Americans spend too much for wine.
And this column (and just about every other writer who dares tread on the subject) is part of the problem.
We pretend that a $15 bottle of wine is an everyday bottle of wine, which is why most of us don’t drink wine every day. (If we did, we’d spend more than $5,000 a year on wine. I know, some of you do spend that. You are excused.) While in Europe (or as we call it around the chez, “the Europe”), most people don’t mind drinking house wine that comes in a plastic bottle and sells for less than $3 U.S. And it’s not bad.
We’ve often bought wine from Monoprix - a French retail chain that’s kind of like a Walgreens with cheap clothes or, for those of you of a certain vintage, a Woolworth’s with a supermarket in the back - and found it, well, palatable. Better than the (still-drinkable-though-not-as-good-as-you-may-have-heard) “Two Buck Chuck” that’s sold at Trader Joe’s (for $4, last time we checked) in this country.
But we are such a touchingly insecure nation that we sniff at varietals below a certain price point. We are so frightened of being stigmatized as unsophisticated that most of us immediately write off every wine below some arbitrary price point. I know - I have written about bag-in-box wines a couple of times in this space, and every time I do I get some blowback from folks who tell me my palate is obviously defective and that box wines are undrinkable and vulgar. But they’re not.
Nor is there anything at all wrong with your average $6.99 bottle of Australian pinot grigio.
Don’t misunderstand - wine is a deep and rich subject and often those high-dollar bottles are worth it. Had I an unlimited budget for this column, I would write a lot more about the sort of wines that Wine Spectator writes about than the wholesome plonk I typically consume. The top 100 wines of 2012, as determined by Wine Spectator, had an average price of $46, which they thought was pretty reasonable.
I might even agree with them, were I to spend a month or two fact-checking their list. But consider that “value” was part of their criteria - lower priced bottles had an advantage on higher priced ones. Some expensive wines are sublime.
But if I am honest, most of the time I dwell quite happily on the other end of the spectrum. We have only a few bottles that retail for more than $30, and most of the wine we drink at home really does come from a bag-in-box - I can enjoy cheap wine a lot more than I can enjoy cheap bourbon or Scotch.
But enough about me. A few months ago on my blog (blooddirtangels.com) I held a contest to give away a Boxxle, a cool dispenser of box wine. (You can see, and order one, at boxxle.com.)
To qualify to win the prize, I had my correspondents debase themselves by telling me “something interesting” about their parents’ (or grandparents’) drinking habits, or to provide whatever memories they might retain of the wines they drank before they became the sophisticates they are today. (For me - and I would guess most people who came of age in the ’70s - these starter wines would include Boone’s Farm and Annie Greensprings; Blue Nun, Black Tower or ZellerSchwarze Katz; Lambrusco, Harvey’s Bristol Cream and Mateus Rose.)
Below find some of the most startling admissions. The names have been redacted for the sake of the children.
“Middle, late ’60s, college high in the Colorado Rockies. ‘Ripped on Ripple’ or ‘Rally With Bali.’ Need I say that the level of vinous sophistication at our isolated academic outpost was not as lofty as the geography. However, when the overnight temperature drops into the 30-below range, a grassy sip of sauvignon blanc just ain’t gonna do it.”
“Growing up in alcohol-free Grant County required a drive to Pine Bluff to a certain liquor store where you could get the local wino to go in and buy cheap wine for us for 50 cents. Since that was a large part of our budget, we were limited in our choices. I remember each of us getting a bottle of Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill for a dollar and a nickel. Then we would drive back to Grant County, find some secluded logging road and stand around drinking right from the bottle. I remember being left with more of a severe headache than a good buzz! Except my friend Dave always got Ripple. That was below even my admittedly low standards.”
“I’m half Irish, half German. So I come from a longline of drinkers. My grandmother is German and her family used to brew their own beer. She recalls eating peanuts and wine for breakfast every morning. She and her sister would enjoy sucking the foam off of the beer her dad made.”
“I used to work at Cock of the Walk in Maumelle. In an attempt to learn to like redwine, I made myself sit down nightly after bar-tending and drink a glass of the house red. Prior to this, I had been able to stomach various whites, but had yet to make the leap to reds. I found that chilling the glass with ice water prior to adding the wine helped me to bridge the gap from whites to red after only a few months.”
“My first wine drinking was with a group of Mount Saint Mary’s girls (I attended Parkview). We went to the drive-in movie, bought popcorn, and popped a couple of bottles of Cold Duck. It didn’t taste good, but it worked. Later, I found a $20 bill on the bathroom floor. That made up for the headache I had the next morning!”
“It was a ’60s Saturday night ritual, just outside Washington, D.C. Two service buddies, one hippyish girlfriend, a bottle of Gallo Hearty Burgundy, a baker’s dozen bagels and a block of cream cheese would join together on the shag carpet in front of a big-screen 17-inch television. We began with Sherlock Holmes (Basil Rathbone, Nigel Bruce), followed by Flash Gordon, and somewhere during Charlie Chan, the next morning would appear and the Hearty Burgundy would have disappeared.
“The friendships have remained, but the gigantic collection of empty wine bottles never morphed into lamp shades as planned. Over the years my taste in wine moved toward the whites and better reds, almost without notice. Last year I bought another bottle, convincing myself that it couldn’t have been that bad since we drank so much of it. I was wrong. After one sip, my wife refused to keep it even as a cooking ingredient. Sadly, it went down the drain. But I kept the bottle. We may need a lamp shade some day.”
“My first wine was made by my father back in the late 1940s. He would make wine from dandelions, berries, grapes … whatever he had enough of it to make a batch of wine. One summer a friend traded him a crate of Mexican grapes for some welding work he needed. Only problem with this was that he confiscated our wood baseball bat … scoured it clean, sterilized it and then threatened us kids within an inch of our lives if we touched it. He used this to smash the grapes and then as the wine was making, to stir it. … What Dad didn’t know was that while he was at work, we would sneak the bat out to play some ball, wash it up and put it back where we found it. … The wine was put up and left untouched for a few months but I do remember it being so good. Being so young, I probably was not allowed over a half an ounce, but it was pure nectar. Dad would open one bottle a year for as long as the bottles lasted and my little half-ounce would increase in size each year. His other wines were good as well but not memorable like the ‘ball bat wine.’”
“My first drink of choice was Annie Greensprings. I thought it was just the best thing I had ever consumed. Liked it so much I had a necklace that was a small plastic replica of a bottle that hung on a long genuine brass-plated chain. Wore that danged thing all of the time and thought I was so cute. Wow!That is almost embarrassing.”
“Since you are a Louisiana guy, I thought you might be able to relate to me and my roommate’s alcohol runs from La. Tech in Ruston down the road a couple of miles to Grambling while going to school in the the mid ’70s. It was legal to buy 3.2 beer in Ruston in those days, but to get the good stuff a road trip was in order. Since we were broke college students, in addition to full-strength beer, we pooled our coins to also buy fine wines such as TJ Swann and MD 20/20.”
Send your horribly embarrassing stories of drunken turpitude to:
[email protected] blooddirtangels.com
Style, Pages 49 on 09/08/2013