Ninety-Nine Bottles of Wine on the Wall

   There are all kinds of volunteer opportunities available. Some can get you stabbed in a god-forsaken refugee camp. Others may result in no more than a sore back from picking up trash along a stretch of highway you've adopted. Teresa and I are volunteers at the local hospital. We started off working Saturday mornings at the hospital coffee/gift shop. For some reason that gig ended and we weren't called for a few years.
   But then we were asked to pour wine at the nursing home Christmas dinner. That was fun. At the end of the night we saw staff about to empty the half full wine bottles into the sink. "Whoa!" we said. "We'll take care of those."
   This past Saturday we were asked to run the Wine Pull table at the annual hospital fund raising dinner. This is a fancy to-do with fine food, flights of wine and a panoply of silent auctions and games to induce the upper classes of our town to part with their loose twenties to support the hospital. Certainly a worthy cause.
   As I say, we were in charge of the Wine Pull. "Everyone A Winner." We stood in front of a table covered with 96 bottles of wine. Also on the table was a glass bowl with 96 numbered corks in it. People paid $20 to pull a cork from the bowl. Each bottle in the racks had a tag around its neck. We read the number on the cork then hunted for the corresponding  bottle and slowly, carefully pulled it from the rack. Some bottles perched precariously in these racks that weren't really suitable for holding wine bottles.
   The previous year Teresa had been working the table next to the Wine Pull and had seen a wine bottle smash on the wooden floor. It took two rolls of paper towels to soak up the blood-red wine. Teresa warned me that we had to work together to carefully slide the bottles out the rack to prevent disaster.
   Some people took their bottle and left. Others would pout if they didn't get the kind of wine they liked. Sorry, no refunds. Move along please. We made it through the night without any accidents, though there were a couple of minor snafus with the numbered corks. We went home and had a glass of wine to relieve our stress.
   If we're asked to do the Wine Pull next year, we're going to demand some changes. First, get rid of those ridiculous wine racks. Maybe use them to hang posters of Napa Valley. That's all they're good for. Second, set all the bottles upright on the table. Third, Teresa and I will come in early and number the corks. Each bottle's number will relate to it's sweetness. Number one will be Boone's Farm Sugar Afternoon. Just kidding. It will actually be a Moscato, the wine for people who don't like wine, but have to drink it to be sociable. The next set of numbers will  be for the White Zins, then the Rieslings, and on up through the Chardonnays, the Pinot Grigios, the Sangioves, the Valpolicellas, the Montepulcianos, etc., etc. It's not rocket science you know.
  So next year when someone draws a 96 and says "Chianti! Yuck! Don't you have any Germurtzraminer?" We'll say, "Try again. Keep fishing till you find a cork between fifteen and twenty." This could lead to long lines at the cork bowl. So maybe we'll divide the corks numerically into ten bowls to help us help people feel good. Isn't that what a hospital's all about? People feeling good?

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