Wine

When I was a child, my parents did not drink wine with meals. Like most Southerners, they drank iced tea. The sterling silver had ice-tea spoons and there were certain LARGE glass dedicated to iced tea only. It wasn’t that my parents were “tea-totalers,” but my Dad’s taste ran more toward the hard stuff. But wine – well, that was mostly for medicinal purposes.

My grandfather had hardening of the arteries. He wasn’t a drinker, but the doctor forced him to drink a small glass of wine every day. His “medicine” was Mogen David wine, an inexpensive, high alcohol-content fortified wine still made today. Of course, he referred to it as David Morgan wine. My father knew what he meant and brought it home from the State store on a regular basis. My father was the only one in the family who bought alcohol. While I guess my mother could have legally gone to the State store, she was a Southern lady and not about to be seen there.

The other kind of wine my father had to bring home was sherry. It was known as cure for “cramps.” When I had my first “cramps” I got to taste sherry for the first time. Mostly my mother used it to cook with – in an amazing “sherry wine pie” and as a major ingredient in her holiday sausage ball recipe.

When my parents had their 25th wedding anniversary, I joined with their friends in giving them a big party. The punch had sauterne and champagne and I remember having a bit too much of it!

In college, there was beer and there was bourbon, but no wine. The bourbon was consumed in Coca-Cola, and the beer came in kegs at frat parties. As a co-ed, I could get kicked out of school if I drank any of it. Obviously, not so for the boys who could drink as much as they liked – the old double-standard.

In graduate school I got some acquaintance with real wine. I was then old enough to drink and my husband-to-be introduced me to chianti – the kind in the straw bottle that became ubiquitous with its candle and melted wax. He cooked pizza and proved to me that it was really chianti that went with pizza, not beer.

Along about that same time, everyone I knew was drinking rose’ made by Lancers and Mateus. I never have been much on rose, but the bottles are nice.

When we moved to southern California in 1971, we discovered wineries and went to wine tastings and bought wine by the case. And, of course, we bought wine glasses for us and for my parents, who were by then also gaining an appreciation of wine.

Since then wines have come and gone into our lives. I remember when there were three flavors – white, red and rose’. White mostly was chablis and red mostly was burgundy if it wasn’t Chianti. Chablis, chardonnay, sauvignon blanc, pinot grigio, viognier, resisling, and their blended kin lead the whites. Burgundy, cabarnet sauvignon, chianti, merlot, zinfandel and malbec bid for our attention. We have been to Europe many times and had fine wines in Germany, France, Austria, Italy and even Greece. My personal favorites are Alsatian.

We bought a bottle of Sherry in St. Thomas on our honeymoon in 1969. We still have it, unopened. These days we don’t drink much sherry. The “cramps” are a painful memory mercifully gone forever. So we will wait another few years and open that wine on our 50th anniversary. It probably has gone bad, but we’ll see. We can share it with our son and his wife. Of course, none of us really has that much of a taste for sherry. Oh well, it seemed like the thing to buy at the time!