DelBloggolo: WINE

Tuesday, January 06, 2015

WINE

Woman's quote of the day

"Men are like fine wine. They all start out like grapes, and it's our job to stomp on them and keep them in the dark until they mature into something with which you'd like to have dinner with."

Wine in my family background goes back at least a century. When my grandfather came here to America, he brought with him his wine making skills and passed on the appreciation of wine to his children, who in turn tried to keep it from their children.

Grandpa Ralph had a winemaking grape crusher in his cellar on Fulton Street, Brooklyn. In the late summer when the grapes where fully ripened, he would cut them down from the vineyard he had growing in his backyard, Grandpa was a smart man, in the spring when the grapes began their maturation, he would cut a grape off and giver it to his grandchildren, who would taste a sour grape, and avoid touching the grapes at all, never realizing that the grapes would sweeten in the late summer!

Once it was time for the grapes to be harvested and turned into wine, the place became a beehive of wine making activity, flies all over the basement and grape being crushed into a grinder, then set aside to ferment, and then bottled into wine bottles without labels or brand. But if you tasted the wine, it was Grandpa’s wine we drank.

A homemade bottle of wine was often an apt gift to present to someone and was gladly accepted. Wine was like a pizza compared to other pizza made, so wine was compared. Grandma Frances made pizza as a business in during the great depression and profited from her pizza parlor. Dad would buy pizza and make a judgment, depending on his mood, whether the pizza was as good as he would make.

Grandma would always come to visit us when we moved to the Island and bring a big shopping bag or two. One bag was with a gallon of homemade wine and one was a bag filled with Italian cheeses, salami from different Italian regions and sometimes bread. But wine was the gift!

On the holidays such as Easter and Christmas, Dad would pour a pitcher of wine from his gallon jug and then slice oranges and drop them into the jug. After the orange slices sat through the meal, each of us kids got a slice of orange to suck and eat on, this was a big deal to a 7 year-old!

But God forbid you dropped or spilt a glass of wine, you were marked as clumsy for life, and everywhere you went, people would know: HE spilled the wine.

Men's counter-quote of the day

"Women are like fine wine. They all start out fresh, fruity and intoxicating to the mind and then turn full-bodied with age until they go all sour and vinegary and give you a headache.