If you order a $2,000 bottle of wine in the States, there’s a good chance the server or, more likely, the sommelier (if you’re at the type of place that has $2,000 bottles of wine on the menu), will just double check that that’s really the one you want. They will do this gently so as not to offend. And unless you are truly a snob, you will appreciate this touch because it saves any potential embarrassment when it comes time to settle the bill. Because there really is a good chance that you mispronounced the wine you meant to order because French is hard.

They do the same courtesy in country. For example, when I ordered that really pretty decent 700,000 dong bottle of Australian shiraz at the Indian restaurant we ate at in Hanoi the other night, our server gently double checked that I was sure I wanted the bottle by giving me a look of total disbelief.

“Two glass?” she asked.

“No, no. We’ll take the bottle.”

“You want bottle?” she asked again.

“Yes.”

“You want whole bottle?”

“Yes, please.”

“You sure not just two glass.”

“Pretty sure. My wife drinks too much and she gets angry without her medicine.”

“Hold on.”

So just to gently double double check she went and got a male to come to the table. This type of thing happens in country.

“You want whole bottle of wine?”

“Desperately.”

Good wine costs a relative fortune in country. That 700,000 dong bottle of wine cost the better part of $30, which is a lot of dong. And not just to the locals, either. If Gina had known how much that bottle cost, she would have given me a look of total disbelief too. It’s extravagant.

There is a more affordable imported wine brand that’s readily available in country. It comes from Chile and is called Passion. Passion wine ranges in quality from your basic table plonk for about 110k at the local Winmart to super premium for I’m not sure how much because it’s well over 100,000 dong and so I can’t buy it without doing a lot of soothing and reassuring of my wife who still loves me that it’s okay and really isn’t all that much money at all. Passion wine was conceived and developed specifically for the Vietnamese market, which means it’s designed explicitly for people like me to drink and say, “Yep, that’ll do.” It is by no stretch what anyone would call good, but it’ll do just fine. And in fact, a few nights of drinking Passion wine goes a long way to making that splurge bottle you spent 150k on something special, indeed. A basic sense for relativity comes in handy in country.

Maybe not surprising given the whole French colonialism situation here in country, they also produce their own French-style wines. These range in price too. But if you get a cheap one, you will find that it is decidedly not good and will not at all do, not at all, but you’ll drink it anyway because you just spent four bucks on it, darn it. The slightly more expensive local wines are okay, though. And I imagine the premium local wines are pretty gosh darn premium. Because, in country, you get what you pay for.

The thing about Nam, and particularly a big city like Hanoi, is that you really can get anything you want. Want a bottle of Dom Pérignon to wash down your bún dậu mắm tôm? No problem. And I think you should, too, because who doesn’t enjoy a little Champagne socialism every now and then. You’ll just have to pay for it like anywhere else. Except it’ll hurt more here, psychologically, because instead of shelling out 350 American, you’re shelling out over eight million Vietnamese. And eight million feels like an awful lot no matter what the conversion rate is. Plus, whereas in the States you can be sure that your bottle of Dom is indeed the real thing, there’s no guarantee that the bottle you get here hasn’t been drained and refilled with something that’s been steeping in cobra for the last ten years, which if you’ve made any effort at all to assimilate to the culture, you know is much, much better than Dom will ever be.

And If you don’t want to splurge on wine, you can splurge on something else, like the beautiful sunset-colored apricot rice whiskey they make at the place in Ninh Binh where you go to take a hot bath with soothing herbal extracts that cures everything and makes you look like Brad Pitt would look if he’d spent more time taking baths in Ninh Binh and less time in the California sunshine. They make it right there, too, the apricot rice whiskey. You can see the fermenting urns that are made out of stone because stone urns produce way better hooch than plastic or glass. And this stuff is delicious and complex and a little like the Hungarian dessert wine Tokaji. And you can have a bottle for just 550,000 dong, which Gina doesn’t mind because it comes in a handmade wooden box they make right there too in the King Bath commune, and Gina really likes boxes.

Maybe the best thing about the apricot rice whiskey is that “it’s not too strong so women can drink it too sometimes.”