Thunderbird? Annie Green Springs, Strawberry Hill? Boone's Farm? Ripple? Italian Swiss Colony? Until we discovered wine tasting....these were what we were familiar with at 21 years of age...now...ugh!

Here is a pretty good synopsis for the connoisseur of the fine wines of youth.

BumWine.com

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Straight shootin'
SWCA#2439

MD 20/20 (MadDog)......just the thought of that stuff brings back a massive headache and nightmares of the morning after.

Don

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Laus Deo! <><

Manischewitz, Richards Wild Irish Rose and Bali Hai.

At 17 ones taste buds are but speed bumps.

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Music/Sports/Beer fan

Riuniti (prob spelled that wrong) on ice! That's nice. For that classy date at Pizza Hut.

Maddog 2020....Rosie O' Grady....
Old times! Not sure I remember them as good times!

Sangria wine.

You forgot Mad Dog (Mogan David) 20-20 and Pagan Pink Ripple!

Love dat mad-dawg 2020. That and Boones Farm got me through middle school!

It is amazing how many of these are/were Gallo products bottled under different names. Also all the fllavors of Boones Farm are all Apple wine with different fllavors added.

My favorite whine of the '70s was "I want to hear more disco music"

I saw no mention of my favorite, Zapple, Cinnamon apple wine. It was good stuff, and no too overpriced. As I recall, it was about 99 cents for a bottle, in line with "hill". Strawberry Hill, that was. Its big advantage was it had no ugly after taste. You got the good apple flavor and then the after taste was masked with a cinnamon flavor. You could drink it until you fell over and puked. The next morning was no worse than anything else. We drank it in the 60s and early 70s, then it kind of vanished. Along about the mid 1980s we were at a friends garage. The top of the concrete block walls were lined with empty bottles, I guess consumed while building the garage or "working". There, up high, were about a dozen bottles of my former favorite. All empty of course.

Also in the early 1970s we discovered Ripple Pear wine. We lived in an apartment, and the guy next door's wife was a nurse like my wife. They worked 2nd shift so we were "unsupervised" in the evening. We falsely decided it would be a good idea to buy a couple of bottles each and tie one on. A strong hint of the bad idea was the label that suggested it be served ice cold. Never being overly bright, we "served" it ice cold as suggested, right out of the bottle. We kept pace and nearing the end of the 2nd bottle each, the thought came to us that it might be a bad idea. But being young and kind of student poor, we finished those bottles. Remember our total cost was under $2 each. Gawd did our head hurt the next moring. Pear wine tasted good but had an awful after effect. Sometimes things that sound like a good idea turn out differently in practice. I haven't talked to the other guy in years, but I'd bet he hasn't touched any of it since then, either.

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Dick Burg

don't forget the champale

Mine was Spanada. $1.89 a bottle. In those days it was a treat.

The worst: Gallo White Port, AKA Chateau Walgreens. Tuesday was a good year.

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Oh well, what the hell.

Yago Sangria if I remember correctly along with Boones Farm Strawberry Hill.
The girls that were with us at the time enjoyed those, me back then,just give me an iced cold Miller or a Rolling Rock!

Anybody ever get wasted on Akadama? It was the downfall of many a young sailor in Westpac..........















i

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Dean
SWCA #680 SWHF #446

Akadama - Akado - good for me - but better for you!

Almaden Mountain Red, Mateus, Blue Nun, any Chianti with a basket around the bottle. I guess those are more a '60s thing, but that is what the congenial young ladies of the East Bay served.

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Not in jail.

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Music/Sports/Beer fan

My taste was a bit more refined, Lancer's, and Matuse, both were a sparkling rose wine, I was married and in the military the wine added class to the evening.

Now when I was TDY and broke Mad Dog, Thunderbird Wild Irish rose were 69 cents a bottle. The trick was to drink a cup of wine and a cup of water then the hangover was manageable.

I went to work hung over one day, man did the boss give me the worst job of the day. It was summer in Okinawa, We had to load passengers and baggage for 60 people inside a KC-135 sitting in the sun and the breeze was blowing the wrong direction. My job was to build the baggage bin and floor load the the bags. 115 degrees, I sweated the alcohol out of my system, the guys i worked with said i smelled of Thunderbird. I can not think about those wine without my stomach doing a roll.

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Carpriver.

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Music/Sports/Beer fan

Who can forget "Night Train" and the classic full bodied "Dude 44?" My head still hurts!

Foolish boy. Always give the girls double what they like. It pays dividends.

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Dick Burg

Asti spumante.

Kept a bottle of Yago for the ladies in the back seat, square bottle if I recall prevented it from rolling about.
Miller worked for me or Old Mildew in the bottles.

Gallo Tawny Port. A lot of alcohol for the money without the low-rent stigma of the Thunderbird label.

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What, me worry?

I was a kid in high school in the late 70's. I used to hunt on the local Navy base where my father worked in the civil service. I got to know a lot of the sailors and the anti submarine patrol squadrons used to fly to the Azores all the time. They would bring back this Portuguese wine called "Mateus"...they brought back a lot of it because the entire county was about flooded with it and none of the local liquor stores sold the stuff, so everyone knew where it came from. When I asked one of the guys how they brought so much back the reply was always, "kid, there's a lot of hiding places on a P-3..."
Then when I was out of high school in the early 80's for some reason there was a regularly scheduled flight of some P-3 to Columbia and the county got flooded with weed. They called it "one hit Columbian"and it was pretty popular among the weedheads back then...but of course that was stopped. Even the U.S. Navy engaged in "traffic"...

Pagan Pink Ripple, Tyrolia, T.J. Swan, Bali Hai...

I learned wine in the 1970's, beginning with Mateus rose, which my girlfriend served. I mentioned it to a friend where i worked and she asked the wine director of a famous dept. store whose president she dated. You WOULD know his name and store, so they'd better be anonymous.

She told me with some amusement that V. (the wine guru) had described Mateus as "carbonated Lavoris." (a mouthwash)

I began studying wine in earnest, and about 1975, a store was overstocked after getting some really good deals in Bordeaux, red and white. I read EXTENSIVELY about it and bought the best bottles I could. Some needed to be laid down for a few years; others could be drunk then. I also read about and tried wines from CA, WA, Chlle, and South Africa, later also Australia.

After about seven years, I knew enough to write about wine and sold an article on it to a major newspaper. I also sold one on coffee and its origins, also a love.

For a couple of years, I worked in a liquor store, being one of their main wine men. I attended tastings where I met such renowned men as the head of Stag's Leap in Napa and Jean Hugel of Hugel et Fils, in Alsace since 1639! Turned out we'd both fished Harry's River in Newfoundland for Atlantic salmon!

I've never even been TEMPTED to try any of the wines mentioned here in other posts. The exception is Yago sangria, one of the better bottled sangrias.

But I've never drunk to get drunk. I have the impression that some of you feel otherwise. Not my thing.

BTW, Mateus also made a white, called "branco" in Portuguese. ("Blanco" in Spanish) I haven't seen Mateus wines in some years, but haven't asked. I think the wine director of that famous store was too disdainful of the type.

I did get to know him better after attending tastings after he left that store. By then, I knew that a good red Bordeaux from St. Julien might be Chateau Ducru-Beaucaillou and he couldn't talk down to me. That felt good.

BTW, I did use Lavoris as a mouthwash and liked it. So, his disparaging remark didn't sting me as much as intended.

The blonde who passed it on to me did marry her famous store president and they lived happily ever after until he died some years ago. She was far younger and is, I believe, still living, so no names.

And thus, I learned wine. It's a joy...if you learn about and drink the worthwhile ones.

If I had a few extra $$$, Mateus Rose.

Forgot about Mateus. Never tried the wine
but always kept an eye peeled for empties.



Perfect shape for the melted candle look.

I get an upset stomach and head ache just thinking about all of the above. Boon's Farm was a staple in my diet in the late 70's.

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paws for friendship

I never understood why wine used for Passover had to be 14% alcohol. To those of us NOT celebrating Passover, but Passout, it really did the job.

Boone's Farm Strawberry Pink (I think it was). Gads, I couldn't even put the stuff in my mouth now without throwing up. Gawd that stuff was SWEET! Miller's gave a nice buzz.

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"He was kinda funny lookin'"

It wasn't bad for a 'universal Rose' wine' so that it didn't taste to far different from the really cheap stull.

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"He was kinda funny lookin'"

I'd recently gotten out of college and was mostly drinking various B&G Bordeaux, along with the usual Lancers, Mateus, and similar plonk. The B&Gs all tasted pretty much the same regardless of the place name, no surprise there, but they were only around $2 a bottle. Great times.

Mateus was for *fancy* occasions like trying to impress ladies that had higher standards than Boone's Farm.

Or actually drinking with a meal instead of trying to get blotto.

Ah, the 70's.....

At the other end of the spectrum; I used to attend the Christie's wine auctions that were held in Chicago on a regular basis when I lived there.
The finest vintage wines available anywhere used to come up at these auctions . What you wanted to do was get a invite to the pre-sale tasting where samples of a lot of the upcoming stock was opened to try. I had the pleasure of tasting some bottlings' that had been put up prior to the Civil War that were still potable. Proper storage is the key here and many of the chateaus in France have bottlings' in their cellars that date back to the 18th century.
Jim

Carlo Rossi Pink Chablis. You were a heck of a man if you could drink a whole bottle of it and make it to work on time the next day.

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LIVE FROM THE DAWGHOUSE

I was begining to think I was the only connoisseur of TJ Swan on the forum

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Retired Career Security Guard

It was a sign of class to sniff the screw off cap for the bookay.

Before "Almaden Mountain Red" it was Red Mountain; $1.49 a gallon! First chug was a killer but after that, Who cared?

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Mike Maher #283

Personally I preferred the bottles with the wicker bottom for candle holders. I must have good taste, as every Italian restaurant I can recall also used them.

Swizzle! Yummy! A friend and I finished off 11 bottles of Annie Green Springs one night. I've been drunker and I've been sicker, but I can't remember when.

My father liked Wente Brothers............. Gray Riesling.

Did you notice that Johannesburg Riesling is no longer on the labels?

Pass the Blue Nunn, please.

I'm enjoying some Sheffield Cream Sherry right now.

It's not bad! The taste isn't quite the best, but the price was right. Not too bad... 1970's to almost the 2020's... ah, cheap wine.

Drink a bit of this and have the sudden urge to ram a Cadillac with a Toyota. Many of these wines were fine purgatives the better ones came with a message, "BEWARE". All in all these wines helped me to make my rule not to drink any alcoholic beverage which was less than four dollars per gallon.

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Common sense isn't.

Amen. My favorite wine is Piesporter Michelberg Spatlese. Which would surely gag a wine connoisseur. Oh, and I put it in the refrigerator.

You say it like its a bad thing.

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Dick Burg

In the late 60s around here it was "Morgan Davis" or "Mannnisherry" you could buy a setup: a bucket of ice, six paper cups, and a bottle for a couple of bucks.
Steve W