The Wine Snob

It was November, 1969 and there was a grey cloud over our house because Auntie Rose and Uncle Frank were coming to stay with us for the long Thanksgiving holiday weekend.

Auntie Rose was my mother’s older sister and the two of them always had a stormy relationship. Sometimes they were best friends and other times they could go for years without speaking. But through good times or bad,  the one thing that they always agreed on was their total contempt for Rose’s husband,  Uncle Frank.

Uncle Frank was not smart or educated but he was sly;  he owned a paint and body shop in Cleveland where he made a small fortune thanks to back-alley deals with men named Vinnie or Dom.   He parlayed this into other investments, including an oil well in Texas, a horse breeding farm in Kentucky and a  wine store in Cleveland, all of which paid off handsomely over the years.

Auntie and Uncle always drove to Florida in a huge, black Cadillac and on this Thanksgiving trip, when Uncle was, as always,  boasting about his net worth my younger brother asked him, point-blank,  why he didn’t stay in a hotel if he was so wealthy.

Uncle Frank looked at him for a long minute. “Your parents would be offended if we went to a hotel,”  he finally said.

“No we wouldn’t,”   said my mother, rather too quickly, while my father said, “Try us.”

Uncle gave his careless laugh. “You guys are such kidders,”  he said.

In the course of amassing his fortune Uncle also became the World’s Smartest Man.  At dinner he would expound at length about the war in Viet Nam, race relations in Cleveland and why Richard Nixon would be regarded as the greatest president of all time. While he held forth my parents rolled their eyes at each other and Auntie, who knew Frank was a fool but liked his money,  would reach without ceremony for the wine bottle.

This was Uncle Frank’s cue to show off his superior knowledge of wine, honed to perfection by being the silent partner in a  Cleveland wine store and by a weekend trip to Napa where he shook hands with Orson Welles. This was an era when wine essentially came in two flavors, red and white, and Frank  like to flaunt his ability to differentiate one from the other.

Auntie and Uncle arrived Wednesday afternoon just in time for dinner.  “I know I’m a snob, but the worst thing about coming to Florida is drinking cheap wine,” Uncle said to Mom over dinner that first night. “At home we only serve Paul Masson,  don’t we Rosie?”  he asked, and Auntie nodded morosely, refusing to make eye contact with my mother. Uncle sighed.  “I suppose you have that awful Vin Rose you always serve?” he asked my father who was silent. “You can tell how a man feels about his guests by the wine he serves,”  Uncle muttered, to no one in particular.

In the past this line of conversaton would infuriate my parents who, with six kids, were always on a tight budget.  “If he wants good wine let him open up his wallet and buy some,”  my mother would fume after dinner when Rose and Frank had passed out, while Dad would say, “The way those two drink we’d go broke if we served them good stuff.”  But this year, for the Thanksgiving of  1969, they had hatched a  plan. They asked some wealthy friends to save their Paul Masson wine bottles for them, and the night before Auntie and Uncle arrived my parents filled the Paul Masson bottles with the cheapest wine they could find;  I think it had been  bottled earlier that same week in Plant City, FL.

At Thanksgiving dinner as my mother served the turkey my father showed Uncle the Paul Masson bottle and poured the wine with a flourish.

“Finally some decent wine,” said Uncle condescendingly.   He rolled the wine around in the glass, sniffed it, took a robust sip and   gargled with it. My parents held their breath.  Uncle swallowed.

“Now this is a fine wine,” said Uncle.  “ A  noble vintage.” He took another sip.  “I know this is not in your budget,”  he said to my father, “but I appreciate it.”

“You can tell how a man feels about his guests by the wine he serves,” said my father, poker-faced.

“You are worth every penny,”  said my mother.