Are you familiar with the View From Your Window contests at Andrew Sullivan’s The Dish blog? In short, readers send in pics from their windows and Sullivan makes a contest out of some of them, where readers are asked to identify the location of the photo, with as much specificity as possible. I never attempt to win these contests, because nearly always the winner spends hours Google Street View-ing the thing and is able to name the city, street, building, what floor the window is on and often has a story about how they honeymooned right around the corner from there 15 years ago.
What’s that got to do with wine? Nothing really. But in a recent contest a reader submitted an interesting answer based on a glimpse of a wine bottle in the photo:
The one fat obvious clue makes this one easy.
Wine bottles of that particular olive shade are the product of Baltic Sea sand and, since the late 15th century, are mostly manufactured on the peninsula west of Riga. Ah, but that’s a misdirection, because while they’re made in Latvia, they’re almost all exported through Stockholm, even today, due to lingering effects of the short-lived trade embargo of 1962 (look it up).
As everyone knows, however, Swedish wine sucks, so we’re looking for a secondary market, and that means Hungary. Now for the second clue: Who leaves a full bottle of wine on a window sill? Answer: Forgetful old people like my parents, and young folks, who are careless about alcohol. Well, my parents still can’t attach a digital photo to an email and would forget to send it anyway, so it must be a student, probably male, probably unshaven, probably with a sink full of dishes just outside the frame.
But that doesn’t narrow it down much, so here’s where I get strategic. I bet most of the entries are going to say Budapest, home of Moholy-Nagy University, or maybe Gyor, where they sell cheap Tokajis from vending machines in the student center. So I’m going to hedge and go with the leading destination for Magyar exchange students and say Bratislava, Slovakia.
My first ever VFYW entry, and I’m pretty sure I nailed it. Can’t wait to read the crazy guesses of my competitors!
That’s an awful lot to read into the color of that bottle don’t you think? The bottle color even doesn’t look that unusual to me. And it turns out the reader was completely wrong (the correct answer was near Oystermouth Castle, in Mumbles, Wales). But points for the Sherlock Holmesian attempt.