Wine snob or wino, the twist cap is a giveaway

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By JAN GLIDEWELL

© St. Petersburg Times, published May 21, 2001

I was reasonably sure I had properly pronounced Piper-Heidsieck, the most reasonably priced bottle I saw on the menu, but, to be sure, I added, "the cheap one."

Laughing, my fiancee pointed out the best way to handle that situation is to point to the cheap one while saying out loud, "a bottle of your finest."

I never thought of that, but then again, I never think of a lot of things when it comes to wine.

And, given that I have one friend who wrote a song about drinking red wine out of a tennis-ball can in the parking lot of a motel, and another who once actually told me, "nothing complements a good meatloaf like a box of fine wine," wine never has figured that prominently in my life.

In fact, as I have written previously, when a Dade City wine vendor, through the bulletproof glass in the convenience store, asked me "corkercap" (cork or cap) after I ordered what she called the chardonnay, I knew immediately that the correct answer, when accompanied by a date, was "cork," no matter what you drink when you are alone.

That comes, in part, because, after spending 26 years (until 1986) as a smoker and doing other damage to my palate, I have trouble telling wine from other fluids, like, say, bubble bath.

The first time I ever ordered wine in a restaurant was in 1966, shortly after I came back from Vietnam -- where I had read in a Playboy magazine that Piper-Heidsieck 1957 was a good champagne to order. It wasn't that pricey in 1966, but it became increasingly more costly and harder to find as the years went by and I had to look around.

One night in Milwaukee some friends of mine ordered a bottle of Blue Nun in a seafood restaurant (great place for fresh seafood, the Midwest) and I adopted it as my own, giving a succession of snotty waiters a chance to look down their noses at me -- and we won't even talk about the Cold Duck years.

Then in the early 1970s, along came the fad wines, Annie Green Springs and Ripple to name a few, you know, wines aged on the truck where the vintage is given in months.

"Saucy," said a friend of mine one night, twisting the paper bag more closely around the top of the bottle of a similar sort of wine, "but not impertinent."

"March," I agreed, "was a wonderful month."

One night in Tampa I ordered a very good Cabernet Sauvignon (the wine that people who can't pronounce it drink Merlot instead of), and, memorizing the name and vintage and the bin number at Bern's Steak House (home of more than 6,000 wine selections) would knowingly order it at all meals where anyone ordered steak, usually pretty likely at Bern's.

But it was a 1971, and what cost $12 per bottle in 1976 was getting up around $50 when I gave up, bought a copy of their wine list and gave myself a mini-course in wines, especially the reasonably priced ones.

Just as I had learned to order red with red meat, white with fish or fowl and a blush for any yuppies or vegetarians who might be in the group, food writers began coming out with those articles that said you should declare independence from tradition and order whatever you felt like at dinner.

Talk is cheap, I still never found a restaurant that served either Thunderbird or Mogen David 20/20, known to aficionados as Mad Dog because of its initials and because it is reinforced with extra kick.

Finally, after years of self-education and learning what is and isn't acceptable to my oenophile friends, I have reached the point where I am comfortable around a wine list.

Just as I have entered the age group where dietary concerns prevail and I finish a detailed study of the list and prepare to order just as I hear, from across the table, "I'll just have some ice water with a slice of lemon please."

And after I went to all the trouble of finding the right flavored wine cooler.

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