Miss Manners: Sharing wine with journey companions took an surprising flip

DEAR MISS MANNERS: While touring overseas on a gaggle tour, I invited three journey companions to share a bottle of wine with me, they usually agreed. None of us had been teetotalers.

As the waiter poured for us, one woman refused the wine and ordered a soda. Was I obligated to pay for the soda? I did, but when she had selected a cocktail as an alternative of the wine, what would my obligation have been?

GENTLE READER: Obligation is a powerful phrase, however it was an inexpensive presumption that you simply had been treating your companions to a spherical of drinks, not simply that one specific bottle of wine. That your good friend deviated from the plan is much less of an assault on protocol than you make it out to be. Paying the nominal price for her soda — which she might need ordered for any variety of causes: a pending work name, say, or a propensity to complications from that sort of wine — was the gracious factor to do. Getting her a cocktail, if she most well-liked, would have likewise been variety, though the added expense might need prompted her to supply to pay. In both case, actual or imagined, Miss Manners thinks the price of accommodating your good friend’s modified thoughts might hardly be better than that of wounding the friendship and sustaining a grudge. And she trusts that they’ll deal with you for the subsequent spherical.

(Please ship your inquiries to Miss Manners at her web site, www.missmanners.com; to her e-mail, dearmissmanners@gmail.com; or by way of postal mail to Miss Manners, Andrews McMeel Syndication, 1130 Walnut St., Kansas City, MO 64106.)

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