My dad gave me a small taste (less than an ounce) of his wine from the refrigerator that always sat in the back of the top shelf.  I was an odd bottle made of heavy glass with diamond shaped points on the wide bottom.  It had a long skinny neck and was closed off with a metal screw cap.  Dad would take a “swig’ out of it a couple times a week – no more often than that.  Even at a young age, I knew it was old as the cap was rusty by the time he finally finished it off.

One night I asked him if I could taste it and he looked at me for a long moment and said, “Sure, why not!”  He went to the kitchen cupboard and poured out about a ½ inch in the bottom of a “Welch’s Grape Juice” jar because that is what we used as “juice glasses” at our old Iowa farm house in the 1950’s.  He handed it to me and told me, “Don’t tell your mother!”  I smelled it and it had a terrible scent of vinegar.  I then put it to my lips and tasted it.  Yup, it was worse than it smelled.  He laughed and told me that it took a bit to get used to.  I finished it in one more gulp.  Yuck!  He laughed even harder.  I’m pretty sure that he knew that he had single handedly cured me of wanting to try that again for a long time.  He was right!

In a few minutes, I felt this warm feeling in my gut.  How could cold wine make your belly feel warm?  This terrible tasting stuff was really weird!  So what did I learn from this? First, wine tastes like crap!  Second, it has to be kept cold in the refrigerator for months and, last, don’t ever try that again.  I didn’t!  I stuck to soda for the next 10-15 years.

That being said, I had another epiphany at about that same age with hard liquor.  My aunt and uncle came to my parent’s house on a Saturday evening to pick them up and go to a dance in a town several miles away.  My uncle was drinking a bottle of 7-UP.  He sat it on the kitchen table and I figured “pop” is “pop” so I took a good pull from the bottle (I was probably 10 years old).  Someone had replaced the 7-UP with something that tasted like a mixture of warm pee and battery acid!  I guess it was cheap whiskey.  Everyone had a doubled over – knee slapping laugh at my facial expression.  I never ever “snuck” a drink of “pop” again unless I took the cap off myself.  Why would adults drink this stuff?

I soon learned that you could not buy alcohol at the dances, you had to bring it in yourself and at the town bar you could only buy beer.  Then in the 1960’s, Iowa allowed “liquor by the drink”, which meant alcohol could be sold in places like dances with a liquor license.  Thus, history was made and no more bottles “could” be brought in to the event.  You now had to buy it there!

Jim Albinger (Andrew’s dad) grew up in smalltown northwest Iowa in the 1950’s.  He has been writing down his experiences looking back at all that has shaped his current wine tasting hobby.  Expect to see more of Jim’s writings here at offthecork.com.

Find the 2nd installment of this story here

Tags: 1950s, alcohol, Concord, experience, first wine, juice, wine

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