WOW! Wine on this site. I have a short story to tell. My father made wine in our upstairs back in the early 1950s. He used wild grapes. I can't be more precise on the date, but four of us kids were in an upstairs room pushing a wagon around. Earlier, my brother and I had cleaned the unused room up and had a problem with what to do with dad's several gallon jugs of homemade wine. We decided to put them in a corner and cover them with an old homemade quilt. While playing, my buddy, Larry, walked over to the quilt-covered lump, said, "What's this...?" and kicked it when he didn't get a quick answer. The kick knocked two jugs together, breaking one, and we tried to sop it up with the quilt. Our efforts were almost fruitless and we went downstairs to reveal the bad news. Rather than being mad, my parents and the other kid's parent were laughing. The wine have gone through the wooden floor upstairs, and was dripping a red stain from the ceiling. We were off the hook with that, everybody was too embarrassed to do anything but laugh!
And this part, some of you will not believe. I would not believe it myself except I was the taster! My dad died in 1973 and his last batch of wine was made probably sometime in the 1960s. In 1981 I went back to Illinois and collected a few things. One thing was one of those gallon jugs in that upstairs room that had a good bit of wine in it. I brought it to Texas and put it on a shelf in my garage. It was, more or less, simply a keepsake of my father's. Four years ago I moved from that house to a smaller one and debated about bringing that jug with me. I decided that to be fair about it, the least I could do was to taste the wine that had evaporated down to about a quart in the corked jug. I was prepared for the worst and took a tiny sip. It was amazing! The stuff was wonderfully sweet and easy on the tongue. I'm not a wine drinker so all I can say is that it was good! The final act was for me to send a container back to my brother in Illinois for him to sample some of dad's old wine.
I retained a bit for future use myself. I'm thinking I'll finish it in March, on my 74th birthday. I'll drink it in honor of my father. a good man who died when he was 72. Here's to you, dad.
