My wife doesn’t often drink anything but Diet Coke, but we ate out last night and she enjoyed a glass of wine with her dinner. She said she wished she would remember to order it more often.
Wine was not part of my family's life. My first experience with wine came when I was about 14 years old and some people who came to our house for dinner brought a bottle of Manischewitz Concord Grape. I was allowed a sip, and I decided that if that’s what wine tasted like, I didn’t want any part of it.
Because of that I abstained from drinking wine for a lot of years, until I discovered there were plenty of wines out there that taste way better than Manischewitz. That was in the mid-1970’s when you could pick up some cheap but acceptable vino from wineries like Gallo or Carlo Rossi for about $1.50 a bottle.
To earn extra money when I was in graduate school, I gave guitar lessons at the local music store on Saturday mornings. The store owner didn't take anything out of the $3 I got for a lesson. It was just a way for him to lure customers into the store.
Sometimes lessons were paid for a month in advance, sometimes a kid would forget to bring money, and sometimes there were no-shows, so my income varied a lot from week to week. One particular Saturday I had given several lessons, but I finished the day with only $3 in cash.
On the way home, I stopped at a liquor store and bought two bottles of wine with my earnings. While driving home, I suddenly thought, “Well, ain’t that just like your basic drunk -- gets a day’s pay and immediately spends it all on cheap hooch.”
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