Blame it on my unsophisticated palate

I know nothing about wine.

This would be neither here nor there, had I not been obligated to buy a bottle of wine tonight for the office Secret Santa exchange tomorrow.

Our Secret Santa exchange goes something like this: Draw name. Panic. Visit the Secret Santa sign-up list and hope your victim, err, recipient has signed up for easy-to-buy things, such as a Macy's gift card or a Frampton CD. Buy and bag your $15 to $20 gift. Put a gift tag with your name on it, nullifying the concept of Secret Santa. Give it away, go home, have a merry Christmas.

This well-oiled machine breaks down when (a.) you draw the boss's name, and (b.) he doesn't put anything on the sign-up list. And that's precisely the situation in which I found myself.

After a bit of hemming and hawing, one of my coworkers was able on Tuesday to pin down what my giftee wanted: a bottle of Beaujolais.

Uh oh. The only thing worse than not knowing what to buy is finding out you know nothing about what you are going to buy.

So I went to the biggest wine and liquor store in the area, Buster's, which has 8,500 wines and spirits, all of them foreign to me. I walked the aisles, slack-jawed. I wandered past the South Africa section at least four times. I tried to look as helpless as possible, hoping to attract the attention of a clerk -- any clerk -- hoping to make a sale.

I was standing somewhere in the Alsace section when a cheerful woman walked by. "Do you need some he--" "Yes!" She raised an eyebrow a little and told me to hang on a second. After a couple of minutes, a young man came up.

"Help," I mumbled weakly. I explained the situation -- right from the beginning -- because I wanted somebody, anybody, to feel the anguish I was feeling.

He nodded sympathetically and picked up a bottle. "For that price range, this is what you want. It was named to the Top 100 list of..." (He kept talking but I stopped listening at this point because it was lost on my non-connoisseur ears.)

Wine in one hand and a little bottle of Disaronno in the other (hey, I deserved a little something for my trouble), I headed to the cashier and got the heck out of Dodge.

But I'm not out of the woods yet. I've still got to wrap it and get it to work without dropping and breaking it or, more likely, popping it open and drowning my frustrations. And maybe learning a little bit about wine in the process.