Great Expectations

It wasn’t all that long ago that supermarket wines had names such as Gallo Hearty Burgundy and Almaden Chablis.
This situation has changed drastically. Visit Shaw’s or Hannaford and you will be enticed by wines with names such as Cycles Gladiator, Three Blind Moose, Fish Eye, Fat Bastard (not to be confused with Il Bastardo), Our Daily Red, Smoking Loon, Red Truck (a red wine) and White Truck (guess).

These labels have in common a certain quality of uselessness. They don’t tell you anything except that the vineyard wants to mess with your head or the bottler never got over the ’60s.

At the head of the class is “Running with Scissors,” which puts out a very nice Chardonnay (there’s a Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon, but I haven’t found them locally).

Why would a vineyard name a wine after a book? And why this book? Augusten Burroughs’ memoir of his gigantically screwed up childhood is a wonderful book (the 2006 movie didn’t quite make it) but what has it got to do with a flavorful bottle of $9.99 wine?

One can only hope that if the trend to name wines after books continues, the vintners might select more germane titles, such as “The Grapes of Wrath” for a headache-inducing cheap red, or “The Chalice” for a nice, Tuscan vin santo. Maybe slip one of those little accent marks into Umberto Eco’s novel to create “The Name of the Rosé.” How about “Come Fill the Cup” for a free-flowing box wine? The possibilities are endless. “The Catcher in the Rye” might be a nice name for a whiskey. And I can personally recommend a 100-proof vodka that would do well to be named “The Power of One.”