The Wine Raconteur

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.

Please bear with me, as I give some background exposition, before I get into the actual stories about wines.   This is all to set the stage for my discoveries and to explain why I enjoy the grape so much.

My earliest recollections of being around brewed beverages were in the local establishments in Detroit and Windsor, Ontario (as my family was originally from Canada).  I think that were times when my father would “baby sit” me as a child, so he dragged me around to see his friends.  Those days were the days of shells, perhaps a Canadian term for draught beer, or draft here in the States.   They would order trays of shells, as they were a nickel or dime depending on the “exclusivity” of the establishment, so why bother the server for a glass at a time, when one was thirsty.  You have to remember that at that time, people believed in the bill board advertising “Drink Canada Dry” and they always tried.

In Canada back then there were Taverns and Bars, I believe these were the legal terms for them.  One only served beer and were men only places, women could enter accompanied by a man.  The other was a place for both sexes and it served whisky and other hard drinks as well as beer.

Since I was a child, I really should not have been there, so if the local gendarmes would walk in, I would become a coat rack that is all the coats and jackets would be piled on top of me, and my glass of coke would be left on the table.  I still smile when I think of the times when I was a clothes rack, and remember the heady days of being one of the boys with my father.

My name is John  and I have a passion for and romance for the wines.  I can sing praises about the wonders of wine.  People have suggested that I should start a blog and I thought first why should I blog, when there are great periodicals and websites that rate wines and technical facts.  Well, currently I have the time to be reflective and retrospective.  That would not be my intention, I am more a raconteur, and I shall wax poetic about stories and incidents that have fueled my ardent passion for the wines.

I came from humble beginnings growing up in southwest Detroit, not a major center for wines, especially in the sixties.  It was a working class area, that had many watering holes, but they were establishments where one could have a few beers or shots with friends, not the place to study the nuances of the toil of the winemakers.

It is from this location, that I eventually discovered “the grape” and I have been discovering it ever since.  At times I may seem to be rambling in my expositions, and I probably will.  Stories may be short and sweet, or long depending on my muse.