A little humor…

Posted on by August 25, 2023

If you grew up in the sixties and seventies…

You ‘might’ have indulged, maybe…

And sworn to NEVER EVER do that again…

(Not that ‘I’ know anything about that.)

Comments

A little humor… — 40 Comments

  1. You forgot Annie Green Springs, was that deliberate?

  3. I had a navy buddy that loved Wild Irish Rose. I’d never had it before, so I indulged with him once.

    Once.

    I never did figure out what he saw in it, but from that day onward I just referred to it as “instant hangover”.

  4. I remember drinking Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill with friends as a teenager. Shudder… Never again. The memory gives me a headache.

    • I remember drinking Boone’s farm from little jugs in the 70’s

      • Remember the Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill commercial with the granny doing a wheelie on a motorcycle?

  5. My brother in law, who had been stationed in Okinawa introduced me to akedama plum wine when I was stationed in california in the early 70’s. IIRC it was cheap.

  7. Here in the New England area the usual mistake of choice was Narragansett’s Haffenreffer Private stock Malt Liquor. It came in 40 oz green bottles and was 5.9% ABV. Allegedly (I certainly NEVER did this 🙂 ) it gave one hell of a hangover… and it was dirt cheap. Did it taste good? Umm that wasn’t the point was it?

  8. My old granddad was a miser. I mean a real tightwad. He worked for a trucking company – he was in upper management – and from time to time would bring home delivery shipment salvage. One day he brought home five bottles of Thunderbird wine from a case that had fallen off a forklift. This would have been in the late 1960s, when Thunderbird was advertising heavily on the radio.

    He and grandma served it at a dinner party, and that wine was so bad no one could drink it. No one, that is, except a sixteen year old kid who didn’t know any better, and who pilfered a bottle to take along to the drive-in with my main squeeze and my best friend and his main squeeze. We emptied the bottle, with me drinking the last two fingers because I didn’t want to see it go to waste. Ha-Ha.

    I grew up on a horse farm (American Saddlebred show horses), and my folks were out of town at a horse show, so I had to get up early and feed the horses on Sunday morning. My old granddad found me out back of the barn on all fours, heavin’ and hoein’. When he asked if I had the flu, I, genius that I am, replied, “No – I drank too damn much last night.”

    This on Sunday go-to-church morning. Oh yeah.

    Eventually I got the work done and ended up sitting at the kitchen table, waiting for the coffee to finish and wondering if I could stomach any, and the phone rings. It’s my grandmother.

    “I heard you over imbibed a little too much last night,” she said.

    “Believe me grandma, I’ll never do that again,” I said, and meant it. She just laughed.

    “Well, they say tomato juice helps. Your dad used to have a shot of vodka in his tomato juice, along with a half shot of lemon juice, a dash of Tabasco, and a dash of Worcester.”

    “Thanks grandma. I’ll try it.”

    And I did, and it helped.

  9. There was an excellent name for this class of hooch that still applies: Rotgut!

  10. What’s the Word?

    THUNDERBIRD!

    What’s the price?

    A DOLLAH TWICE!

  11. I tried Mad Dog 20/20 once, to see what all the fuss was about.
    Once.
    Once was enough.

    So warned, I felt no need to try any of the others.

    Not that I don’t have my own Beverages of Regret, but I made new mistakes instead of repeating those recounted to me.

  12. Played in a band in high school with a group of college freshmen. One night we played at a fraternity party up in Commerce. There was a guy with a bottle of Sloe Gin that was happy to share with me. I helped him finish the bottle. Never again…

    • Most “sloe gin” is garbage. The Plymouth (yeah the fancy gin folks) make a slow gin that really is sloe gin and worth drinking – or at least mixing with.

    • Sloe Gin at a new-years eve get together at a friend’s house, senior year of HS. Woke up on their pool table in the morning, with my clothes neatly folded next to me! Courtesy of my friend’s older sister, I was told… Went home for breakfast, dealing with the only hangover in my life. Mom thought it was funny. Driving back and forth in my ’57 Chevy was annoying. We did an engine swap on his ’56 Chevy that afternoon. When a bolt squeaked my head hurt. Oddly enough, although I got drunk a few times in my 20’s, no hangovers resulted. Could never stomach the smell of sloe gin after that evening. Yuck!

  13. There are a number of serious wine collectors who will sock away a bottle or two of “those” wines in amongst their collections that mostly include bottles that go for the cost of a transmission repair or an engine rebuild. Rumor has it that the Gallo bros started off right after Prohibition ended by producing T-bird and Night Train as low-quality high-volume cash cows to buy time for the young vines to mature to produce the kind of fruit required for decent pizza-quality wines by the ’70s, and eventually some higher-end wines today. (Meanwhile on the Rhone a few decades ago Vieux Télègraphe produced their ‘Telegramme’ series from their ‘young punk’ vines – ‘only’ 90yrs old…)

  14. All- I ‘see’ a few of us might have had ‘various’ experiences as kids…LOL Wine- That is a helluva story!

  15. I think I recognize a few labels..
    Wasn’t there an Apple something or other also?

  16. I had several of those back in the day when alcohol content was more important than taste. After all after a few drinks you didn’t notice the flavor anyhow. Bali Hai was another nasty one and Boone’s Farm Strawberry was so bad that one mouthful was all I could take.

  17. Aye, the T-Bird with a couple of packages of Kool-Aid. Didn’t make the hangover better but helped the taste.

  18. Any young military trooper headed to Viet Nam that DID NOT try several of these isn’t worth his stripes (or bars, in my case).
    But for me they were an introduction to better fare when I got home.

  19. Any Norfolk based blue jackets back in the 60s remember Sly Fox wine? Aka Slippery Wolf…..a delicately defined and refined vintage sought and consumed by the elite of the Fleet…It was a fermented product guarenteed to be aged for less than thirty minutes possibly in a Texaco restroom septic tank to be purchased by non-rated Seamen and wrapped in unmarked brown paperbags passed around the alleys between the gin mills just outside the NOB (Naval Operating Base) main gate. A Slippery Wolf stain was like a birthmark that could not be removed from a set of whites.

  20. All- LOL, some ‘creative’ versions and ‘helps’… SCPO, I’ve ‘heard’ of Slippery Wolf, never partook of it though.

      • Slippery Wolf was a pseudonym for Sly Fox as one may sometimes (personal experience) wake up on the floor in a strange room with half of your uniform off, and no recollection of the events of the previous night.

  21. Oh yeah … that party where each participant brought a bottle to be shared with the others. That hangover was EPIC ! Vodka -whiskey – wine and even a bottle of champagne. I was drunker than hell, the first and last time I got the bed spins.

    Wine is a learning experience. Tastes like strong grape juice so you keep drinking until it full effect hits you.

  22. I didn’t know anyone besides homeless and my ex (and now deceased) alcoholic boyfriend drank Cisco. It smells like a drunk puking when you unscrew the cap.

  23. Thanks, all. I’m recalling a few hangovers-by-proxy that I had after helping fellow college suffereres, er that is, students, back to their rooms after they overindulged in a few of those.

  24. Graduated to Southern Comfort. Once. I still shudder at the smell of it.

    • $HOUSEMATE loves it. I find it reminds me too much of ‘banana’ to be tolerable.

  25. All of those appear or at least are mentioned on the “bum wines’ site. I *think* I had a TINY sample of MD20/20 at one con where someone had something of a ‘recreated HS mistakes’ sort of room party.

    I did have Thunderbird, and found it.. while not great, mainly just really cheap white wine. Not missing that it seems to be history – unless the name has been resurrected for a different product.

    I’ve not had the (no longer made) thing by Boone’s Farm that $HOUSEMATE described as “tasting PINK!” There is a Western Prickly Pear vodka that does “taste pink” – however, I suspect this about Prickly Pear, as other Western Son products are quite good.

  26. Hey Old NFO;

    *Shudder* the memories…When you are young and poor…one drinks anything alcoholic….Much to my regret.

  27. Mid 90’s… Adak, AK… Forklift pallet bonfire on the beach on the 4th of July… We didn’t just drink one of those… We drank ALL of them… ‘Headed back to the ship… Windy, rainy, with swells rolling under the pier… Nothing sucked more than to find that the floor was rolling under my feet on top of the fact that the floor REALLY WAS moving under my feet!!! YEEESH!

    I felt like ROADKILL the next day… ‘Found a good cure though. Took a couple of bottles of water and hit the sauna at the base gym. By the time I got out of there the water was gone and I felt PERFECT!!! That being said, NEVER again!!!

  28. In England, there’s Buckfast Tonic wine – 15% ABV and caffeinated to keep you in the ‘regret later’ zone longer. If you can’t afford that, Ace cider is cheap and although only 7% ABV, comes in 2.5l bottles. Just don’t expect that apples had anything to do with making it!

  29. Only slightly off topic:

    Anyone remember Cruzcampo beer in Spain?

    I just looked it up and it appears to still exist. Hopefully it’s gotten better. Back when I was stationed in Rota (Mid-80’s) that stuff was sold in small bottles (about 10 oz) and came in plastic “milk crate” style cases.

    You had to pay a deposit because they recycled the bottles but after getting the deposit back, it ended up costing something like $3 a case.

    There were generally one or two bottles in a case that didn’t get sealed properly during bottling and it would have a layer of green fuzzy moss-like material on the top of the liquid. Hopefully you noticed before the first drink. Often not…

    The rumor was that they used formaldehyde as a preservative in it and I don’t doubt it a bit because it tasted nasty, but it was cheap enough that us E-3’s and E-4’s could afford to get drunk on it.

    The events of the next day were commonly referred to as “The Cruz Blues”.