned over the commode is not a fun decision at 3 in the morning. That's just poor planning, which reeks of stupidity, which is the opposite of intelligent. Therefore, this is not sophisticated.

So who was it who stood up and declared that wine and cheese parties are sophisticated affairs? Probably some jackass with a vineyard and a dairy farm and a very large advertising budget. This jackass can be summed up with one word: pretentious. Pretentious, as any of the five literate people in America can tell you, comes from the latin root "pretend," which, roughly translated, means "to be full of shit."

His first forays into the business did not turn out go well. "Purple Foot Juice" and "Going to be Mold" didn't sell nearly as well as submarine screen doors or Hooked on Phonics for Gerbils. His follow up products, "I Can't Believe It's Not Purple Foot Juice" and "Might Be Mold, But Not Yet!" sold just as poorly, despite a heroic endorsement effort by Fitness Celebrity John Basedow.

But did this guy give up? No siree! Proper marketing can solve any problem known to mankind. Purple Foot Juice was finally renamed after the pathetic cries of the migrant workers who'd spent the last sixteen hours dancing the cha cha in tubs of grapes, thus becoming "wine" (dropping the h from "whine" makes the word appear to be European, which makes it that much more sophisticated). Going To Be Mold became "cheese" in an effort to remind the consumer of happy times taking photographs with loved ones, as all sophisticated people like to feel that they are more sophisticated than their immediate family.

Now you know the truth. It's all a pile of marketing horseshit.

So for your next party, eschew the wine and cheese. Sophistication? Pfffffffffffffffffffft.

Get a keg. Get some tunes. Get some Beirut. Get some Northeastern girls who've been pregaming since noon for a 10 pm party. And if you must add a touch of sophistication, look no further than Miller High Life, the Champagne of Beers.