My first experience with wine was one Thanksgiving over fifty-five years ago.  My grandfather had received a very lavish give from some French friends, a case of Cheval Blanc bordeaux.  As a treat he offered to share a bottle with the family. For me this meant about a tablespoon in a small glass.  My immediate reaction was “sour!”  I pretended to act sophisticated, suave, and urbane, but at twelve years old this was hard to pull off.  The lasting impact for me was that fermented grapes were equivalent to those other adult food follies: broccoli, asparagus, and liver.

Times and my tastes evolved.  In college, when my beer budget permitted, I tried on a debonair persona to impress my dates and, where Chapel Hill restaurants had wine, I ordered the only thing I recognized, Almaden rosé.  I found it to be tolerable, but, more importantly, thought that it made me look cool.  Coolness, not the wine, was the motivator.

After college I went into the Navy. This experience did not give me many opportunities to expand my wine vocabulary until my wife and I were transferred to Naples, Italy.  We lived there for three years.  Alekka, our pastry-chef daughter, was born there.  Now it is impossible to live in Italy without experiencing wine.  Indeed for the beginner there was a bewildering selection.  Wines we never heard of in the United States: Soave, Valpolicella, Amarone, Lagrima Christi, Barolo, Bardolino, and on and on.  It seemed that each village had its own wine and a festival to honor their local grapes.  I had no anchor other than Chianti; generally this is what we drank.  I do remember a Sicilian wine, a red Corvo that was tasty and had a more robust flavor, and the ubiquitous wines bottled by the Bolla company.  Overall, the outcome of this three-year experience was a fondness, not passion, for having wine with a meal.  Still, the breadth of my knowledge ranged to: white wine with white things and red wine with dark things.

On returning to the United States I found the beginning of the ground swell of the American wine passion.  I left the Navy and enrolled in graduate school.  My wife and I discovered Gallo Hearty Burgundy, a jug wine that fit both our tastes and budget.  We thought that we were drinking the equivalent to French burgundy, and no one told us otherwise.  Our guests thought we were pretty cultured, after all we had lived in Italy for three years.  Still, our preference for drinks focused on beer, bourbon, gin, and scotch.

Years passed and I cautiously expanded my wine vocabulary.  Slowly I recognized that I could distinguish between chardonnay and sauvignon blanc, and that zinfandel was distinctly different from merlot.  As I took these baby steps I started to understand that wine both enhanced and was enhanced by the food with which it was paired.  Having grown up in an atmosphere that treated family meals as an important event, I became more active in trying to learn about the nature of wine and food.  I  read, tasted, and experimented.  In the past ten years I have begun to develop some confidence in my taste in wine.  I cannot afford the top bottles costing zillions of dollars, but I have touched a bottle of Lafite-Rothschild bordeaux .  It cost $1,050.00. I have seen a bottle of d’Yquem sauternes; cost $650.00.  I can only dream about tasting some of these wines but never expect to do so.  

I have even started collecting wine, not as an investment, but as a way to learn about differing flavors and profiles.  Several years ago I got a small windfall and bought a wine cellar, a large temperature and humidity-controlled refrigerator for storing my purchases.  My price ceiling for an expensive bottle of wine is $70.00 but mostly they fall into the $30 to $50 dollar range.  These are the wines for special meals with friends.  Daily my wife and I drink less expensive stuff and have fun experimenting with them, trying to match the wine with the meal.

As a teacher I believe that the educated person is not the person who knows everything, it is the person who is aware of what he does not know and knows how to find out the answers.  As I write this I am still learning how to find the answers and am enthusiastically looking for the right questions to ask.