Thinking Wine of Past & Now

We had a family dinner the other Sunday evening. Wine was served , a Riesling. This semi sweet wine is a favorite of wife & daughter in law. I usually maintain a selection of wine for various occasions. Received a wine fridge a couple of yrs ago so I have a place for storage. Talking about wine I admit is a slippery slope. Lets face it , wine can be a topic of snob appeal. I have run into a fair number in my life , wine snobs that is. So I am avoiding vintage & year discussions & leave that to others. My wine experience stems from my early yrs in the Town of Schodack NY in the 12033 zip area. The growing of grapes was a fairly common pursuit 40 plus yrs ago. My family had some grape vines as did many back yards in my hometown. Many farms in the area also grew grapes , the Swartz & Golden farms being examples. The majority of grapes were turned into jams & jelly back then. People grew grapes mainly for this purpose. Usually the hardy concord variety. We were not yet the wine consuming nation we would become. Beer & whiskey was the norm. Wine was something one might consume at a Thanksgiving Dinner. A rare if festive occasion. The Gallo family lets face it were what we thought about when it came to wine. I as well as my generation began to turn to wine in my opinion because of their marketing efforts. So what got me interested. Well James Bond for one thing. These movies were all most a cult event in the 60's. Bond , drinking the 57 whatever chilled properly. We were more open to something new if Bond did it. What was new was products like Ripple and Boone's Farm Apple and Zapple wines. Cheap & drinkable and local bars began to serve them. Especially Zapple , with it's higher alcohol content. My generation began to consume and would keep an open mind on this type of drinking. As for me one experience served as a milestone. The Connolly family of Shufelt Road. Mr. Connolly an amateur vintner had a small vineyard on his property and made his own wine. It was on a hill in the wooded area in back of his home. Slightly less than an acre it produced a Pinot type grape. Mr. Connolly created a Merlot type red. Sediment on the bottom of the bottle cause he did not believe in straining very much. I as well as a friend received a bottle as a gift. It was a deep red and dry. Oh yeah. It was consumed but it was not for amateurs. But these ventures into adult kind of wine were instructive , even to a 19 yr old. As yrs went by I developed a real taste for wine from these beginnings. I also in my various explorations of this part of the Hudson Valley region have been mildly surprised to discover grapes growing in the wild. Perhaps planted by birds or deer from droppings or wooded areas overtaking former farm land left vacated. These untended vines with a low production of grapes I have found in places such as the Papscanee Island preserve near the Hudson river off railroad right of ways in South Schodack and Schodack Landing areas. Recently I found a stingy clump in a wooded area of Graw Road near the Columbia County border. Perhaps some are from old grape vines grown 40 or 50 yrs ago in the area. One cutting I took from the Papscanee Preserve a couple of yrs ago appears from my research to be of the grape used to make Pinot Noir. Hope to return and see if it remains next summer. So , my blog on wine. Old tastes , old vines left behind new tastes such as wine from Schodacks Brookview Station winery owned by the Gould family. All part of this life I still live.

John Lennon 70th Birthday Today

A sure sign that I myself am aging is that today would have been Lennon's 70th birthday. Has it been that long ago....must be. As a young teenager I as did millions of Americans watch the Beatles on the old Ed Sullivan Show. A couple of years ago I attended a taping of the Late Show with Letterman. It is done at the Ed Sullivan theater. I was mildly surprised to see that the theater was as small as it was. Seemed huge that night. The Beatles overall impact back then was huge. I once attempted to try and explain to my daughters musician boyfriend just how big an impact that week was. To music , culture , art , fashion , etc. The world seemed to change within a few short weeks. The change was most intense in the urban areas of course but even in small town Castleton NY where I grew up. You could sense things were not the same. We became a little more British or we thought we did. Our hair , clothes music tastes were moving in an exciting new direction , even if some were reluctant to go. My generation had discovered a different world beyond our borders. Overall we liked it. So among my Kyle Eastwood jazz cd's and Bach there remains my Beatles as my favorite R&R that I still pull out and enjoy well after 45 yrs. If there was a cultural DNA , Lennon would have his genetic template in their somewhere. Subtle but present , a wave still effected us to the present day. RIP , especially the peace part.