Thursday, May 22, 2014

Lo Hai Qu Starts Her Wine Club!


Lo Hai Qu, my somewhat crazy intern, asked me if she could once again publish her thoughts on HoseMaster of Wine™. I never know what the hell Lo is going to say, but I'm sure it will be her usual brand of outrageous. So let me apologize in advance for this latest post by Lo Hai Qu.

So me and my friend Loqueesha are in this wine club, though I don’t know why we’re in this stupid wine club, I can boost plenty of wine from the HoseMaster’s free samples, and a lot of it is the same shit we get from the UPS guy, who Loqueesha has a crush on and keeps asking if he'll deliver his package to her overnight. So, like four times a year we get a case, exactly like Loqueesha’s bladder infections. It’s usually half white and half red, like Oprah’s Book Club—get it? Half white and half read! Shizzangela made that joke up, but she loves Oprah cuz Oprah makes her weight fluctuations seem normal, which isn’t easy considering one day you see Shizzy and she looks like there might be trapeze artists under her dress, and the next month it looks like she must have flown around the inside of Staples Center like a leaky balloon. She crazy. Anyway, I don’t know how Loqueesha talked me into being in this lame wine club with her. I don’t even know where she signed up for it. Anybody else heard of the Preparation H Wine Club? What’s weird is all the wines come in shrink wrap. I think she got a deal because she buys Preparation H in bulk, mostly to put on her little Mexican Hairless, which is not her dog.

I’m not really an expert on wine, but I know what I like, which is what kids who torture pets say, but it seems like most of the wines we get are really cheap crap. Like I try to Google the appellations and I can’t find any of them. “Cotes de Tongue?” Where the fuck is that? If I want Cotes de Tongue I’ll go down on a hippie. That’s the kind of shit we pay like $100/case for. I mean, I’ve heard of a “California” appellation, which means all the grapes have to come from California, but not from places that make good grapes. It’s sort of like “Locally Grown” at Safeway—yeah, it’s grown near some Safeway somewhere, just not yours. We get a lot of wine from “California.” "California" wine is wine that’s Wine Country adjacent, like it’s wine tofurkey. And last time we got some Spanish white wine--first of all, who wants Spanish white wine, man, that’s like Mississippi vodka or something, you just know when you put it in your mouth you’re gonna start playing some albino banjo, and bad enough it’s Spanish white, it’s from some weird grape called Hondarribi, which my Dad used to drive a beat-up 1989 one, and one time almost backed over Loqueesha’s Mexican Hairless, even after he saw it in the rearview mirror, which about caused him to have a heart attack. She needs to not let that thing out.

Why do people join these stupid wine clubs? Like everybody has a wine club! The NRA has a wine club, cuz, you know, the only thing missing when you own a gun is alcohol. Every magazine and newspaper has a goddam wine club, like it’s some kind of public service, or their responsibility. There’s an article in the New York Times about alcohol-related deaths happening somewhere in the world like every three seconds. Shit, there goes another one. Fell asleep at the wheel. Hell, there’s another one. Every three seconds is like fifteen every minute or so, and five more innocent bystanders! But on the opposite page of the paper is a full-page ad for the New York Times Wine Club! What the fuck? So then you have an article about how heart attacks are the number one killer of women and on the next page you print a giant-ass BOO!? Yeah, the New York Times, the Newspaper of Drunk Driving Record.

Anyways, I told Loqueesha I’m done payin’ for the Prep H Wine Club (nice motto, though, “You’ve already picked your seat, let us pick your wine!”). But then I started thinkin’ I should start a wine club. It’s like super easy money! You get these fake wines, well, they’re real wine, but they’re like totally fake labels, like you can’t find them in any stores, so the “retail prices” you just make up. “Oh, this sells for $25 a bottle, if you could get it, which you can’t because we just now slapped the labels on it, but your wine club price is only $15, so that’s 40% off!” What's better than 40% off an imaginary price?! All the prices are made up, but that’s perfectly legal cuz the whole wine business is built on made-up prices, I guess, judging by how none of them make any sense. I might as well cash in, too.

But the HoseMaster says I can’t start a wine club without a license, like I’m a goddam cockapoo, from some gay porn or something. I’m not sure I believe him. I mean, we wouldn’t sell to anybody under 21. They’d have to click on that little box on the website that says they swear to the Internet God that they’re 21. If you lie to Internet God you go straight to Internet hell, which is basically having aol.com for your email. So I’d be OK legally, I think. And then that fucking wet blanket HoseMaster, and, believe me, wet blanket is right up his alley, he has more nocturnal emissions than Mauna Kea, tells me that I won’t be able to ship to every state. Like I’m so stupid I’d believe that. Yeah, sure, I know Utah is out cuz the whole state is Church of the L.D.S., which stands for Let’s Drink Secretly. But who cares, I can sell to everybody else.

Yeah, I know what you’re thinking. How am I going to choose the wines for the “Lo Down Wine Club™?” It won’t be that hard. Let’s say I send out four different cases a year. That’s only six whites and six reds every twelve months! I mean, I can use the same white wine in every quarterly shipment, I just have to make up some new label. Shit, the people in those wine clubs, they can’t tell! You send ‘em a nice little made-up information sheet every shipment, tell ‘em one time the wine is made from “Trebbiano,” and then the next time it’s made from “Ugni Blanc,” and they don’t know. They’re in a cheap and stupid wine club, what the hell do they know about wine? It’s like free dating sites—nobody’s on there because they have a fucking clue about people, they’re on there because they wanna get fucked once in a while. See, this is perfect. There’s my “Lo Down Wine Club™” motto!

Join the new Lo Down Wine Club™! It’s for when you want to get fucked once in a while!

And HoseMaster of Wine™ readers get a special discount! Join now!


7 comments:

Thomas said...

"tell ‘em one time the wine is made from “Trebbiano,” and then the next time it’s made from “Ugni Blanc,” and they don’t know"

Is that what's known as an insider joke?

Charlie Olken said...

No, an insider joke is to know that the grape is also called Round Clarette, Sour Muscat and White Syrah. But my favorite of all is Cadillac, which this grape aint.

Not that Cadillac is Cadillac anymore.

renzo said...

Q: 1) Low-brow or 2) high-minded?

A: #3, and funny, too ;)

The Sommeliere said...

Lo really seems to have gotten her juju on with this wine club biz!

Marcia Macomber said...

Dang! Thomas and Charlie got to all the good comebacks first. That Lo... she's quite the creative intern...

Ron Washam, HMW said...

Hey Common Taters,
Lately, when I just don't feel like writing HoseMaster, I turn to Lo Hai Qu's Voice. She crazy. But Lo is meant to be the HoseMaster's imaginary character, not mine. So in my head, I hear him channeling Lo. Yes, it's pretty complicated inside my cranium. And scary.

Thank you for putting up with my foolishness. These really are just writing exercises for me, fueled by frustration and a bit of anger at what an annoyingly fake business the wine business is most of the time. HoseMaster of Wine™ is highly self-indulgent, and an acquired lack of taste. I'm surprised anyone reads it. But judging from the rest of online wine journalism, as tedious as watching hours of religious TV, and having much in common with same, it seems folks will read anything.

Unknown said...

That was pretty fantastic, and hit fantastically close to home.
Lo got 2 out of the 3 requirements to starting a wine club.
1) same wine, different label.
2) discount on a fake price.
but she forgot about
3) call yourself the winemaker.