Wine Expert Part II

On the subject of wine, I am reminded of the time during one of our church coaching sessions, it was decided that every area of the church should have a full-time staff person as advisor or over-seer. Somehow as they divided up the tasks, Altar Guild fell under my management. Altar Guild is normally a job the older ladies of the church do. It involves cleaning the brass candlesticks, the brass offering plates, and the communion cups. It also involves putting the wafers and wine out for sunday and ensuring all the supplies are enough for each week.  Well if I am going to over-see a job, I better know a thing or two about it, so I jumped in with both feet.  My first question was, where do we get the wine from? I figure there is some holy wine store somewhere or at least a place online where we order the wine from. How about Publix, I was told. What? The local grocery store sells special holy wine for communion? It was then I learned that we buy ordinary wine and then the priest prepares it, God blesses it and it becomes communion wine. Now the wheels are spinning. Are you telling me we buy an ordinary wine from the grocery store and use it on Sunday? Why do we buy such awful tasting wine? "Buy what you want, you are in charge" is what I am pretty sure I heard from our senior Pastor's mouth, although he denies it to this day. So off I went to Publix to do a bit of a wine tasting which they were offering on Wednesdays. I came back with a nice fruity red wine, in our price budget and certainly I was going to be the hero on Sunday.  The 8 am service comes and I stand by proudly to watch the first customers sample our new wine. By watching their faces I knew someone had put salt or something bitter in the wine. There were no faces of joy. Someone had replaced their church wine with an after dinner wine.  Well they were just older traditional people I said to myself. Certainly the rest of the church will catch on to the trend. One week. My fifteen minutes of fame were over. My plans to radically change the taste of communion had ended before I could try to replace the styrofoam communion wafers with delicious flat bread from Subway. Sure, I am still in charge of the altar guild and have budget oversight and all that, but wine purchasing stays with the older ladies that know a decent port wine is what you serve for communion on Sundays.