Sitting here drinking a glass of red wine (see I do belong in Paris), I thought about this book that I'm reading at the moment, Vroom with a View by Peter Moore. He's on a journey, living out a childhood fantasy spurred on by visions of Sophie Loren, from Milan to Rome on a 1960s Vespa.
Aside from it being a great book, a section highlighted some memories from my teenage years. Michael was travelling just out of Milan and stumbled upon a little town called Broni - "Home to the Fiamberti Vineyard". This really doesn't have anything to do with my childhood, given that I've never been to Italy, nor bought Italian clothing though I have had some pretty good fake Italian food. Besides the point. So this town was famous for Spumante. Anybody bought up in NZ or Australia will know just how awful a reputation that "Spumante" has. It's not the deep, sparkling, dry sweet wine that most tasteful Italians or Europeans may know it as. No, in NZ this is what was sadly deemed the "Five Buck Chuck". Today's teenagers may know it as the "$7.95 buck chuck", after we account for inflation. This is even infamous in the US with Charles Shaw the
$2 Buck Chuck equivalent.
Ultimately what this lovely drop did was give you a big enough sugar high to think you were experiencing the "
delights" of intoxication and then when the rush died down, in the morning you felt like the biggest 50 tonne truck had hit you. Moore, summed it up nicely:
"As a teenager growing up in Australia in the 1970s, spumante was my introduction to wine. Asti spumante was the alco pop of my generation. It was sweet and fizzy and at $2 for a [bottle], it represented extraordinary value when you wanted to write yourself off. After a few glasses of the stuff my mates and I would guffaw about the fact that spumante's makers chose to advertise the drink's effect so openly via its name... unlike sophisticated Italian teenages, who had been enjoying a glass of wine with their meals from the moment they stopped breastfeeding, I had developed a taste for sugary wine which gave you a hangover that kicked like a mule".Now does this sound familiar? It just made me think just how large a world away we are from other cultures in the world, but how close we are to our Aussie neighbours that we even share childhood drinking habits.
