Blame it on Rioja

All hail the re-masculization of wine!

The Onion—American pop-culture’s endlessly renewing and frequently hilarious repository of what’s knowing, biting, clever, and smove—has fastened its mock-frock of coolness and muttered a solemn benediction over the American male’s consumption of wine.

Well, sort of. 

In a multi-authored Q&A that appears this week in The Onion’s A.V. Club, called “Personal Drinks of Choice,” A.V. Club staffers answer the seasonal question, “what spirits and libations are [you] using to steel [your] nerves before/during/after the holiday fiestas and fiascos?”  

Although freelancer Jason Heller copped to a promise that he’d split a PBR tallboy with his little bro (to keep things real, presumably), he admitted, too, that nowadays, “I will indulge in a glass of wine with my girlfriend over dinner—usually a spicy Shiraz or a Rioja.”

Et viola!

As I wrote back in July:

In recent years we have witnessed what I have called a ‘remasculization of popular wine appreciation,’ which is to say that, for men outside the bottle-collecting, fine-dining urban male elite (for whom wine connoisseurship has long been a matter of almost fetishistic devotion), having a passion for wine no longer emasculates the American male; on the contrary, it gives him an advantage, especially among women.

But recent comprehensive national research has shown that it is still women who exert the most significant influence over wine-market forces.

Notice how Heller mentions his girlfriend?

Of course, he does go on to say that “back in the day, I used to get sh*t-faced f*cking plowed every Thanksgiving Eve and Christmas Eve. I’d usually warm up with a couple of Newcastles before diving into alternating shots of cheap bourbon and well tequila. I was in it to win it. (Um, that is, until I lost it.)”

I’m pretty sure that he ain’t posturing here, because it sounds a little too familiar to me. Except that I cut the cheap bourbon with Dr. Pepper.