I had the pleasure of spending part of last weekend’s trip to Connecticut with the Drunken Accountant, an old friend of mine from back in the day. (We also spent some time with the proprietors of the music store where we worked for most of our teens and twenties, but they deserve a post all their own. Suffice it to say they showed up at my parents’ house around midnight with a gallon of vodka, a can of Diet Dr. Pepper, and the kind of vim and vigor that only those whose nest has recently emptied can have.)

Who is the Drunken Accountant? She’s a badass flautist who will knock your socks off on not just a regular old silver flute, but a Chinese flute, as well. She’s been known to squirt out a few tunes on the saxophone, the clarinet, and the stand-up bass. Just to keep things interesting, she’s also teaching herself how to play her grandfather’s violin. She supported herself during her twenties and early thirties by cobbling together various teaching and playing gigs, until she finally got sick of the lousy pay and non-existent health insurance and went back to school for an accounting degree.

Most importantly, she’s the person I started drinking wine with way back when I decided vino was much more fun to imbibe than, say, the overly sweet cocktails I favored during most of my underage drinking years. We both worked at an awesome Italian restaurant out in Avon, CT, which is where I first learned about Italian wines. (I also had my first taste of Portobello mushrooms, calamari and radicchio, but that’s another story, as well.) In the beginning we mostly drank jug wine before graduating to the 1.5 liters, and then, when we could afford it, the regular old bottles that most of the good stuff comes in. We had a lot of laughs, flirted with a lot of boys, and drank our share of bad wine, along with the occasional surprisingly-good-for-our-price-range bottle.

We once had a salesman at a little wine store in Glastonbury sell us a wine made in upstate New York by describing the taste as “foxy.” When pressed as to what, exactly, “foxy” meant, in relation to wine, I remember a lot of hemming and hawing on the part of the salesman, and plenty of giggling on our part. We were too intrigued not to buy it, although, sad to say, we did pay a price later on. To sum up the experience, I’ll leave you with a haiku by the Drunken Accountant herself:

XXX Poison XXX

Flavors just bursting

Mixture of tar and wet dog

That’s what “foxy” means