What My Father Taught Me About Wine
In addition to some more important things, too.
Like many of you, I think of wine just about every day. I think about my father every day, too, and on Father’s Day weekend, I wanted to bring those thoughts together because my first exposure to and appreciation for wine came from him.
To be clear, there was nothing snobby or statusy about that exposure. It also wasn’t my sole early initiation into wine, either. There was the wine we snuck tastes of in the sacristy as altar boys, for which I am positive I never sought absolution. Primarily though, there was wine on the dinner table in my home most nights. Nothing fancy, jug wine poured from a carafe or unlabeled homemade bottles that then were actually made in someone’s home, not some facility for corporate team-building exercises. Those dining room initiation tastes were red wine mixed in with our 7-Up for special or special-ish occasions, and as we got older, the ratio of red wine to 7-Up literally inched up.
I can remember it often being a red blend from California called CK Fortissimo. Of course, it wasn’t labeled as a red blend and was not in the popular Red Blends section of the wine store, which did not exist then I don’t think. A Gallo product, the Italian-ish name likely appealed to Italian-Americans, but these blends were formulated and consumed by Italian immigrants in California, and of course, co-opted and adapted by the marketing folks at the Cali mass-producers. Today, it is made from some unspecified blend of cabernet sauvignon and “Italian varieties” according to their website, but I suspect it had been at one time, if not still, doses of zinfandel, alicante bouschet and petite sirah among other grapes. No, I don’t have 50+ year palate recall, but I do remember the alcohol content being in a 15% abv range which would have exceeded the typical abv level coming out of California at that time. It also tasted a lot like the homemade wines the neighbors would make (in their homes), which were often zinfandel, alicante bouschet and petite sirah, maybe some sangiovese, whatever traveled best across the country largely intact in wooden crates. I wrote about the traditions of home winemaking for Edible Jersey a couple of years back and you can read it here, if you like.
The wine never had to be sublime, by the way. It just had to be good, and I suppose “strong” too. Strong was not necessarily high in alcohol, but something with a bite, something rustic, the opposite of one of the world’s most overused wine descriptors, smooth. Wine that we were told would put hair on our chests (we being the males in attendance, I hope).
For special occasions, like Father’s Day, we would buy my father, not jug wine, but the “fancier” 750ml wine bottles. With them came the connotation that they were higher quality and classier. They had to be better we thought, and nicer and more special, and he deserved it. And what was the most special potent potable gift possible for Dad? No, not the Amaretto Disaronno bottle and snifter gift set but the Bolla wine gift box. I can remember there were three bottles in the wooden case, which was some sort of balsa wood, probably a step above the wood used to make those little airplanes with the rubber band and plastic propellers. A precursor to the “wood” used in IKEA furniture I suppose. There was one white - a Soave, and two reds - a Valpolicella and a Bardolino. They could have been made up marketing names for all we knew about wine in the 1970s. Most of our wine education then came from TV and radio commercials after all. Ruinite on ice was evidently so nice. Paul Masson would serve no wine before it’s time. Blue Nun had that funny couple bantering somewhat suggestively about liebfraumilch and we didn’t even know he was George Costanza’s father (eventually). And Mateus had to be cool because cool girls coolly melted multi-colored candles in the empty bottles for some cool effect lighting for their French impressionist posters on their dorm walls.
But those Bolla wines were not marketing names. They were and still are real and respectable DOCs and DOCGs in the Veneto region (and as Bolla more specifically today calls their Veronese series). You can buy them made by Bolla, or by any number of very good, less mass-produced winemakers. The grapes that are used in Valpolicella (Corvina Veronese, Rondinella, and Molinara), certainly have found a fan base in the production of Amarone (that more people swear they love than actually do), Valpolicella Ripasso, and increasingly better quality and eminently drinkable Valpolicella Classico and Classico Superiore without a trace of dried grapes.
Those “special” Bolla wooden boxes? I haven’t seen them except for the half dozen or so still in my possession. To give you an idea how long I have had them, they hold my cassette tape collection. Yes, I know, cassettes, but I still own boxes of 45’s and eight track tapes, too. What can I say?
I not only have those Bolla boxes and various physical formats of music. I have the many lessons learned from my father, among them perhaps my most lasting wine lessons. Wine doesn’t have to be sublime or expensive. It wasn’t about impressing anyone. It was for enjoyment. It was on the table because it was a component of your meal. Part of what made it enjoyable was the tradition, that it tied together generations with a common ritual, a ritual that traveled across an ocean with those earlier generations. It was part of the social fabric too, what you shared with family and friends and conversation. Sure, it was OK to splurge on occasion, like for a Father’s Day present with those fancy Bolla collection boxes, but you still drank it for the same reason. It all distilled down into my wine mantra: wine is social, wine is personal, wine is connective.
Typing this makes me cry and smile. I did win the father lottery, for certain, and whenever I am compared to him, it is both flattering and embarrassing. If you knew my father, you’d understand why. I would love to be able to sit and share a meal and a bottle of wine with him again, and it wouldn’t matter what the wine was. Sure, I’d want to get him something nice, maybe something from where his parents were from in Italy. Bari in Apulia or Caserta, outside Napoli in Campania. As a young adult, and as my wine knowledge started to develop, I would buy him wines that had some connection to him, not just to his heritage, but his deep religious devotion. The man who referred to vinegar as “the wine they gave Jesus on the cross” and loved using it, also liked when I would buy him wines like Lacryma Christi.
On any given night, I continue the tradition that ties together the generations of my family. I’ll sit down to a meal with family and have some wine. It won’t matter what the wine is in order to make that bridge. One more thing my father made me realize - how great it is to be a father. Although I fall short, I have always strived to be great at it too, like him.
Happy Father’s Day!