Love by the Glass: Tasting Notes from a Marriage

Chapter One Andre Cold Duck The first wine we shared was Andre Cold Duck. Hey, don't laugh. Okay, go ahead and laugh. It was a big deal then, a bizarre concoction with a bizarre label. The name Cold Duck was derived somehow from the German practice of blending already opened bottles of red, white, and sparkling wines so they wouldn't go to waste. The resulting cuvee was called kalte Ende or "cold end," which sounds like kalte Ente, which means "cold duck." In the early 1960s, David Gallo, who was co-president of the E. & J. Gallo Winery and the oldest son of Ernest Gallo, figured there was room in the market for a nationally marketed, inexpensive "domestic Champagne." So in 1965, when he was working in marketing, he oversaw the development and introduction of Andre Champagne. Two years later, he developed Andre Cold Duck, which was a red, sweet sparkling wine made from Concord grapes. By 1971, the winery was selling two million cases of it a year. John's parents gave him a bottle as a housewarming present, and it sat in his refrigerator for months. John was posted to South Dade County, then the more rural part of the county. It turns out that being "South Dade bureau chief" meant he got a tiny little office in a town called Homestead and a massive area to cover by himself. Dottie was a general assignment reporter in the main office, a lumpen structure on Biscayne Bay, where we worked together every Sunday. As the weeks went on, we found it was fun to have lunch together along with a couple of other new reporters. Then we started to wait until the other reporters were out of the office and we would rush off to lunch alone. We could talk for hours, as though we were the only people in the world. We were so much alike in our outlooks and values that it was as though we'd been raised by the same parents. We even had a joint byline together, on a story about the annual New Year's Eve riot on Miami Beach. While we were dodging tear gas, a sweet thing happened. A drunken reveler stumbled up to us and drawled, "You two are beautiful together, man." Was it that obvious that there was something between us? After months of rushing off together whenever we could, John mentioned to Dottie a story he was doing about U-Pick fields. Those were South Dade farms where you could pick your own food. It was fun, it was cheap, and it was a great story for the Herald's weekend section. Maybe I could show you the U-Pick fields sometime, John suggested. Without knowing it, John had touched Dottie's most vulnerable area: fruits and vegetables. Dottie is passionate about them. She had inherited that from her mother, whose father had grown cherries, peaches, mint, and corn. The date was set. On a beautiful winter day, we picked squash and lima beans and snap peas and eggplant and the most beautiful strawberries Dottie had ever seen. She sat on the ground and ate them, still warm from the sun, right off the plant. John thought he'd never seen anyone so pure, happy, and beautiful. We took all of the bounty to John's little one-bedroom apartment. Dottie simply sauteed the vegetables in butter and served them over rice that John had cooked. Sweet, sparkling red wine is not a classic match with sauteed vegetables over rice, but that night, on our first date, no wine could have been better. We woke up the next morning as a couple. It wasn't long before we told our parents. John: I had mentioned to my parents on the day I arrived at the Herald that I'd started work with two black women, and one was really cute. One night, when my father answered the phone, I said, "I'm actually dating someone." This suGaiter, Dorothy J. is the author of 'Love by the Glass: Tasting Notes from a Marriage' with ISBN 9780375505607 and ISBN 0375505601.