As a teenager I remember going with the other guys to the park, and drinking beer, not a great tasting beverage to me, as I always thought it had a bitter taste, but it was the beverage of choice in those days.  It also was the way to achieve the expected results to prove our maturity.

Mixed drinks were cumbersome at a park setting or a make-shift baseball game, in those days, so beer it was.  There were the occasional nights of current wines of the moment like Boone’s Farm, Mad Dog etc as we sang “Bottle of Wine, fruit of the vine, when you going to let me get sober.”  Adolescence was charming and this was way before the internet, so we thought these were just the rites of getting older, especially since none of us were of legal age.

This was also the era before big advertising campaigns for wine.  Outside of beer commercials, where no body could be seen drinking a beer, except for the one that Frank Sinatra did.  That was immediately pulled off the air (and in Canada they couldn’t even show people and beer in the same picture – remember the “Skating Clown”).  Smirnoff had Woody Allen doing commercials for Moscow Mules (Smirnoff Vodka and ginger beer). Then there were  the commercials for Mateus Rose, Riunite Lambrusco and Cella Lambrusco.