Thanks For All Your Sterling Entries!

Our message from a bottle-neck, you're recall, involved a poetry-writing contest to win this sterling silver wine collar from Aspinal of London. Here's the latest...

If you're down on your luck,
Drinking Two-Buck Chuck

Just pour it and drink it, all happy & grinnin'
You'll likely not notice those stains on your linen

But when on your wine you're spending top dollar
To stop those damn drips you'll need this wine collar.

So thanks for all your sterling entries
Which made it past the censor's sentries.

We'll let you know if you're a winner
In proper time for New Year's Dinner

Well, we had a veritable outpouring of entries, with finalists coming from near (Seattle, Bainbridge Island) and far (Paso Robles, Calif.; even--via a Twitter retweet based on my Examiner post--from the coal country of West Virginia).

We had a gusher of predictable rhymes (dollar/collar; drop/stop), some blank verse ("Fine vintage open/Nary a drop runs"), even haiku (including the particularly felicitous phrase "collar of prevention"). And here's the winner, submitted by Elisse Jo Goldstein-Clark, who operates a bed & breakfast in Eckman, W .Va, called the Elkhorn Inn.

What She Didn't Say

Once upon a moonlit night,
They had a group of friends to dine;
The linen it was snowy white,
The crystal twinkled, the repast fine.

But lo! When wine He went to pour,
Striving to be debonair,
It dribbled onto cloth and floor,
And made a mess, and She did glare!

She rolled her eyes (but didn't holler),
But wished that he had thought to fetch,
Their Sterling Aspinal Wine Collar,
So she would not have had to kvetch! (Poor wretch!)

"It was fun to write this," Goldstein-Clark reports to Cornichon. And in case you were wondering: Eckman is on West Virginia's "Coal Heritage Trail," a six-hour drive southwest of the Other Washington, or two and a half hours by car from the nearest airport, in Charleston, the state capital. The 14-room Elkhorn Inn was built as a miners club and has "train-view" rooms for rail fans; the gift shop sells mining souvenirs carved from lumps of coal. Too bad the Inn's website, elkhorninnnw.com, is festooned with so many gewgaws that it crashes Cornichon's computer; no such troubles on the Inn's blog or Facebook page, which includes a hilarious album of the Clarks stomping grapes at a nearby winery. So the next time you're drinking red wine from stemware rather than plastic, you'll have a collar of prevention to keep your linen snowy white!