Ripple

We've never been what you might call a wine aficionado.  The first wine we ever drank was Boone's Farm, and it pretty much went downhill from there.  We remember more or less chugging a bottle of Mad Dog, the Ford Pinto of bum wines, with our pal Dan Diehl in our grandfather's workshop behind our brother David's apartment in Gettysburg.  That didn't turn out so well.  The next morning we showed up at our job at the Littlestown Foundry with a hangover so horrible it felt like our brain had turned to vomit.  Only to hear our boss shout, "Failure, you're on the jackhammer!"  There's nothing like ripping up concrete with a head as delicate as the bad guy's bones in Unbreakable.  We spent the whole day riding that hammer, and it was like somebody put our liver in a paint can shaker. 

We never drank Ripple, in fact we didn't know until right now that Ripple was an actual brand.  We always thought it was just a generic term for a shitty fortified wine.  We do remember staggering around Mount Carmel Cemetery drinking Bali Hai, which has since that time become extinct.  It's a tragic story, for at one time Bali Hai bottles stormed in the millions across the prairie, raising clouds of alcohol fumes that could be seen for hundreds of miles.   

We switched to your classy Gallo jug around the time we hooked up with our first wife.  Those were our years of distinguished drinking, by which we mean we generally drank our wine from a glass.  A water glass in most cases, but still.

One of our greatest regrets in life is that we never drank THE AMERICAN CLASSIC, Thunderbird. Or Night Train, for that matter.  These two brands are the Dom Perignon and Moet Chandon of cheap wino swill, repectively, and we would encourage everyone to do themselves the favor of sampling them.  Including our own children, who are lucky they don't exist and have us for a father. 

We were drinking MD 20/20 the day we took our first acid trip.  We were so excited; we were finally going to take the acid test!  Dan, who was genuinely intelligent and hence had something to lose, had reservations.  He looked suspiciously at his tab of blotter and said, "How long does it last?"  It was obvious he needed reassurance.  So we said, "Oh, anywhere from six hours to the rest of your life."

One of the key advantages of being married to our first wife was that she was of Italian descent and had an uncle who made homemade wine.  He was a mite slow and worked at a candy factory.  He had a big cyst on the back of his neck that he refused to get treated, and in hindsight we think was probably there as the result of drinking his own rotgut.  The stuff was Sicilian rocket fuel.  It burned like whisky, and blew the top of your head off.  We're pretty gasoline was one of his raw materials, and leaded gasoline at that.

We've had all kinds of wonderful liquors in our lifetime, some of which caused us to give up our status as a biped in favor of crawling around on all fours.  We remember doing this for a good eight hours one time in an empty room at our place at 16 North Washington Street in Shippensburg PA.  We wanted to revert to the vertical, but every time we did, we threw up.  It was Ouzo that did that to us.  God bless the Greeks, and their worship of the anise demon!

 

Comments

[Jeffers]

Night Train, yep. Lost my the dog & my keys. Thunderbird, yep. Lost my soul & found my keys.

Old Rasputin Imperial Stout. That's one big-ass comfy couch.

[Stu J 2.0]

Someone Peed in the Strawberry Hill bottle......

That Crap was Ripe Red out of the Liq Store.........

[SL]

Years ago my brother in law got so, so, soooo drunk on Night Train at a family gathering. In the years since then, we have passed a bottle of Night Train from one family member to another as a way of recognizing when that family member does something particularly stupid. I guess the ultimate winner will be the person who opens the bottle of Night Train....

[UF MIKE]

What a wonderful family tradition!