The wine sat in Derek’s grocery basket like a small, glittering indictment: twelve dollars and ninety-nine cents, the price tag blazing in neon yellow as though the universe itself wanted Vanessa’s entire dinner party to know exactly how much he valued their friendship. He picked it up, turned it away from a passing stranger — a woman he would never see again in his life — and felt his pulse tick upward. It wasn’t a bad wine, he told himself. The label had a château on it. Châteaux was French. French things were expensive. The château was probably fine.
“Just get it,” Patricia said from the cereal aisle, not even looking up from her phone. She possessed the serene, weaponized calm of a woman who had long ago made peace with being married to Derek.
“You can see the sticker from space,” he hissed, rotating the bottle as though a better angle might make twelve dollars look like forty.
Patricia finally looked up. “Nobody,” she said slowly, “cares.”
But Derek cared. Derek cared with the intensity of a man who once brought store-brand crackers to a book club and still woke up thinking about it at 3 a.m.
At home, Derek laid the bottle on the kitchen counter like a bomb he was about to defuse. The price tag mocked him, its adhesive apparently forged in the fires of Mount Doom. He started with his thumbnail, picking at the corner. A microscopic piece came off. At this rate, he’d have it removed by Derek Jr.’s college graduation.
“Scissors,” he muttered, retrieving the kitchen shears. He slid the blade under the sticker and pulled. The price tag held firm. The label did not. A chunk of the château tore away, taking with it what might have been a vintage year or possibly just a graphic design element meant to suggest one existed.
“Oh no. Oh no no no.”
Patricia appeared in the doorway, wine glass in hand, an anthropologist observing her subject in his natural habitat.
“Hair dryer,” Derek announced, already moving. Heat loosened adhesive. This was science.
Three minutes later, the label was bubbling like a pizza pocket in a microwave. The price tag remained, now fused to the glass with what appeared to be supernatural determination. Derek scraped at it with a butter knife. The sticker shredded into confetti-sized pieces, each one still clearly displaying fragments of “R121” and “.99.”
“I’ve made it worse,” he said to no one.
“You’ve made it interesting,” Patricia corrected, refilling her wine.
Vanessa’s dining room looked like a Williams Sonoma catalogue had achieved sentience and decided to throw a dinner party. Exposed brick. Edison bulbs. A charcuterie board that probably cost more than Derek’s car payment.
And Brad. Of course Brad was there. Brad, who once spent twenty minutes explaining why his coffee grinder cost R800. Brad, who wore a sport coat to a barbecue.
“Derek!” Brad’s hand clamped onto his shoulder like a vice. “What’d you bring?”
Derek clutched the wine bottle, its label now resembling something retrieved from a shipwreck. He’d positioned his thumb over the worst of the damage, but sticky residue clung to his skin like evidence at a crime scene.
“Oh, just a little… red.”
“Let me see.” Brad plucked it from his hands with the confidence of a man who had never experienced social anxiety in his life. He rotated the bottle, squinting at the mangled label. “Interesting. What region?”
“France,” Derek said. Probably. The château suggested France.
“Obviously. But where in France? Bordeaux? Burgundy? What’s the varietal composition?”
Derek’s mouth went dry. “It’s… a blend?”
“Tannin profile?”
“Tannic.”
Brad’s eyes narrowed. “What vintage?”
“A good one.”
Across the table, Patricia caught his eye and mouthed, Nobody cares. But Patricia was wrong, because Brad cared. Brad cared so much he was now holding the bottle up to the light like a jeweller examining a suspicious diamond.
“What’s this on the label?” Brad picked at something.
“Nothing!” Derek lunged for the bottle, but it was too late. A piece of neon yellow adhesive, no bigger than a fingernail, detached itself from the glass, performed a graceful arc through the air, and landed directly in Vanessa’s glass of Sancerre.
The table went silent.
Vanessa fished it out with one perfectly manicured finger. “R121.9—” she read, then stopped.
Derek wanted to die. Specifically, he wanted the earth to open up and swallow him, but only after he’d had a chance to apologize to everyone he’d ever met.
“I can explain—”
“Hidden gem!” Brad slammed his hand on the table, making the charcuterie board jump. “I knew it. You found a hidden gem.”
Derek blinked. “I… what?”
“These under-the-radar bottles are always the best. Last year I brought a wine to my boss’s retirement party—” Brad leaned in conspiratorially, “—bought it at a petrol station. Seventy rand. Best Malbec I’ve ever had. Never told anyone.” He paused. “Until now.”
Vanessa laughed, actually laughed. . I was terrified I’d have to pretend to know what ‘tannin profile’ meant.”
“I brought boxed wine to my sister’s wedding,” someone else offered.
“I once told people my Costco Prosecco was from a ‘small Italian vineyard,'” another guest confessed.
Derek looked at Patricia, who raised her glass in the universal gesture of I told you so.
By 11 p.m., they’d killed Derek’s R121.99 bottle, two more equally cheap bottles from Vanessa’s “secret stash,” and most of a handle of vodka someone found in the freezer. Brad was explaining his gas station wine philosophy to anyone who would listen. Vanessa was teaching people a drinking game that definitely violated several social contracts.
And Derek, slightly drunk and significantly relieved, realized that the only person who’d ever cared about the price tag was him.
The château on the label, he noticed, was just a clip-art castle.
It was perfect.