Aw Lady. You took my reply too serious. But I did meet a "lady in red" one night, in San Diego and OMG. No skinny dipping...just skinnying. With red wine. Who cares what kind.

My first memorable wine experience was suckling a shriveled teat. It had a Port or Sherry taste to it. I'm pretty sure it was a woman, although maybe a goat? It was a confusing experience...

quote:

Originally posted by slapshot:
Aw Lady. You took my reply too serious. But I did meet a "lady in red" one night, in San Diego and OMG. No skinny dipping...just skinnying. With red wine. Who cares what kind.

Sorry Again Slapshot!...wussn't ME!..

First memories of wine date back to the mid '70s where we'd have family reunions. We'd drive for about 2 hours and then the adults would pull out the cask wine that had been sitting on the back seat of a car that had just baked on Australian roads in midsummer. If we ankle biters had been good we were 'rewarded' with a little taste of the wine.

Fortunately I have managed to suppress those memories of a traumatised childhood.

The horrors of Hirondelle.

Really quite the worst stuff in the World. Worse than Blue Nun, worse than Paul Masson carafes, worse than white zin. Truly atrocious but being fifteen...

as an italian, we had wine on the table since i can remember.
from about 7 years old i was allowed to have a sip on special occations and from 10, i was allowed to have a smal glass on sunday.

Lady: Wasn't you????? But there is a chance it could be. I plan on being in NAPA in October and in southern Cal this winter. You guys got any off-lines planned?

quote:

Originally posted by slapshot:
Lady: Wasn't you????? But there is a chance it could be. I plan on being in NAPA in October and in southern Cal this winter. You guys got any off-lines planned?

...I doubt it...don't remember any skinnying in SD 'cept with my husband..you had a better chance with me back in the French Canal.

..I will be going to my first offline on 8/13..and then we'll see how it goes from there as to what gets planned in the future.

My first memories of wine:

1) My grandma had a wash shed behind her house in Houston, Texas, where I grew up. My parents actually made wine in that shed, once. I am glad I was too young to be interested. I did not have to drink any.

2) My ex-wife buying 5 liter boxes of Almaden Chablis and keeping it in the fridge. Gotta love that spigot. I tried to drink it, but it was too putrid for me. Even then, the idea seemed horribly romantic, but, I was clueless.

3) I will confess, I once drank Berringer's White Zin. Mea culpa, Mea culpa, Mea maxima culpa.

4) One of my daughters high school boyfriends, his mom was from Australia, brought over a couple bottles of Lindemans Cabernet, the first wine I ever liked.

5) My first truly great Bordeaux, a bottle of 1986 Lynch Bages, drank by myself, in about 1990. After nursing it for over two hours, it opened up and blew me away. That did it for me.

6) My mind's recollection of the best bottle of wine in my life, a bottle of 1984 Penfolds Grange, served at dinner by an acquaintance, around 1999. Another eye opening experience.
joe

I remember taking my girlfriend (now my wife) out to dinner and ordering Rose d'Anjou and Lancers and thinking they were very special wines that came in very special bottles. I remember buying Almaden and Paul Masson wines and thinking the year on the Paul Masson wines was important. The first Zinfandel I ever had was a non-vintage Almaden.

I thought I'd resurrect this thread and share what I think was a pretty non-standard intro to wine.

I won’t count the Mad Dog, Blue Nun and Lancers that I scored prior to this. To me, the first time I really had wine was when I answered a knock on the door at my parent’s house. I was around 19-20 years old and it was the mid-‘80s, and this European wine importer called Emissary was actually selling wine door-to-door.

For $15, I got to try six 375ml bottles in the comfort of my parent’s dining room and decide if I wanted to order any more of any of them. My parents were even cool with this! It was through this that I came to love German Rieslings (still my #1 wine). I wasn’t much into reds at the time, but one that I strongly recall as opening my eyes was a Hungarian red – 1984 Ersekhalom-Bischofsberger Spätburgunder, Red Ausbruch Grape Wine. I saved the label, but I’ve never been able to learn anything about this wine or the producer. But it was very spicy and got me excited about the variety of flavors that you could get from wine.

Sadly, I didn’t have the disposable income at the time to really explore much or to look for higher quality wines. But it simmered in the background until it finally flared up for me about 10 years ago.

It is bittersweet seeing slapshot again....

PH

Is bittersweet seeink Serge agaIN.

Nah. Just bitter....

PH

quote:

Originally posted by vintage:
1) My grandma had a wash shed behind her house in Houston, Texas, where I grew up.

what part I lived in Lakeside in west Houston

for me it was surely a night of sneeking out of the house and getting trashed on the Boones Farm or perhaps another New Years blowout with the Cordon Negro Brut by Freixenet

quote:

Originally posted by vintage:
My first memories of wine:



2) My ex-wife buying 5 liter boxes of Almaden Chablis and keeping it in the fridge.
joe

No wonder she is now your EX-WIFE.

as a young (3 or 4 y.o.) my grandfather, who immigrated from Northern Tuscany and had a thick Italian accent, visiting from Chicago. He ALWAYS brought chianti in the wicker baskets. Very stereotypical but we always got to taste it at dinner. Never liked it, of course. Great memories though.

trying to look like i had drank the stuff before on a date

I had more than a few experiences with jug wines, and the case of Cold Duck my buddy managed to aquire from a party his parents held. But the younger years were really just drinking wine for the alcohol, 'not that there is anything wrong with that'!

The first real trancendent wine experience was at Cannon Beach Oregon in 1993, when we splurged on a bottle of 1989 Clerc Milon at a local wine shop. We didn't know what we bought, and it was a few years before I realized what we drank. Wow!

Too bad we didn't buy more.

My first real wine memory involved drinking an entire magnum of some crappy sweet white bought at a grocery store. I was 16 and it was consumed at a 1985 Neil Young concert. The wine was drank out of a straw from a Coke cup.

No need to get into the gory details of what happened later in the night. Suffice to say I was unbelieveably sick. Being out in the sun all day also didn't help.

Well, my very first wine experiences involved 3 bottles of Boone's Farm Strawberry Hill while studying for a Business Law exam. My hangover must have helped me concentrate that day because I got a B+.

My first experience with REAL wine was when I met my wife in 2000. We went on our first date to a nice Italian restaurant in Detroit (Mario's), and I knew she liked wine so I grabbed the wine list and gave it a gander. Even the American wines looked like they were in a different language, but no it was English, I just didn't have a clue. So she ordered a nice Chianti for us, and we talked about Pinot Noir. She had heard about a very good Pinot Noir maker named David Bruce, so on our second date we went to this amazing place called Tribute in Farmington Hills, MI. I called ahead to ask if they had David Bruce Pinot Noir, and they said "yes, 5 different bottlings". YIKES! The next words that came out of my mouth are golden to this day, I said "which one do you recommend?". They gave us the 1997 Chalone vineyard bottling. I had never tasted wine so good in my life. It started my wine obsession, and now I am on the allocation lists for Loring, Kosta Browne, Bonaccorsi, Torii Mor, and Clos Pepe. I cannot get enough. We went to Cali 2 years ago, and I told that story to the wine store manager at David Bruce's winery, and ended up getting a tour and tasting of their "good stuff". She likes to tell that story to people at wine tastings, since I now "know my stuff" for the most part. It gets a laugh.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Scott Butler,

Manischewitz and Passover dinner at about the age of seven. The extra sweet wine paired nicely with the dryed out brisket!

When I was a kid, Manischewitz at seders. Then as a student, Mateus and Cribari from the jug. Then the Almaden line of wines, until one day, I got a taste of '62 LaFite (unfortunately not the '61) which prompted me to buy a case of the '66.

Dick

quote:

Originally posted by SD-Wineaux:
To me, the first time I really had wine was when I answered a knock on the door at my parent’s house. I was around 19-20 years old and it was the mid-‘80s, and this European wine importer called Emissary was actually selling wine door-to-door.

For $15, I got to try six 375ml bottles in the comfort of my parent’s dining room and decide if I wanted to order any more of any of them.

Hmmmmm. So some strange guy was going door to door in the 80's, plying young, underage men with fancy alcohol, eh? How much do you remember after that? Did he "moonwalk" into your house?