WHEN DID WINE
GET COOL?
by John Finocchiaro
R
ecently I attended my college fraternity anniversary/reunion
weekend along with hundreds of other fellow alumni.
Interspersed between the as expected raucous times and occasional
flights in the wayback machine was an exceptional dinner, complete
with a slide show down memory lane, guest speakers, and loads of
jovial conversation. At the dinner a rather insignificant item, for
some reason, caught my attention.
“Wine became popular, not because
of its perceived sophistication and
class, but rather in spite of it.”
Present for each attendee to take home as a memento of the
evening was a lovely, decorative wine bottle stopper, embossed with
Greek fraternity letters. In my college days such an item was known
as a “party favor”. Similar in spirit to a token that a groomsman
or bridesmaid might receive for being in a wedding party, such a
gift was always something simple, safe, and of common appeal.
Sometimes a picture frame, a pen and pencil set, or a logo-etched
beer mug were the chosen items. Other times it was a simple gift
card. So, I thought to myself, just when and how did a wine stopper
become a safe gift item of common appeal?
There was a time some years ago when wine was considered a
specialty item. It was not hip. It was not popular. The masses had
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not embraced it, nor did they especially want to. Culturally, the
grand old U.S.A. preferred just about anything but wine as their
beverage of choice. As a wine distributor, my father would tell me
of the times pedaling his wares back when the public was not very
interested in what he was selling. For those employed in the wine
industry, wagering on a cultural change was risky business, but
the winds of change were in the air long before ‘merlot’ became a
buzzword in the ‘80’s.
America has always prided itself on being cutting-edge, advanced,
and ahead of the curve when it comes to culture, technology,
lifestyle and business acumen. Such pride is usually justified, but
while much of the developed world preferred wine as their alcoholic
beverage of choice, the spigot was somehow slow to turn here in the
homeland. We found wine confusing. It came with rules and words
we couldn’t pronounce. The bottles were hard to open. You had to
have a special glass with a ‘stem’ on it. We were supposed to learn
to swirl without spilling, sip without glugging, and sometimes we
were even expected to – God forbid – spit. Yuck. We could not have
made the world of wine any less appealing.
Meanwhile, our western European friends had embraced wine as
commonly as we do milk. Drink it when you want it. Drink it how
you want to. If you’ve got a nice glass, that’s great, and if not, who
cares. Sure there were rules, but those were lar