Blurred Writing.

Well now, it's not fair to pick onDavid Brooks, when a younger female columnist was caught making the same tonal mistake over at the Bloomberg News.

Drinking to Blur Party Lines
Nov 13, 2015 2:57 PM EST
By Megan McArdle

There was perhaps a time in America when your political affiliation was a modest part of your identity, like your preference for the Rotary Club over the Lions Club, or for Fords over Chevys. Perhaps. If that time ever existed, it is clearly gone. Increasingly, politics is tangled up with your choices about everything from friendship to cars. The Republican who likes avant-garde novels and $200 nose-to-tail dinners, the Democrat who confesses to an unironic affection for Nascar and marshmallow Jell-O salad -- these aberrations may be tolerated, but there will always be a little asterisk next to their names, denoting a suspicion that they are not reliable party faithful.

In such an environment, no detail of your consumption should be left to the happenstance of personal taste, lest you inadvertently signal some sympathy with the amoral cretins of the opposition. Your house, your clothes, your home furnishings -- are all reflections of who you are as a person, which is to say, as a voter. Even your choice of wines may be safely left up to political ideology, now that National Review on the right and the Nation on the left have started offering wine clubs to their fans.

Naturally, I had to subscribe to both.

If it weren't time-stamped, I'd swear she stole a page from Brooks' playbook: you know, going in, that you're shamed to be spending so much for so very little (is the plated nose-to-tail dinner for example, a freshly caught and finely cooked fish? for $200? somebody's pockets are leaking money...)*.

So like Brooks, McArdle turns up her nose at what she's not paying for...

For $70 apiece, I was sent two boxes of wine, each containing 14 bottles. Then I invited over my friend Matt Ficke, a software developer who used to be a sommelier and the manager of DC’s fanciest cocktail bar. We sat down with his wife, Becks, and my husband, Peter, to discover what we had.
...
It took us three bottles to get to anything that anyone would consider drinking for any reason other than scientific inquiry.
...
The next bottle, a Silver Pony Cabernet Sauvignon from the Nation, represented a substantial regression. Matt licked his lips, stuck out his tongue and looked pained. His wife dumped the glass into our spit cup, declaring that it was too sweet. Indeed, when I tasted it, it was unpleasantly reminiscent of communion wine.

Things did get better after that, though they were uneven. ...
“Why would they send you a 2012 sauvignon blanc?” asked Matt. Sauvignon blancs are generally supposed to be drunk young.

“Under no circumstances would I finish a glass,” said Peter.

“This is my new cooking wine,” said I. Becks gave it a 3, but only for use in white wine spritzers.

If you read it for fun, the story is a hoot, complete with "scientific" tabulating in the end -- after the drinking -- comparing the "republican" wines with the "democratice" wines from the two clubs, and declaring a "winner".

And who won the showdown? National Review won, even though they didn’t have the best bottle. However, the Nation was getting dragged down by the 0 points everyone had awarded the rose, and it felt a little unfair to the Nation to judge them on a bottle that had been corked -- something that does happen despite the best efforts of vintners and distributors. So I re-ran the numbers knocking out the highest and the lowest rated wine from each box … and National Review still won. Conservatives who feel dissed by wine-sipping coastal snobs now have a rebuttal ready.

But if you weren't reading for fun, but for advice?

If you prefer a Miller Lite, of course, then you should probably skip the wine club. You can always devote more time to your Facebook rants to prove your party loyalty. To whichever party.

I think the biggest takeaway, the most pertinent exclamation of our mindless times is this:
Take the Freebies! A healthy expense account, whether it be trips you're not gung-hu about or wines you spit out, is really the ultimate 21st century status symbol. For both parties, no?

Well, I canceled our subscriptions, but that’s because we now have 30 bottles of wine sitting in our house waiting to be drunk. (Yes, I forgot to cancel right away, and I ended up with a second shipment from each club.) At the introductory price of $70 a box, the shipments were a great value. At the regular price -- about $10 a bottle -- it sort of depends on what you’re interested in.

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* Nope. Nose-to-tale is just a native throwback: new chefs are discovering ways to eat the whole animal, with little wasted. In some places, that never went out of style...

ADDED: I'm not a big drinker myself, but I think for younger patrons, many are passing on the wines and going iin for the craft brew craze. No political signaling, but then, this is not DC.