Free Fried & True by Fay Jacobs Page A

Bunny, it keeps going and going.
    As Bonnie and the bummed up mower wobble by the window there’s an analogy in all this. Even as I type, words that would have been on the tip of my tongue a decade ago, are now retrieved a whole lot slower. And lots of us are becoming chronologically, aesthetically challenged. But while we may not be spanking brand new anymore, and some of us may not have all our parts, we’re all still going strong. And that’s a good thing.
    Of course, now Bonnie is lusting after one of those new John Deere mowers at Home Depot. She hasn’t had the nerve to start lobbying for one. Yet.

April 2004
    LETTERS FROM CAMP REHOBOTH
    GRAPE EXPECTATIONS…
    I’ve been thinking about wine a lot lately. Well, not first thing in the morning with Boone’s Farm apple in a paper bag. Although I actually did think about it first thing in the morning, when I helped promote the April wine and food festival in town. While I was consumed by wine the minute I walked into the office each day, luckily I wasn’t also consuming.
    One thing I learned by being involved in the wine fest is that all bets are off. Everything I thought I knew about wine is up for grabs.
    No vinophile, my first taste was sipping Manischewitz at the Jewish holidays. I’d rather drink Robitussin. Actually, I suspect that the infamous Kosher Concord grape is from France’s illustrious Nyquil region.
    Although even Kosher wine is improving. In fact, there’s a web site called Kosher Wine Connoisseur, which, only a few years ago would have been a major oxymoron. Apparently, some of the stuff is really good now. But that news does little for the fact that my introduction to wine gave me a sugar high and cured bronchitis.
    By high school, we’d sneak across state lines to small towns where you could drink legally at 18 and get away with it at 16. At that point we thought we were real cool to get the boy with the most upper lip fuzz (as opposed to the women with the most upper lip fuzz now that we’re in the AARP) to buy us bottles of Lancers in those darling red crockery bottles. I don’t remember what it tasted like, but we thought we were really cool for drinking it.
    In college I moved on to Mateus, a vaguely foreign-sounding imbibement which, concurrently made us feel sophisticated and nauseous. It’s a wonder we ever sipped wine again.
    Welcome to the 1970s. It was all Chianti in cute straw-coveredbottles, with or without spaghetti. And a little Blue Nun. Public relations programs all over the country are still citing those Anne Meara/Jerry Stiller radio ads as an example of the greatest brand identification ad campaign of all time. All of America was drinking that sweetly anemic German Leibfraumilch wine. Ptooey.
    I think it was replaced in the 80s by Riunite on Ice, remember that one? After that, Chardonnay became the rage and it’s still hanging on.
    Around about 1985 though, George DeBeouf importers played the brand ID game again and gave us Beaujolais Nouveau. They got everybody excited about a grape that had gone from the vine to the liquor store in about fifteen minutes. Okay, it was longer than that. But it was very, very new wine.
    On the third Thursday in November, regardless of when the wine from the Beaujolais region of France was actually harvested, DeBeof released that year’s Nouveau. Sometimes it was really good, and sometimes it was swill. But it always came with big fanfare, pretty labels and parties starting at one minute past midnight on release day. In New York one year, an entire motorcycle gang of wealthy wine drinkers from the Hamptons drove their Harleys to the docks and welcomed the freighters with the first batch. Now that was a PR man’s dream.
    In our house we always gamble on the Nouveau for Thanksgiving, but our favorite wine is actually Chateauneuf du Pape. I was introduced to it in the late 70s through friends with an educated palette (and wallet). I loved