“Hey I know this wine. It’s very good quality for a $7 ALDI bottle”
Marcus (27) and Felicity (26) Biddle are a recently married couple who are madly in love. They are currently thoroughly enjoying their time as newlyweds. Life is good.
The only current challenge in their domestic lives is that they both enjoy the finer things in life, but can’t really afford them. So life is a balancing act of trying to find fancy restaurants and decent wine without breaking the bank too much.
So far, they've done a pretty good job, even finding a couple of top-shelf restaurants that let them BYO. They are few and far between, but they've found a few gems.
And when it comes to dinner parties, they were delighted to discover that a couple of the really cheap ALDI reds are not only drinkable but actually pretty tasty. And, thankfully, most people wouldn't even know where they came from.
So for the last couple of years, whenever they've hosted a dinner party, they’d load up on ALDI Cab Savs and Shiraz and a good time would be had by all. And best of all, people would think they’d splashed out on decent wine.
At least that's what they used to do. Before Old Mate opened his fat gob. Their close friend Malcolm Dux (25) is at almost all of these things. This is because, love him or hate him, he's a member of their closest group of friends. And whenever someone says something nice about the wine, he opens his stupid mouth and tells them that it’s $7 from ALDI. It’s his favourite bit of trivia or something.
Felicity explained that he is absolutely doing her head in.
"We were on such a good thing. We could give the allure of fanciness while actually being tight-arses. It was the perfect crime. He thinks he's such a bloody wine expert. He's not. He just knows how much wine costs. Good on him. I just wish he could keep his useless wine price trivia to himself. I'm no expert on, like, social etiquette or anything. But surely telling everyone how cheap the wine is would be against some rule, right?"
So Marcus and Felicity are at a crossroads. They could obviously bite the bullet and spend a little more on some better wine. Or they could just own it and be known as a thrifty couple.
Currently, they are weighing up how sad everyone would really be if Malcolm stopped coming to these things.