BOTTLE OF WINE, FRUIT OF THE VINE

Donald Sensing is waxing poetic about the virtues of German white wine:

A fellow officer of mine named Ed lived a kilometer away in a five bedroom house he and his wife rented. They made a number of German friends in their village of Grüningen. Ed didn’t speak a word of German, but he had a German last name and looked Teutonic, so the Germans liked him. One weekend Ed and Barbara threw a wine-tasting party under a big tent on their lawn.

Most of our battalion’s officers came, along with many of Ed’s German neighbors. Everyone brought at least one bottle of wine. Some wag had gone to the Army’s store and bought some Mad Dog 20-20 and Thunderbird, which are about the cheapest rotgut wine made in North America. Ed didn’t know what to do about the MD 20-20 and the T-Bird. If the Germans saw the skid-row stuff surely they’d laugh at the cheap, unsophisticated American palate. So he put them behind everything else and started with the good German wine, figuring that after everyone had partaken of a number of samples of prädikatswein they’d forget about the rotgut.

But the Germans had already seen the stuff and after the rest of the wine had been uncorked and passed from table to table, they asked about the Mad Dog and the Thunderbird. Reluctantly, Ed opened it - not uncorked it, because it was so cheap it had a screw-on top. With deflated ego, he handed the bottles to the Germans. Amazingly, the Germans loved it! The bottles never left their table. They drank every drop and complimented Eddie for leaving some good wine for the end.

We couldn’t believe it. In fact, we never did believe it. We agreed that they told each other jokes about the idiot Americans and their terrible wine for weeks afterward.

Granted, comparing a good German prädikatswein to swill like Mad Dog is like comparing a backrub to a shattered pelvis, but still . . . they had every reason to feel foolish in the presence of some of the greatest wines on Earth.

I’ll stick to the advice of David Rosengarten, the Food Network’s pre-”Bam!” standard-bearer, who recommended a dry German Riesling with almost any meal. I’ve never gone wrong, and people frequently tell me I must be some sort of food-and-wine genius.

Me a genius? Unpossible! I already missed out on this year’s Beaujolais Nouveau, it would seem . . .