Category: Places to Visit

This is another in Power Tasting’s occasional series on great wine bars of the world.  Previous locations have included the Bounty Hunter in Napa and W.I.N.O. in New Orleans.

Generally, when Power Tasting recommends a wine bar, it is not primarily a restaurant with a bar in the front.  We make an exception for the Antica Bottega del Vino in Verona, Italy for a couple of reasons.  First of all is the name; it means the Old Wine Shop, so you know right from the beginning that wine is king here.  For another, the wine bar draws its own patronage distinct from that of the restaurant.  And finally, because the wine selection is so good.

The wine bar at Antica Bottega del Vino.  Photo courtesy of blog.boggi.com.

A few issues ago, we presented our impressions of the town of Verona.  It’s a charming little city with roots back to Roman times (and a great, still active arena) and is best known as being the home of Romeo and Juliet.  It’s also the jumping-off point for wine tasters visiting Valpolicella.  So you would expect that a Veronese wine bar would feature Amarone and other wines of the region.  And indeed, you can get some good Amarones and Ripassos.  But what makes Antica Bottega del Vino so special is that their list, written on a chalk board over the bar, includes wines from all the great wine making regions of Italy.  You can choose a Barolo, a Brunello, Nero d’Avola, Marche and so on and on and on.

Of course, there are many bars where you can find a long list of fine wines.  But in most cases, wine bars buy recent production and don’t have either the facilities or the finances to age their wines.  Antica Bottega del Vino is the grand exception.  Mostly, you’ll find wines with ten years or more on them, well-cellared and well-poured.  These folks appreciate wine and their customers have come to appreciate their knowledge and care.

And those customers are a part of the attraction as well.  Get to the bar a little before five, earlier than when most people leave work and before the diners arrive.  If you get there much later, you’ll have some difficulty getting a table in the bar, because the place fills up with Veronese, stopping by to sip, to nibble, to chat and be seen doing all the above before going home to spouses and bambini.  Unless you happen to speak Italian, you won’t understand the conversation but you’ll be wrapped up in an atmosphere that only a bar that first opened in 1890 can give you.  And if someone notices that you’re showing real enjoyment of the wines you order, he or she will want to know who you are, where you come from, what you do, why you’re in Verona and what you’re having for dinner.

We’ve never dined at Antica Bottega del Vino, but we have noshed.  The bar features many cicchetti (snacks), such as finger sandwiches, a meatball, a piece of cheese.  Just little things to go along with your wine.

And one last thing: it’s not very expensive.  For what you’d pay for a glass of plonk in New York, you could have a noble wine aged perfectly.  It’s almost enough to make a special trip to Verona.

Here’s another in Power Tasting’s irregular series on great wine bars of the world.

Of course, you knew that W.I.N.O. (http://www.winoschool.com) stands for the Wine Institute of New Orleans.  Situated just outside the famed French Quarter on Tchoupitoulas Street (that’s Chew-pa-TOO-las, in case you have to ask your way), W.I.N.O. is one of those places with a lot of bottles in nitrogen-filled dispensing machines.  They refer to themselves as a self-service wine bar.

You get a plastic card, insert it into a slot and then put your glass under the spigot in front of the bottle of wine you want to taste.  You can get one-, two- and four-ounce tastings at graduated prices.  There are a few communal tables up front where you can sit and sip your wine, or you are free wander around with glass in hand.

Many, perhaps most of the wines on offer are little-known.  There are others that are quite renowned and are priced accordingly – rather steep for little servings.  We’ve found that trying wines we’ve never heard of is the most fun.  They don’t cost much to sample and they’re from all over the winemaking world.  If you don’t like it, you’ve only spent a few dollars on an ounce of something obscure.  And if you do like it, you’ve made a wonderful discovery.

But, you may well ask, what’s so special about W.I.N.O?  There are lots of similar tasting machines in cities across the US, and overseas as well.

For one thing, at W.I.N.O. you are wine tasting in New Orleans.  Maybe you’re there for a convention or to listen to jazz or try the local cuisine.  And drink (a local custom).  Now, New Orleans has famous cocktails, like the Hurricane (ugh) or the Sazerac (not bad).  It has some great local beers, specifically Abita, available at every bar.  There are good wine lists at some of the better restaurants, but if you’d like to go to a wine bar and don’t want to travel far from the French Quarter, W.I.N.O. offers you a wine-friendly oasis.

Another part of the appeal of W.I.N.O. is the sheer scale of the selection available to you.  Their wine dispensers house 120 beverages (a few spirits are included as well).  They have reds, whites, rosés and dessert wines from the US, Europe and many other corners of Wine Country.  The cost of the pours is based on the bottle price and runs from a dollar for an ounce of an obscure wine from a little-known source, to as much as $20 per ounce of Opus One. Careful: putting “just a little more” on the card adds up quickly.

If you’re looking for a quick education in the wines of a region you’re unfamiliar with, W.I.N.O. gives you the chance.  In our most recent visit to W.I.N.O., we looked specifically for Languedoc wines, just to see what they would have.  In fact there were five or six, but we were familiar with all of them and had some bottles of them at home.  We were amazed to find out also that there were two bottles from a really off-the-beaten-path cooperative in the Enserune region that we also had tried in France.

You can get some fancy nibbles to absorb the alcohol, like cheeses, dips and olives.  In New Orleans, though, if you come out a little woozy from what you’ve been drinking, no one will notice.  This is the town with the motto Laissez le Bon Temps Rouler.

Sonoma County is a big place.  It is most famous for the American cartoonist Charles Schultz, the Petaluma Puppy Farm and flooding in the spring.  Oh, yes, and wine.  Lots of wine, some very good, and the people there have been making it for a long time too.  The oldest known commercial winemaking vineyard in California was founded in Sonoma in 1861.  It was – and is – the Buena Vista Winery, where you can still taste their current wines at their winery just outside downtown Sonoma.

There are three major towns in Sonoma County, the others being Healdsburg and Santa Rosa.  They also have restaurants, shops, tasting rooms and hotels.  Sonoma town has its own reasons to visit.

The Mission San Francisco Solano de Sonoma.  Photo courtesy of Sonomavalley.com.

The most important reason, perhaps, is that this is where it all began.  As mentioned above, this is where winemaking started in California.  It was a Spanish mission town, the last one as a matter of fact.  The Mission San Francisco Solano de Sonoma is still standing and available for visiting.  It was in Sonoma that Guadalupe Vallejo, a young lieutenant in the Mexican Army, laid out a street system with a plaza in the middle: today’s town of Sonoma.  The Sonoma Plaza is the main reason, besides the history, that you should visit the town today.

One side of the Sonoma Plaza, with the historic Sebastiani Theatre.  Photo courtesy of joyfimg.pw.

It’s a large plaza, in fact the largest town square in California.  It is surrounded by shops, restaurants, tasting rooms and the Sebastiani movie theater that’s an architectural gem in itself.  The plaza is full of shady trees and in the middle is the Sonoma Town Hall, also worth seeing for its architectural value.

Sonoma is the southern-most town in Sonoma County’s Wine Country.  If you’re driving up from San Francisco and plan to spend only a day or so, it’s the town in the middle of the Carneros and Sonoma Valley vineyards. There are, in fact, many wineries right around Sonoma to choose from, far more than anyone could visit in a day.  While you’re tasting, you’re going to want to eat and Sonoma and its central square are a natural choice.  We had quite an authentic Mexican lunch there.

Moreover, there are many tasting rooms on or around the plaza.  If you’d prefer to taste without a lot of driving, especially on weekends, Sonoma offers a good alternative.  Some of the wines available there are quite good.

Many of the wineries in easy proximity to Sonoma have considerable longevity.  Besides the aforementioned Buena Vista, nearby wineries include Sebastiani, Chateau St. Jean, Ravenswood, Gundlach-Bundschuh and Hanzell. They’ve been making wine for a long time, in some cases back to the 19^th century.   Of course their wines today are more up-to-date, but you have the chance to sip history in Sonoma.

When you’re out wine tasting, travelling from winery to winery and taking the vineyard views, it’s easy to forget that real people live there, buying food and hardware, getting their clothes cleaned and generally living ordinary American lives.  When we go to Wine Country, we always try to see some of the local life as well as the wines.  That’s true overseas in places like in the city Bordeaux and the village of Montalcino, though those are tourist destinations in themselves.  In Napa Valley, it’s St. Helena.

The Richie Block.  Photo courtesy of Noe Hill Travels.

St. Helena has a unique charm.  We have found it a worthwhile to interrupt our wine tasting adventures to take an hour or two to look around this town.  A portion of the only street of note (Main Street, also known as Route 29 and also Route 128) is a registered Historic District.  There are several restaurants, a few tasting rooms (which we have never tried), and then the usual: a few grocery stores, clothing shops, a movie theater, jewelers and some offices.  In other words, St. Helena is just like everywhere.  Except there’s this architecture, with 34 buildings of note.  Particularly notable are the Richie Block, a fine Victorian structure built in 1892 and the St. Helena Star building, from 1900.

The St. Helena Star Building.  Photo courtesy of Noe Hill Travels.

Then there’s this really neat hardware store (Steve’s, no relation) where we’ve often found something or other that was just what we needed and couldn’t find at home.  There was a nicer than usual champagne preserver, a salt grinder, some random cookware all at lower prices than at fancier cookware stores.

Many of the “downtown” restaurants are quite good.  We have enjoyed lunch at Market, which specializes in the classics of American cuisine with a bit of a Wine Country twist.  Sure, they have a burger, but the beef is from an “all-natural” butcher and the cheese is from a special farm in Modesto.  In fact, that summarizes St. Helena: It’s just like everywhere, except it’s not.

There is one eatery in St. Helena that is a must for visiting wine tasters.  Just south of the commercial district is Gott’s Roadside, the place for burgers and fries.  Oh, they have other things too, but stick with the Americana.  You sit outside, under umbrellas, and order from a window.  It   If you want to feel like you’ve gone back in time for a great burger, this is your place.

Photo courtesy of Gott’s

 One nice thing about stopping in St. Helena is that you are very near to many of the wineries you might want to visit.  Beringer is just five minutes away by car (20 on foot).  Markham and St. Clement are just a bit further.  The grand buildings give evidence that St. Helena has long been an important town, even before wine became a major business in itself.

You’re planning a vacation in northern Italy.  And you’ll certainly want to spend some time in Venice.  Lucky you.  As a wine lover, you’d like to do some wine tasting.  Right around Venice are Soave and Venetzia-Friuli, both famous for their white wines.  Oh, but you wanted to taste some major league red wines?  In that case, you can drive about an hour and a half west and you’ll be in Valpolicella, where you can sip Amarone to your heart’s content.  We’d like to suggest that you take more than a day trip and enjoy the pleasures of the main city of Valpolicella, Verona.

It’s an ancient city, as evidenced most of all by the magnificently intact Roman stadium on the grandest of Verona’s wide plazas, the Piazza Bra.  They still stage an opera festival there every summer.  Even if you can’t get a ticket, it is quite a pleasure sitting in sidewalk caffe on the piazza, sipping a cappuccino and admiring the stadium and other grand buildings of a more modern era.

The ancient Roman Arena on the Piazza Bra.

In fact, Verona is a city of many wonderful piazzas, much like Venice.  The Piazza d’Erbe was the herb market in the Middle Ages.  Today it is lined with restaurants, all with tables in the open air.  The middle of the square is full of carts selling all sorts of touristy items, most importantly little puppets of Pinocchio, a famous local resident of the past.

In many ways, the Piazza d’Erbe is best appreciated at night, when the Renaissance buildings and towers are lit up.  It’s a dramatic backdrop for a bowl of spaghetti or big fat pici, the locally popular pasta.  (A word of warning about the food in Verona: horse and donkey meat are very popular there.  So if you see cavallo or asino on the menu, think twice.)

Just beyond the Piazza d’Erbe is the Piazza Seignoria, with a large statue of Dante looming over it.  He was a Florentine, but was exiled there for his political views and settled in Verona.  The Veronese adopted him quite readily.  In those days, Verona was a possession of the Venetians so anyone that Florence was against, Venice was for.

Piazza Seignoria, with its statue of Dante.

Verona has a special place in the hearts of lovers of Shakespeare’s plays.  For one thing, there were the Two Gentlemen of Verona.  And then there was a notorious feud between two Veronese families, the Montecchi and the Capeletti.  You may know them as the Montagues and the Capulets.  Today you can visit Juliet’s balcony, where single women have taken to leaving little messages on the wall asking Ms. Capulet to help them find a lover as true as Mr. Montague.  In fact, you can have dinner in a restaurant in Romeo’s house.

As you wander through Verona’s medieval and Renaissance section, you will find a high gate with a clock in it, that turns an ordinary street into a special place.  At its base is a bust of Shakespeare with this inscription in both English and Italian:

“There is no world without Verona’s walls, but purgatory, torture, hell itself.  Hence, banished is banish’d from the world, and world’s exile is death.” Romeo and Juliet, Act III, Scene III

 

This article is another in Power Tasting’s series on great wine bars of the world.  The most recent additions to this list were Vinauberge in Languedoc and Petits Creux et Grand Crus in Québec City.

 We have written about the Bounty Hunter before, in the context of things to do in the town of Napa while you are on a wine tasting trip.  It deserves to be taken on its own merits, as a place to sample some pretty good wine in a, shall we say, distinctive setting. Located on the corner of 1st and Main Streets, the Bounty Hunter (http://www.bountyhunterwinebar.com/) attempts to bring the ambiance of Western movie set saloon to the modern-day tourist mecca that is Napa Valley.  And, to our point of view, it succeeds.

Photo courtesy of timeout.com.

In the old Western films, a bounty hunter was not a nice person, but rather reminiscent of Inspector Javert in Les Miserables.  Fear not; we can attest that the people at the Bounty Hunter are all very pleasant and helpful in selecting wines to drink.  And help is often needed, as you have a choice of 40 wines to order by the glass and 400 by the bottle.

You may already know about the Bounty Hunter even if you’ve never been there.  If you’re a wine lover (and why would you be reading Power Tasting if you’re not?) you’re probably on a buyers’ list so you may have received their catalog in the mail.  It’s notable in the way that they highlight individual producers, mostly but not exclusively from California, and it makes good reading even if you’re not buying.  The wines in the catalog, for the most part, are the same wines you can order at the saloon.

The layout of the Bounty Hunter places the bar at the rear (unless you enter from the parking lot, in which case it’s the front) and restaurant tables at the street entrance.  The restaurant specializes in what the proprietors aptly describe as “Smokin’ BBQ”.  Although some of their wines do go with barbecue – Zinfandel always works for us – they have many high quality, rather delicate wines to choose from.  We think their idea is for you to drink a rough, tough wine with dinner and then take a bottle of Burgundy home with you.

The interior of the Bounty Hunter.  Photo courtesy of oenomad.com.

We must note the décor, which is notable for old Wild West posters, the heads of dead animals and a florid nude over the bar.  All that’s missing is a piano player.  You can easily imagine Black Bart walking through the front door to have it out with the sheriff.

It would all be very kitsch, except for that wine list.  The by-the-glass offerings change frequently.  You can look up the choices on their web site, but why bother.  As of this writing, they offer quite a few wines we know well (e.g., Veuve Cliquot, Frog’s Leap, Renwood, Chappelet) and then many more with which we are unacquainted such as Poetic Justice, Jigar or Ken Wright.  A sign of a good wine bar is that if you are comfortable with the wines you do know, you can have the confidence to experiment with the ones you don’t.  The Bounty Hunter also offers eleven flights of wines to help guide your experiments (including one to go with barbecue).

We don’t go to Napa Town without stopping for a glass or a meal at the Bounty Hunter.  We recommend that you do the same.

 

 

 

 

On the eastern edge of the Minervois appellation in the southwest of France, there is a small village – a hamlet really – named Le Somail.  There are no vineyards immediately surrounding it, the nearest ones being only a few kilometers away.  When you are visiting wineries in the general area, leave yourself some time to visit this charming spot.

It has a certain Brigadoon quality, as though time had slowed down, if not stopped, in the 17^th century.  That’s because Somail exists solely because it was at a convenient point between Toulouse and the Mediterranean Sea on the Canal du Midi.  It provided a stopping-off point for the boatmen and a harbor for their ships.

And so there were inns built, a bridge over the canal, a chapel, a few cafés.  They are all there today, some of them updated for the 21^st century of course, with the enhancements done with a dash of French élan.  There are many boats, called péniches along the canal, and vacationers with rentals continue to steer their way (a bit shakily in some cases) under the ancient bridge.

The bridge is festooned with pots of flowers and offers a view of the hamlet and its boats.  One near to the bridge is quite a sight.  It’s a floating grocery store, good for a few provisions for the boaters and croissants for the locals in the morning.  It, too, hearkens back to another era.

The Epicerie Flottante, or the Floating Grocery Store

A good idea is to save your visit to Le Somail for lunchtime.  There is a row of outdoor cafés stretched along the southern bank of the canal, several of which have quite a reputation in the region.  Steve had one of the specialties, frog legs in a garlic cream sauce.  It was particularly delicious and would surely have been enough for two, except that Lucie doesn’t eat the little hopper sand could not even look at him eating them.

The southern bank also has all the requisite craft shops and galleries that seem to pop up wherever tourists gather.  They’re fine, but really no better than all the other sun dappled villages in the south of France.

On the other side of the bridge from the restaurants are several small hotel/guest houses and restaurants that offer fancier fare than the previously mentioned cafés.  The old chapel is worth a glance as well.  And there is a truly unique attraction: the Librairie Ancienne (the Old Bookstore) which claims to have 50,000 books, surely an undercount.  Of course, most of them are in French but there are plenty in all languages.  There are marvelous picture books to thumb, rare books to stare at under glass, comics, kids’ books, lithographs, engravings, antique maps and more.  If you are a bibliophile, you could get lost in there forever.

A partial view of the interior of the Librairie Ancienne

You can see all there is to see in Le Somail in an afternoon, lunch included, or you can stay for the night and really get the feel of the place.  It does come down to a choice, wine tasting or soaking up the atmosphere.  We chose the former, but not without a little twinge of regret as we pulled away.

This is another entry in Power Tasting’s catalog of great wine bars around the world, places to visit whenever you are in the area.  In previous issues, we have highlighted wine bars in Quebec City, London, Paris and other cities.  In this case, the destination is not in a city at all, but in a tiny village in the Languedoc.

If you are in the southwest of France, whether in a boat on the Canal du Midi or just wine tasting in the Languedoc, make a stop in the village of Poilhes.  No matter how that’s spelled, it’s pronounced POOH-ya.  The hamlet is surrounded on all sides by grape vines, as far as the eye  can see.  And in the middle of it is Vinauberge (http://www.vinauberge.com).

It is many things: a boutique hotel, a restaurant, a meeting hall and certainly not least a wine bar.  It is situated in a long-defunct wine cooperative, the location in a French grape growing region where viticulturists (that’s fancy Latin for grape farmers) take their crops to be pressed and made into wine.  An international group of investors bought the disused building and renovated and repurposed it.

For many American wine lovers, Languedoc’s wines are a bit of a mystery.  Maybe you’ve heard of Languedoc-Rousillion, Corbières, Minervois, St, Chinian, Faugères or Pic St. Loup.  Maybe not, and if you have you probably don’t know much about them.  If you tasted any of them years ago, you probably found them rough and highly acidic.  Today, there are many fine wines to be had in the Languedoc region, but trying them all requires time, travel and a resilient liver, plus some ability to speak French.  That’s where Vinauberge comes in.

Vinaubege on the banks for the Canal du Midi.

You may have seen those dispensers that for a dollar or two pours you a taste of a specific wine.  Your local wine shop may have one with half a dozen wines on offer.  Vinauberge has them too, with forty wines to sample.  Of course, facing forty unknown wines presents its own dilemma.  You certainly don’t want to try forty wines at a sitting.

Romuald (“Romu”) Barreau and his friendly colleagues are there to help you.  He first asked us what we wanted to taste and we replied we’d like to get to know the red wines.  Then he asked what our tastes in reds are. Steve prefers bold wines and Lucie goes for more elegant ones, so that called for more than one glass.  “Well, if you like this Faugères,” Romu said, “compare it with this St. Chinian.  Oh, and try this rosé”.  And, and, and.  Before we knew it, we had six glasses in front of us and we’d sipped who-knows-how-many different wines from around the Languedoc.

Romuald Barreau introducing us to Languedoc wines.

Aside from his generosity, Romu told us tales of the wine makers, their families, the history of the winery and other lore that only a local son of the vineyards would know.  We learned a great deal about Languedoc wines from Romu.  Of course, we bought several bottles when we left and we returned often.

One particular event is worth mentioning.  We happened to be in Poilhes the night of the annual harvest celebration, held at Vinauberge.  We shared dinner with more than a hundred vignerons and their families.  There’s something very special about being among the good, honest folk who work so hard so that we might open bottles of what they produce and get the enjoyment of a full-bodied glass of wine.

The vignerons and their families gather at Vinauberge for the harvest festival.

[Oh, by the way, it’s pronounced VIN-oh-berzh.]

Back in 1666, when Louis XIV was 28 years old and not yet the Sun King, he and his ministers decided to actualize a long-held dream: to connect Toulouse to the Mediterranean Sea via a canal running through the Midi, a familiar name for the Southwest of France.  The engineering work fell to Pierre-Paul Riquet, who is still celebrated in that region, and it was completed by 1681.  All of which is mildly interesting history, except for the fact that you can boat, live and walk or bike along the Canal du Midi today.  If you are visiting Languedoc for wine tasting, leave yourself some time to enjoy the canal as well.

For the most part, the canal wends its way through shady glades and lovely little villages.  Life does not go very fast along the Canal du Midi.  It is 240 km. long but only 10 meters wide, just enough for two rather narrow boats to pass by.  You couldn’t go fast if you wanted to, unless you wanted to smash your boat against one that is anchored on the side, drown in a lock or take your head off passing under a low stone bridge.  So you are forced to slow down your inner clock, take it easy and enjoy the scenery.

Sometimes the best part of that scenery is the willows and reeds along the banks.  On others, it’s the pretty small villages along the canal and also the glimpse of castles and cathedrals off in the distance.  And if you’re walking or biking along the banks rather than boating, there are pleasant pathways that give way to breathtaking vistas especially, so we have found, as sunset approaches.  Both the boaters and the walkers seem to enjoy a friendly wave as they pass one another.

Our personal experience has been to take a tour from just outside Toulouse to a turning point half way to Carcassonne.  It’s only 30 or so kilometers and can be driven in a half an hour, but it took us all day.  There are other, similar tours all up and down the canal.  Make sure you find one that goes further than just around the sections that are in urban areas.  Nothing against cities, but the joy of the canal is the French countryside as you glide by. We have also spent time in a house along the canal, which was wonderful.

Another idea is to make the Canal du Midi the vacation itself.  We haven’t done it ourselves, but we know that you can rent a boat (called a péniche) and pilot yourself along the canal.  There are dinky little boats available as well as large cruisers that sleep up to 10 people, although we mostly have seen parties of six or fewer.  From what we can see from the banks, the most popular rental agency is the unimaginatively named company, Le Boat (www.leboat.com).

There are numerous places along the canal where you can pull up and spend the night or a few days.  If you are next to a village, you can pick up groceries or have your meals in cafés or serious French restaurants that line the shores.  It’s the best fun you’ll ever have in the 17^th century.

Here’s a place to visit that you can’t visit anymore, and thank goodness for it.  But there is  some kind of nostalgia involved anyway.

In many US states and Canadian provinces, sales of alcoholic beverages are restricted to the government.  That’s all right because these stores are indistinguishable from the private wine and liquor stores in other states.  You walk down aisles with shelves stocked with wines, locally made and from around the world.  Just because it’s an SAQ store (Société des Alcools du Québec) or one run by the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board makes no difference.  Do you really care if the profits go to the government instead of a private owner?

But it wasn’t always this.  Just because Prohibition ended in the United States in 1933 and in 1920 in Canada (a wartime provision) didn’t mean that drinking alcoholic beverages was universally accepted.  In fact, in many places it was considered to be a sin.  Therefore, various jurisdictions reached the rather contradictory conclusion that if the state or province was opposed to sin it should nonetheless profit from the sinners.  But they needed to be well aware that they were sinning.  Hence, the state stores were born.

Photo courtesy of virginiaplaces.org

There were no aisles to wander.  There were no gaily decorated bottles to see.  There was no one to ask for a recommendation of what to serve with dinner that night.  What there was was a counter, some civil servants and racks of bottles behind the counter, “unauthorized entry prohibited”.  There was a price list of the products for sale in a plastic folder on the counter and you asked one of the civil servants to get you a bottle of whatever you intended to buy.  These individuals were there to serve you, but it definitely wasn’t service with a smile.

It became a rite of passage for a teenage boy to enter a state store with a driver’s license clenched in his fist and ask for…what?  Something.  Anything.  Just to prove that he could do it.  Drinking from that bottle was almost an afterthought and it was surely not going to be a fine wine from the vineyards of Bordeaux (he probably couldn’t pronounce it, much less spell it).  More likely he said, in a tremulous voice, “I’ll have a bottle of Gallo Hearty Burgundy, please”. Thus were the wages of sin paid.

Note that we refer to teenage boys.  Legally speaking, girls were allowed but that just wasn’t done in those times.  In fact, it was a brave grown woman who entered a state store.  Moms looked askance if Dads even took their little children into a state store with them.  Lucie’s Dad took her and she still remembers her Mom’s comments when they got home.

The whole point was that you were supposed to feel guilty.  Guilt was the cement that bound the drinker with society, and it was guilt that washed the sin away from the state or provincial coffers.  The underlying schizophrenia of such a system had to become unsupportable over time.  Eventually, the governments came to realize that they could make more money from sin if they made it seem attractive rather than reprehensible.  And so the stores became as they were and still are in their less restrictive neighboring states.

For those of us who enjoy tasting and drinking wine responsibly, it is hard to think back on these benighted times.  But it’s good to do so from time to time, if only to put our pleasant avocation in context of our times…and those gone by.