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Half & Half
Truck stops and small bottles

                             
          Say you're in a foreign country. You want to tap into the local psyche without rising at dawn to catch the Wednesday fish market or subjecting your tender new language skills to the onslaughts of a crowded bar. Then it's time to hit the road, Jacques. While my colleagues gorge at 5 star restaurants, my secret favorite place to soak in strangeness is.....the highway rest stop.

           Yup, it's true. Because while certain road-trip rituals are universal--gas pump, sandwich, drink, bathroom--the differences are profound. You'll find CD's by local musicians, exotic candy, sophisticated cookies, soda in unthinkable flavors and a loo consisting of two footprints and a hole in the ground. You'll discover that a lot of countries have a dim view of the cardboard coffee cup with plastic lid, requiring you, instead, to stand at a bar and gulp your fix from a cup and saucer. If God hadn't sanctified the coffee/driving synergy, he wouldn't have invented cupholders, but then part of the foreign experience is challenging yourself to adapt.

           The clearest sign that you're not on the Kansas Interstate, though, is the selection of wine in half-bottles. To an American, there's something just plain wrong about a trucker washing down his lunch with a split of Bordeaux or Barolo instead of, say, a Bud. It does, however, highlight the issue of serving sizes.

           Do you feel compelled to finish an opened bottle? Does it languish in your fridge for months because you might get around to cooking with it? Does it pain you to leave a restaurant with wine still on the table, wine you paid good money for?

           Even as you cavalierly toss leftovers into the disposal, deaf to their plaintive cries of "Eat me! Eat me!," you might find it hard to pour wine down the sink. Perhaps it's the thought of all that skill the winemaker put in the bottle. Or maybe it's the traumatic memory of choosing and paying. Either way, wine is a terrible thing to waste.

            Take a hint from Euro-truckers: try the half-bottle.. Say you’re out to dinner with one of those “Wine’s first duty is to be red and damn the Pad Thai noodles!” types, and you had your heart set on Gewurz. Your choices are: duke it out, give in, or order from the by-the-glass menu, which, incidentally, has come a long way from the desultory days of the “house” brand.

           With half bottles, though, you can sip your white while watching your companion stoke firecracker shrimp with Shiraz, and you each put back the equivalent of only two glasses.  Even if your tastes are compatible, you might want to start off with sparkles and segue into red. A half bottle of each cuts down on waste and hangovers.

           The risk of trying a new or expensive wine is more palatable when halved. And--not that this has ever happened to any of us--but say you were the brilliant one who chose the wine and it turns out tasting like bilge water, only you don’t want to admit it, and besides, the waiter insists that it’s  “correct for its type.”  Well, then, the smaller the bottle, the shorter the humiliation.

           Half bottles are perfect for the business traveler who would rather look sophisticated than pathetically lonely at a table for one. Or for those mixed marriages between a wine-lover and someone with more rational uses for excess money. Somewhere between the three-martini power-fest and the low-carb energy bar on the Stairmaster lies the civilized lunch; a perfect time for the half-bottle. Just the right amount to return to the office in the ultimate, productive state: mellow but not sloshed. 

         T here are a few drawbacks: ounce for ounce, you'll pay more for a half-bottle, since bottling, corking and labeling are a fixed cost regardless of size. And with their higher relative surface area, small bottles are not good candidates for aging. 

           But perhaps the biggest drawback is selection. As we age, our days of slamming back Long Island Ice Tea and tequila Jell-O shots are numbered. We may go to Bob's Bulky Bunker to fill our SUV with wheelbarrows of Cheerios and twelve-packs of toilet paper, but our wine-buying is more selective. I hope the industry takes notice and starts making more wines available in this format.

           If they do, it will be nice to start drinking less but drinking better. You'll be in better shape for it. I mean, just look seniors at Euro truck stops. Can you imagine a golden age American navigating those footprints?

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