(as written by Jeff)
A number of years ago, my parents received a bottle of Maurice Car’rie Sara Bella blush wine from a dinner guest. Blush wine isn’t on the menu in their house, so the bottle made its way into our Yankee swap (i.e. white elephant) gift exchange at Christmas. Somehow, I ended up with the bottle. And thus began the saga of the most shared bottle.
It started innocently enough. I didn’t want to be saddled with it, so I snuck it into my parents’ wine rack when they weren't looking. They vowed revenge and the bottle wound up in the bottom of a gift basket my parents gave us for Christmas the next year. This escalated into a tit for tat exchange where the couple with the bottle re-gifted it to the other at the next Christmas in increasingly surprising ways.
Here are just a few ways the bottle was shared:
It was delivered to my parents as an amenity when they checked into a hotel for a get-away weekend.
My parents shipped the bottle to my in-laws’ house and had them put it under their Christmas tree when we were there for Christmas one year. It totally caught us off-guard.
We hid it in their house at Thanksgiving and waited until Christmas to email them a video that showed where they could find the bottle in their guest room.
Finally, it came to the inevitable end. My parents gave us a really nice bottle of 2008 Gypsy Boots Pinot Noir as a peace offering in exchange for officially retiring the shared bottle. We agreed to accept the olive branch under one condition – we had to open the bottle and try it.
It wasn’t good.
