“Two More Bottles of Wine” is a wry survival anthem—when dreams crack and love walks out, Emmylou Harris finds a way to laugh, hurt, and keep breathing anyway.
There’s a particular kind of song that knows how to smile through a bruise. “Two More Bottles of Wine” is exactly that: a bright, barroom-lit tune with a quietly devastating storyline, delivered by Emmylou Harris with the kind of poise that makes resilience sound almost effortless. Released as a single on April 15, 1978, it became the first major calling card from her album Quarter Moon in a Ten Cent Town—and it arrived with real momentum, debuting on Billboard’s country chart at No. 60 that same week (chart date 04/15/78).
The song didn’t just climb; it reached No. 1 on Billboard’s country chart during its run, one of the signature victories of Harris’ late-’70s peak. Billboard chart listings from the period reflect that Peak: 1 status. At the same time, it tells an equally revealing story about where this record truly lived: in the U.S., it did not enter the Billboard Hot 100 (listed with a dash in her singles discography), which is almost poetic—because this isn’t pop escapism. It’s country music’s older trick: turning hard luck into something you can hum while you straighten your shoulders.
The bones of the song come from Delbert McClinton, who wrote and recorded “Two More Bottles of Wine” for his 1975 album Victim of Life’s Circumstances. Harris’ genius wasn’t to reinvent it beyond recognition, but to frame it so it felt like her own lived-in short story—one that begins with the intoxicating promise of escape and ends with the plain fact of abandonment.
Because listen to what happens in the lyric: two people pack up and head to Los Angeles, chasing that shimmering idea that the next city will fix the old restlessness. The distance is even spelled out like a weary receipt—1,600 miles—and then, in the way life sometimes turns on a dime, the lover disappears. Now the narrator is alone, scraping by, “sweeping out a warehouse in West L.A.,” and the dream has become fluorescent lighting and the ache of being left behind. And still—the chorus doesn’t collapse. It shrugs, it grins through tears, it finds a crooked kind of comfort: there are two more bottles of wine. Not an elegant solution, not a moral lecture—just the small, human impulse to soften the edges of a night you didn’t choose.
That’s where Emmylou Harris makes the song unforgettable: she understands that humor is sometimes grief’s last dignity. She sings with a clear, silvery steadiness that never turns the narrator into a fool. The character may be down on luck, but she isn’t pathetic. She’s surviving. And the band behind her—tight, road-ready—keeps the rhythm moving like headlights on a long highway, suggesting the most important thing heartbreak can’t take away: forward motion.
Placed on Quarter Moon in a Ten Cent Town—an album that reached No. 3 on Billboard’s album charts—the song also acts as a thesis statement for Harris’ late-’70s voice: sophisticated but not fancy, literate but never precious, tough enough to tell the truth plainly. The single’s details are pure working-country craft: producer Brian Ahern, label Warner Bros. Nashville, and a B-side that tells you she was still keeping one boot planted in outlaw grit—“I Ain’t Living Long Like This.”
In the end, “Two More Bottles of Wine” endures because it captures a feeling many songs avoid: the strange middle place between devastation and acceptance. The moment when you realize the dream didn’t work, the person didn’t stay, the city didn’t save you—yet the world keeps turning, and somehow so do you. Harris doesn’t romanticize the wreckage. She simply sings through it, with a wink that feels like courage. And long after the last chord fades, the refrain lingers like a neon sign in the dark: not a promise that things will be perfect—only the promise that you’ll make it to morning.
