It finally sunk in at some point this week that my adolescent hockey heroes were but one win away from winning the Stanley Cup (my boyhood heroes, oddly enough, were actually the Pittsburgh Penguins, but that’s a whole other story). A pretty remarkable feat when you consider they played 107 games before getting to that final 60 minutes. I barely had a minute to grieve in the warm sun on East Hastings before I noticed the giant plumes of black smoke rising from the center of my city. Obviously, some of the events that followed have overshadowed the hockey played on the ice. And, while I know the Canucks will have a few more cracks at the cup in the coming years, it’s impossible for me to feel any happiness for the Boston Bruins organization. Below are some reasons why I can no longer be reticent.

I happen to know that Mike Gillis is a big wine drinker and I’d like to believe that he wouldn’t allow his team to drink the following products:

1. Veuve Clicquot

Seriously? You just won the Stanley Cup and you’re drinking fucking Veuve? How truly banal. While I don’t exactly expect them to be relishing in the subtleties of Larmandier-Bernier or Selosse, I’d like to think that the Canucks would have enough gumption to be drinking Krug, or at the very least, Bollinger.

2. Ace of Spades

I’m trying to make this solely about the wine and not about Zdeno Chara’s Ed Hardy tee, which I’m pretty sure he isn’t wearing ironically.

Much attention has been raised about the Bruins’ 100K+ bar bill, which included a 30-liter bottle of Armand de Brignac ‘Midas’ – a size of bottle that I’ll admit, I didn’t even know existed (that’s double the size of a Nebuchadnezzar, by the way). It was entirely appropriate for them to drink a 30L bottle of wine, and if that bottle cost $100,000, then so be it. What I consider less appropriate, is that that giant bottle was filled with some of the worst Champagne I’ve ever tasted (my past post on how much I despise Armand de Brignac, yet love Jay-Z).

Call me a disgruntled fan or even call me a wine-celebratory snob, but the Boston Bruins’ are such an awful hockey team that they don’t even know how to drink Champagne properly.