Would You Like A Pinot Noir With That Tantrum?

My husband and I like to go to wine dinners where you pair each course with a different glass of wine. Food can bring out the best characteristics in a good glass of wine. A sauvignon blanc can go really well with sea scallops, a cabernet with a steak, and zinfandel goes amazingly well with pizza. RED zinfandel, that is. No good wine snob even considers white zinfandel a wine.

This inspired me to make my own pairing list of sorts. Cheers!

Wines and Spirits to Pair With Your Children:

Situation A: The kids have been playing in the yard and have come inside coated in mud from head to toe and need a serious bath. For the third time today. Oh, and they managed to get mud all over the floor, too.

Drink: Try a cool (but not cold -- that kills the taste of the wine) glass of a French chardonnay. California Chardonnays are very oaky and buttery, but a French one will be crisp and refreshing so as to take the edge off the mud scrubdown.

Situation B: Your spouse is out of town for 6 days. You are on day 5 and your child is throwing the tantrum to end all tantrums because you sent him to time out for hitting his brother. Repeatedly. On the head.

Drink: A pinot noir will make the screams from his room seem cities away. Use a Spiegelau wine glass (or a Riedel one, but they break really easily and the Spiegelaus are just as good, a lot tougher, and a lot cheaper) to make sure to really capture the bouquet of the wine (that's "wine talk" for saying that using the right glass will make the wine smell better).

Situation C: You have been at the beach and now it is time to come home and begin the process of digging thousands of grains of sand out of crevices that you didn't even know your children had. And your children really hate it. They would rather go to bed with sand in their ears and between their toes than let you give them a bath.

Drink: Pop open a bottle of Prosecco, an Italian sparkling wine. The bubbles going down your throat will soothe the pain of having to pin down your child long enough to get the 5 Q-tips worth of sand out of his ears.

Situation D: Some friends drops by with their two children. And these two children make your own two crazy children look like docile little lambs. Because they are completely freaking nuts! Now even though the kids are having a great time, the volume of noise has been roughly quadrupled, and every single toy in the house is now scattered all over the floor.

Drink: This calls for busting out the hard stuff. A wine buzz will take a while to kick in, and you need something fast. Try mixing a Cosmopolitan. Do equal parts cranberry juice and a good quality vodka, a splash of triple sec, 10 drops of lime juice, then put in a shaker with ice. Shake and pour. For a twist, use white cranberry juice instead of red. It tastes a little sweeter, plus then you won't get a red stain on your shirt when your friends' kids run into you for the tenth time.

Situation E: You ordered to-go sushi because you are not dumb enough to try to go eat at a restaurant with your kids. You bring the sushi home and the order is totally wrong. You are kicking yourself for not checking the order while at the restaurant, especially since the collective IQ of the employees there is about 53. Your kids love to eat sushi with chopsticks (kid chopsticks that are attached at the top) and are having a fight over who gets which set of IDENTICAL chopsticks. And here you thought that having matching chopsticks would eliminate any fighting over such a thing!

Drink: Sake. It's a Japanese drink that most Americans drink warm, but we prefer it cold. Or maybe a Japanese beer, like a Sapporo. Oh wait, the kids are still fighting. Just go ahead and drink both.