Wild Irish Rose

'Eat, Drink and be Murdered:' Dinner theater planned for this weekend in Clare

Drinking the Bottom Shelf: Richards Wild Irish Rose | Lemonade ...

I live in Cambridge, which is a strange place. Strange isn’t always the same thing as interesting, so I’ll try to keep this and future digressions on the workaday weirdness of my surroundings brief: I know we’ve got cheap booze to drink. But like any good story, this one needs to start in the middle.

One of the signature—and Bottom Shelf-relevant—oddities of this relatively rich place is that so many of the civilians operate in states of sartorial disarray. I tend to be a bit undersheveled myself; my nicest t-shirts are the ones with the bleach stains, because at least they indicate onetime proximity to a cleaning process. But even though my Sunday-best liquor distributor freebies have bathroom-cleaner scars, I still never feel underdressed around here. That’s because an uncommon percentage of my fellows are dirty grad students, dirtier hippies, or dirtiest street folk. It’s not always easy to sort individual specimens without whipping out the dirtometer. The good news here is that there’s rarely any good reason to sort them. The other news, if you’re an inveterate sorter like myself, is that the truth lies in the eyes: Grad students are dead-eyed, hippies are googly-eyed, and street folk are wild-eyed. So naturally I gravitate toward the street folk.

Most of Cambridge is the same as it ever was, but a couple grubby handfuls of things have changed since my last tour ended in the fall of 2009. Most of these changes don’t matter, so let’s complain about the ones that do. 1) The hamburgers have gotten very expensive. 2) The roads have all been bombed to the point of being borderline unbikeable, which won’t be noticeable come December because the city traded all the snow plows for LED signs that flash lies about street closings and detours. 3) My man Sammy’s gone.

Sammy was, I guess, a bum. The thing is, that word makes me uncomfortable. I have a filthy mouth and on any given day most of the things I say after “good morning” are offensive, but, for whatever reason, I’m uncomfortable calling a bum a bum. This is why I cringe a little bit every time I set about to review cheap fortified wine, because these things are popularly known as bum wines. There’s even a pretty funny website called Bum Wine . I like the site, hence the link, but as invaluable as the content is, I can’t fully endorse the tone. I’m not sure the author respects bums, which can only lead me to conclude he never met Sammy.

Wild Irish Rose

Wild Irish Rose

Wild Irish Rose

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