It’s Monday morning and CJ is at work with a serious case of the Mondays.

Bored and listless, she suffers.  All she can think about is the weekend that is so far away.  It’s going to be so hot this week.  She just wants to click her heels and not be in Kansas aka Monday anymore.

But wait.  She vageuly remembers getting an email from Cellar on Greene last week.  Something about a Mystery Case.  $90 for a case of wine?  At the time she blew it off because surely it was too good to be true, and she couldn’t think about wine last Thursday anyway, because she’d had a bit too much the night before and was feeling ill.  But today!  Today was the day.  Thoughts of wine would whisk her away to her happy place where it was Friday at 5pm instead of Monday at 10am.

So she opens her email and scrolls down.  Here is what she sees:

Hallelujah!  This is awesome!

She gets busy picking her five choices out of the 24 wines available for the Mystery Case.  She hasn’t heard of many of the wines, but there’s a Cava listed and she loves Sparkling wine so she’s pumped about that.  A Sangiovese sounds good too.  She knows the people at Cellar have a lot of good wine, so she trusts that the remaining bottles will be good.   Off goes her order…

She waits patiently.  What will happen next?  did they get her order?  what if they didn’t?  anxiety sets in.  She paces.  She gets a snack to distract herself.  After some deep breathing exercises, she feels better- and then bam!  Look what arrives in her inbox!!

Relief washes over her.  She WILL be getting her wine today!  Her phone rings and it’s Kaitlin on the other end.  CJ excitedly reads off her credit card number, where it is safely stored in a fancy filing cabinet at Cellar on Greene.  The rest of her day she spends in a jittery haze, trying to get work done but really thinking about wine ALL. DAY.  Meanwhile, at Cellar, Kaitlin gets to work packing up her wine:

Kaitlin actually has a lot of fun packing Mystery Cases.  If she knows you well enough, she will likely pick wines that she knows you’ll especially like.  For example, if the last time you had dinner at Cellar you really enjoyed a Malbec- you will probably find an extra Malbec in your case.  She has a wierd memory for wines people like.

At long last, CJ escapes from her prison of employment and comes to pick up her wine.

She arrives breathless and estatic.  At last she will be united with her twelve bottles of wine.  Since she already paid for her wine, she doesn’t even need to bring her purse in!  She and Kaitlin have a meaningful exchange and CJ snatches her case away.

Giddily, she drives home.

Ahhhhh!  Loot!  She relaxes on the sofa and picks a random bottle to open.  Bonarda?  she’d never heard of it before, but she likes it!  And to think, all this transpired in the course of one day.  And for just $97.60, including tax.  It’s shocking to say the least.

Please note: no actual wine was consumed during this process.  That’s our story and we’re sticking to it.