My Fellow Inebriates,

The head-lice notice came home from school AGAIN today. This time a kid in Miss V’s class has bugs, so my dad spent 15 minutes this evening combing through both girls’ hair to make sure LBHQ hadn’t been infested.

Despite her habit of bestowing hugs upon and sharing hats with every friend she has, P was relaxed during the inspection. V was freaking, though. Every few weeks one classmate or another has been positive for lice, and V is a natural pessimist, so she was probably thinking her number had come up.

Phew. No lice.

And that’s how the kids felt. Read this (from HealthLinkBC) and you’ll get a sense of how I felt.

Anything that can’t be washed (i.e., Blankets, coats, headwear, stuffed toys [italics mine]) can be treated by: placing in a closed plastic bag for 10 days or putting in a hot dryer for 20 minutes or putting in the freezer for 48 hours or ironing it.

OMFG!!!!

The choices, again:

• Asphyxiation
• Cooking/suffocation with motion sickness as a side bonus
• Cryonic stasis (beside meat, probably)
• Flattening and hot-branding

I repeat, OMFG, people. I need a drink stat. And the kids need to shave their heads. But FIRST I NEED A DRINK.

BEAR FLAG DARK RED BLEND to the rescue. Christine left this $13 bottle of unpretentious California vino when she visited last week, along with a sweater I’ve been using as a blanket. You should never really share sweaters if you’re concerned about lice, but we had no idea we’d be on Yellow Alert about lice, and I don’t think Christine meant to leave her sweater, especially since she could have predicted that I’d fetishize it. She did mean to leave the wine, because Christine is wonderful and genuinely cares about my alcohol supply.

BEAR FLAG DARK RED BLEND bills itself as a “big, bold blend” of dark varietals (Zinfandel, Petite Sirah, Alicante Bouschet, Petit Verdot, and Tempranillo—a veritable Heinz-57 mixture). Compare the “DARK RED” with BEAR FLAG’s three other products (SMOOTH RED, SOFT WHITE, and BRIGHT WHITE) and you can see this outfit is all about sloshing as much into the vat as possible and seeing what comes out. Slap a hideous label on it and voila! Low expectations.

Promised tasting notes include chocolate, coffee, and blueberries accompanied by low tannins—an easy-drinker you could stuff under your arm and take to a casual barbeque. Let’s pour it.

Yes, it is a dark red wine, but not to the point of opacity. If anything it’s ruby-garnet and very agreeable to contemplate as it opens up. First aromas: earth, tobacco, stone fruit, and a slight 28-day wine kit–like backnote. First sips are pleasant, although I beg to differ with BEAR FLAG’s own marketing copy on boldness. This is a medium-bodied, fruit-forward wine with some sharp notes that mosh a little roughly with the rest of their tasting-note compadres.

BEAR FLAG reminds me a lot of Granny (my dead Granny, that is) because she probably would have liked it. Granny wasn’t an asshole about wine the way my parents are; she didn’t require a jammy explosion, and she probably would have enjoyed BEAR FLAG for what it is: an uncomplicated and totally drinkable blend. And if Granny hadn’t been too nice to say so, perhaps she would have told my parents off for being wine dickheads. Perhaps she would have told them they need to actually know something about wine to diss it credibly. And then she and I would have taken the bottle outside and downed it while she had a smoke.

Which is to say, I like BEAR FLAG. It’s not my favorite $13 wine, nor is it the most interesting wine in its price range. But it has a wacky, freaky label, especially if you like weird art, and—for you solid food fans—it probably would go pretty well with, um, what’s a solid food you would barbeque? How about a hamburger? I bet solid-food eaters would love BEAR FLAG with a hamburger. But they’d probably be freaked out when they opened the freezer to take the meat out and there was this frozen alcoholic bear beside it staring at them accusingly.

Luckily that won’t happen because the kids don’t have lice. This time.