Since I had a few different folks tell me about this story that ran in the San Francisco Chronicle a few days ago, I thought that, since it amused me, I’d pass it on to the readers of these pages.
The full story can be read on their site, but here are some of my favorite excerpts.
For some reason, Democrats can’t shake the perception that they hang with a bunch of wine-swirling, cheese-eating elites. This despite Barack Obama raising a glass of beer with voters more than once and even having a tribute brewed to him in Kenya. Hillary Clinton was seen knocking back a shot of Crown Royal (really, watch it), though the fact it was Canadian whisky didn’t exactly help.
Despite this, the rumors continue that Obama is in fact more of a wine drinker, which I wholeheartedly endorse — so long as he’s not one of those Nixonian types who serves the plonk to guests while hiding the good Bordeaux for himself. (Fine, fine. So Nixon also brought Schramsberg to China along with diplomacy.) But watching the election maps turn ever more blue last night — and watching the whole West Coast back Obama — set me wondering where the wine-producing states fell on the electoral map. I’ve spent so much time reading Fivethirtyeight.com in the past few weeks that this exercise didn’t even seem remotely dorky. (Though I’m sure those guys will have a better way to have calculated this sort of thing.)
and
Still, it’s no longer possible to just pin this on wine being a blue-state phenomenon, or a coastal one. As I pointed out not long ago, wine is now a 50-state affair, and states like Ohio and North Carolina hold not only political kingmaking power but increasing winemaking power as well.
But the real fun is in the statistics that follow the prose. Well, some of the mouth-breather comments are kind of fun in a NASCAR wreck kind of way, but such is the state of most newspaper comment sections.
