le vin a la fin de bouteille avec plaisir je souris! acclamation!

My first wine purchasing experience (in high school) led me to Bartles and Jaymes wine coolers, a step up from boxed wine I was sure. I was ready to grab my high top shoelaces and pull myself up into a better life. That lasted until I tried Sloe Gin.

I traveled to Europe after high school and began to really understand the difference between the wine and beer I had grown up around, and Wine and Beer. Sipping a French wine selected to complement a fresh fish dinner made me understand the difference between drinking to drink and drinking to taste. My whole family has evolved. Though my mom still sports boxes of wine on her kitchen counter, she is known to buy a locally made Ozark mountain wine now and again. My dad, before his death, bought bottles of fine red wine as part of his personal anti-diabetes regiment. As for me, Bartles and Jaymes is history. I recently learned that my dad’s younger sister makes wine from her fruit trees. The cherry wine is to live for. I guess fine wine is in my genes after all.

My mother always made it a point to set out her best linen, china, and silverware for our holiday table during Easter, Thanksgiving and Christmas. Cut-crystal wine goblets were placed by her and my father’s places while we had small tumblers for water. One holiday, around the time that I was about to enter high school, we noticed that wine glasses were set at our places, too.

With neither fuss nor fanfare, my father opened the bottle of wine – the details of which escape me, except that it was a white – and proceeded to pour some into our glasses, under our wide-eyed and disbelieving stares. We were going to have wine? We were going to have wine!

It didn’t matter that the amount apportioned to each us was would barely moisten the tongue; to my mind, all that mattered was that sophisticated adults drank it. In that moment, as I reached for my glass, I felt the first stirrings of impatience to leave behind childhood, although it was my childish sense of whimsy that allowed me to imagine that a sip of this elixir would transform me from girl to woman.

Trying to hold the glass delicately by the stem, I brought it to my lips for my first taste and . . . what the . . . ?! This was no honeyed nectar of the gods! I had sipped about an eyedropper full of wine and it wasn’t just dry, it was desiccated (of course, it was years later before I knew what ‘dry’ meant). I put my glass back down where it remained untouched for the rest of the meal. My parents never said anything, my sisters made no remark about their own first tastings and we all tucked into the delicious food my mother had prepared.

That first shock to my immature palate might have put me off of wine forever and yet, at each subsequent holiday meal, I would quickly scan the table to reassure myself that a wine glass sat by my plate. It wasn’t the wine itself that was important – I didn’t learn to appreciate wine drinking until my early 30s – it was what it seemed represented. By serving us wine, even in token amounts, my parents seemed to signal that in their estimation, my sisters and I were becoming “dalagas” (young women).

Perhaps this is simply a wishful reinterpretation of a rather benign event and yet, knowing my parents, who are not overly demonstrative and given to hear-to-heart conversation, it was just the sort of quiet gesture whose message is imprinted lightly yet indelibly. My first taste of wine was my parents’ toast to a new, exciting transition.