There's nothing wrong with a drink of some adult beverage now and then. A glass of wine, a bottle of good beer, some really good sipping whiskey, all can do a lot, in moderation of course, to keep one grounded. Red wine is supposedly good for your heart, when taken in moderation, but for many of us - me included - the benefit of a good dram, or on occasion a really good, stiff belt, is psychological, not physical.
Note that I do not advocate drinking to excess. Moderation in all things, as the saying goes. And, within certain limits, a lot of folks find some enjoyment in producing their own.
I have a distinct memory, from when I was probably six or seven years old, of suddenly being aware of some big glass carboys in my grandmother's pantry. All were filled with some liquid, some yellowish, some a lovely red, some almost purple. Each of the carboys had a kid's party balloon over the neck, which was all in varying levels of inflation. When I asked my Mom what they were, she told me that Grandma was making wine.
Now that right there is a downright interesting hobby for someone who, like Grandma, was teetotal all her life. But she enjoyed making wine from some of the products of the farm: She made mulberry wine, blackberry wine, plum wine, and dandelion wine. She never partook of them herself; as I said, Grandma was teetotal. Grandpa would have a glass now and then, but he wasn't much for wine, although he wasn't above a cold beer now and then. No, Grandpa made her wine, bottled it, and gave it away to anyone in the family who wanted it. If we enjoyed it, then she did, too.
When I was about 17, Grandma gave me a Mason jar full of plum wine. Oh, she knew I wasn't of age; the drinking age then was 18, and I was still a few months short. She wasn't worried. "If you drink this," she warned me, "just you make sure you drink it at home." I ended up sharing it with a girl I was seeing at the time, and the jar full, split between us, wasn't enough to make us more than a little cheerful, but I remember it as great stuff: Heavy, rich, sweet but not too sweet, with a tart undertone. I'm not a big wine guy, but I know what I like, and I liked that.
About this same time, I made the acquaintance of two old brothers, both in their 80s, both members of the extensive Duffy clan that lived all around our northeast Iowa hills. These two old boys, in the finest bootlegger tradition, had a still hidden on the family land somewhere, and on Fridays and Saturdays, you could usually find them on the porch of Petersen's General Store in Highlandville. For $10, they'd go out to their truck and bring you, yes, a Mason jar full of their product, which they called "corn squeezings."
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Now, this was sterner stuff. If you didn't drink it all, it had other uses: Rat poison, etching glass, starting brush fires, that sort of thing. It was a white corn whiskey, or so people claimed, but it was the kind of stuff that richly deserved the name "White Lightning." Where wines are fermented, this stuff was distilled, and the difference there is not just night and day; it's night and the surface of the sun. Taken without some preparation, the stuff tended to produce coughing spasms that could last half an hour. It really should have come with a biohazard warning label. But we bought it, and we drank it, usually cutting it with orange juice or pop.
The old guys sold a fair amount of the stuff, mostly to the young knuckleheads that roamed those gravel byways in the late 1970s. They say youth is wasted on the young, and this is why; I do know we got wasted on that nasty old corn whiskey a few times.
These days, I know better. My wife makes some wonderful wines, again, products of our own land. Two varieties are fermented and bottled here at our Susitna Valley homestead: Dandelion and raspberry. She doesn't sell it; that's against the law. We drink some ourselves, and she will give some away to family and friends. That's legal. Besides, she doesn't do it for any gain other than the enjoyment of doing it, which is surely the reason Grandma made her wines.
I have it on good authority that her dandelion wine is like a good white wine. It's tart; she adds a little lemon while fermenting. The raspberry wine is sweeter, richer, and on the heavy side. I prefer to have it with a meal, although in summertime we will occasionally enjoy an after-supper glass out on the deck, in the sunshine.
There's nothing wrong with a drink of some adult beverage now and then. Like all things, these should be enjoyed in moderation. I do; every Saturday, I have two beers, no more, with my lunch at the lodge. We'll have a bit of her wine from time to time, and I'm known for favoring really good sipping whiskeys. But having made the stuff at home somehow adds to the enjoyment, in ways I can't really explain but are there, nonetheless.
And, Grandma, thanks for teaching me that early.
