More on Outdoor Wine Drinking…and a Toast to Hans
I guess Dr. Vino and I are not the only ones with outdoor summer drinking on the brain. I woke up this morning to find an article in the New York Times about just that, called, summerily enough, “Ah, the Heat, the Crowd, the Park, and the Booze.”
“New York City is somewhat of a drinker’s paradise year round,” reporter Cara Buckley writes on the first page of the Metro section, “but a certain extra layer of permissiveness seems to infuse the city in the summertime, along with a wellspring of opportunities to get sloshed, slightly or mightily.”
Although I don’t remember seeing the following paragraph in the print version of the article this morning, a parenthetical disclaimer of sorts touches on the legality question we discussed yesterday:
“The official line from the city’s parks department is that alcohol cannot be brought into city parks, though in the summer of 2003, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg suggested that drinking wine at concerts in Central Park was O.K. At Bryant Park on July 7, a security guard said he turned a blind eye to booze on movie nights, ’so long as it is covered, like in a bag.’”
I remember a Swiss friend of mine in Spain making fun of having seen gainfully employed Americans carrying open bottles of wine in brown paper bags at outdoor events to elude the authorities, “like the hobos you see in the old movies, ahahaha…”
Laugh all you wish, Hans. Tonight, as I settle in to watch Bamako at the Socrates Sculpture Park Outdoor Cinema Series in Queens, and pop open a paper-shrouded bottle of 2001 Sierra Cantabria Gran Reserva whilst digging into a plate of lamb tagine cooked up by the folks at Mundo Cafe in Astoria, the summer sun setting over the East River and a nearly full moon on the rise behind me, I’ll drink a toast to you, my good man, wherever you are.
July 29th, 2008 at 6:58 am
[…] I recently read a post on Blame it on Rioja (reacting in turn to a post on Dr Vino) about New York City and the (il)legal and practical applications of drinking a bottle of wine while enjoying the city’s many concerts, movies, and other outdoor summer events. He mentions the friendly mockery of a Swiss friend living in Spain, laughing at having seen Americans carrying bottles around in brown paper bags – hobo style – to avoid detection by the law which in theory takes a more lenient approach to the city’s “no open container” law in the summer months. And while I wish that I could jump on that bandwagon of derisive European headshaking at the puritanical and restrictive attitudes of American laws, I must confess that in Madrid the legal rigmarole surrounding drinking in the street is actually quite similar. While I can’t speak for all of Spain, a few years ago the government of the capital city launched a new alcohol law that seriously restricted what we once considered a right, nay, a characteristic of European life itself! […]