Welcome to a new series with which I'm trying to reinvigorate the DaveTronik 2000 blog. In these posts, I will write about an item or items currently stored in the unfinished side of my basement. Many of them have been stashed in boxes for decades, waiting for this moment.
Today's item: an empty bottle of Freakshow Wine, a Cabernet Sauvignon from Michael David Winery.
I gravitate toward things with strange names, whether on a restaurant menu (huaraches, for example, a lovely Mexican dish featuring pinto beans, onions, potatoes, red salsa, chicken/beef/pork and named for popular sandals of the same name), albums in a record store (Crippled Pilgrims, Butthole Surfers, And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead, Haircut One Hundred) or bottles of wine.
I don't drink much wine, so when I do, I like to buy something with a funny name that can taste like rancid pond water as far as I care, as long as the label makes me laugh. I initiated this method of buying wine back in 1989, when Beth and I celebrated our first dating annniversary on a weekend trip to Vermont. We whooped it up in a motel with a pizza and a bottle of Space Shuttle White Wine from Bully Hill Vineyards.
I'd never heard of the vineyard or the wine, but I couldn't resist the name and the label. I did the same thing when I bought the Freakshow Wine. I had no idea if it would taste any good (I think it did), and frankly I didn't care.
So why do I have the bottle? To give a little man-cave ambience to the basement. It sits alongside my guitars, pedals, cords, folders and notebooks of songs going back decades, the beer fridge and other random rock 'n' roll shit. I am the only one in my household who ever sees it, and I don't pay it much mind when I'm playing my guitar. But it's nice to know it's there, keeping things weird.
