How To Drink Your Daily Wine: The Fair Pour

Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love My Daily Wine

My wife and I, we take different approaches to our daily dose of wine with dinner.

Me, I drink mine with food at the table. And I set a fair pace for myself. My wife, on the other hand, she sips her wine slowly and deliberately; with her meal, yes, but intending to take a glass away from the table. She calls this post-meal portion "the sipper."

Occasionally, though, the sipper's sabotaged. From time to time, I will dip once too often from the well, and the bottle runs dry. No sipper.

Now, when I pour for me, I pour for her, too. I'm not a monster. But if my glass is empty and hers is half full, you can see, the math doesn't add up. I refill mine; I merely top hers. The balance is tipped.

And so, in the interest of The Fair Pour and an equal measure for all, here's what we hit upon. Two little pitchers, each holding the same volume, which, magically, turns out to be half a bottle of wine.

With an equal measure poured into each pitcher, how we choose to empty our own is, as Steve Martin would have it, "up to each individual's personality and style."

Nobody's getting ripped off. And we're better able to monitor how much we're drinking. It's a win-win for daily wine. And maybe also a win for the overall marriage situation.

*Of course, the idea is to drink 2/3 of the bottle, leaving some for the next day. This only works when you have a "house wine" -- another bottle of the same wine on deck to replenish the leftover 1/3 on day two. We rotate a house wine, which keeps things interesting. If you can find a boxed wine you like, the rationing out is easy. And let me be clear, we pour the full 750ML much of the time. But it's always a fair pour.

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