WINE IS FOR SNOBS. Wine is for drunks. And white wine is the universal drink of choice for women. This is what I learned watching a great deal of television these past several weeks in preparation for this special TV issue of Off Duty. I had hoped to see wine woven into plots in some creative ways. Spoiler alert: I did not.
In the Netflix series “Emily in Paris,” for example, wine features a great deal—generally to demonstrate a character’s “Frenchness” or simply as a means to get drunk. The show features a vapid American “influencer” who arrives from Chicago to teach the French about marketing. Emily Cooper (Lily Collins) “discovers” Paris in every clichéd way (croissants! Champagne!). When her sidekick Mindy shows up at Emily’s apartment planning to stay a while, she promises to buy “so much wine.” I was not reassured. This is, after all, the character who calls Sancerre “a breakfast wine.”
