My mom is going to kill me for writing this, but I had my first sip of wine at age 4. Actually it was four sips of wine, Manischewitz to be exact. So I don’t if it could actually be counted as wine, but I got to take one sip for each of the four cups of wine that are drunk on the Jewish holiday of Passover. At the same time I drank the wine, I was learning about slavery and celebrating our escape from Egypt all those years ago.
My first hangover was also from wine. Manischewitz to be exact. I was 14, my first Passover as an “adult” in the Jewish tradition. My cousins had been bar mitzvah’d and so the three of us decided to actually drink our four cups of wine and then sneak the rest of the pitcher. It was probably my most fun Passover ever. Followed by the worst morning of my entire life.
I had no idea what was going on. My head hurt, badly. Even 30 years later and I can still remember how dehydrated I was and the shooting pain in my eyes and temples. Manischewitz, you see, is mostly sugar and there is probably no worse hangover in the world than this one. Only, I didn’t know that’s what it was.
My mom did, though. And she taught me a very valuable lesson that morning and as she moved the dishes around, probably unloading and reloading the dishwasher at least three times for no reason what so ever. I remember lying on our light brown couch swearing off life while she had to slam every cabinet door with such vigor I thought my head would explode.
I learned a few valuable lessons that day. First, sugar drinks cause the worst hangovers in the existence of the world. If you’re going to have a few margaritas, make sure you back it up with water or you’ll be suffering the next day. Second, don’t think I can sneak alcohol around my parents. They knew exactly what was happening, how much we had drunk and knew how painful the next morning would be. I never drank all four glasses at Passover ever again nor did I ever try to lie to my parents about drinking alcohol — even throughout high school.
Finally, I learned to never drink cheap wine. When all the girls in college were pounding wine out of a box like it was juice boxes, I sipped my Jack Daniels. I knew better.
A trip to Champagne in France during high school taught me how meticulously and time consuming the production of wine could be. We spent a week in a town where everyone grew, nurtured and picked their own grapes and made their own champagne. They must have traded for food, because they certainly didn’t grow any. The hills were covered in vineyards.
In college, we went to Italy to celebrate a friend of my parents’ 50th birthday. We went to Barolo. Literally. My parents took my sister and me to Italian wine country for vacation. We tasted wine that was so young you almost ran to the spittoon to get that cat piss out of your mouth and we tasted wine so beautiful you could barely believe it was real, including a 1996 Barolo. In fact, I have a bottle given to me by Paulo Scavino in my cellar to save for my 50th birthday. Four more years!!
I don’t drink wine because I cannot afford it. The wine I want to drink costs $300 a bottle and is over 20 years old. It comes from the best plots of the best vineyards in the best regions of Italy. I don’t know enough about wine to sort through the long lists at restaurants, scouring down the pages for the best flavors to match my food. I haven’t taken enough wine classes to understand even the basic minimum, even though I worked at a French-American restaurant for over 15 years and grew up eating at a family restaurant in New Jersey where the wine list was four 3-inch thick binders.
My dad picked the wine. And he loved wine. Our wine cellar was filled with Barbaresca and Barolo and all other kinds of deep reds that were just stunning. You had to decide by lunchtime which bottle you were going to decant for dinner so it could breathe all day long. It was glorious. The conversations that would flow over those decadent bottles of wine, watching the masterfulness of the men and women who would twirl those giant globe glasses around, letting the wine swirl magnificently between sips. Like the glass was an extension of their fingertips — never their hand.
Remember, life is too short to drink cheap wine!
Merisa Sherman is a long time Killington resident, town lister and member of the Development Review Board, real estate broker and Coach PomPom. She can be reached at Merisa.Sherman@SothebysRealty.com.
