Parents had family friends over for dinner. Had some sparkling shiraz, and then some pinot noir. The sparkling shiraz is cool, but I like red with more kick than the pinot noir had.
You'd probably like dago red. Basement brew. Some of it sucks, but when the guy knows what he's doing, its surprisingly good.
Its kinda funny, because the first time you get offered it, you think what the fuck is this shit... this guy is offering me some basement dreck and I'm suppposed to say how good it is... Okay, I'm game. It comes in a friggin used wine bottle, for fucks sake. It just seems like its gonna be shitty. How can it NOT be shitty?
But then you get a whack, and its really powerfully flavored. Like a deep red wine with a splash of purple grape juice in it. Its like Supergrape. Kinda like when someone goes crazy making powerful coffee and puts five extra scoops into the coffee filter, it rocks your head back with the blast of flavor.
It leaves viscous legs down the inside of the glass, like heavy reds would do, and the alcohol is generally way past what normal wines would contain. It goes okay on ice, obviously a no-no in the more gentrified circles. Its a lot of fun if you disregard the refinements you've developed from tasting what you've been conditioned into regarding as "good".
that's got head cracked-open hangover written all over it.
sugary alcohol = hangover
Yeah, somewhat. I never drank it solo. More like sippin' with a beer. SoCo is sugary, Sambucca is sugary, Firewater is sugary. If you drink Dago Red from start to finish, you deserve to lose an organ.
so, is this homemade red wine?
or a real product?
Home made.
I'm sure they do it everywhere, but around here, we have a rather old and storied history of wine making. Theres a town, not far up the road, that is known to be the Italian center of the universe. You've got your famous enclaves like Little Italy, and Jersey is famous for its Italians, and this one little town here in my back yard. The Germans went to a certain town, the Poles went to a certain town, and so did the Italians. They just, did. It has something to do with the coal mines in the late 1800s.
So, anyway, the Italians made wine. Lots of it. They'd grow these red-purple grapes in their back yards by the ton. You're roughly my age, so you probably remember your pals grandpas and grandmas being different than modern grandparents, when you were a kid. It'd be nothing unusual to go into someones basement and see fifty glass gallon-sized jugs on a wooden shelf, they all had it. And these were not casual experiments, these were older men of the family who tried (often successfully) to make some really good brew, and would swap it and sample it with pride. You know how Italian people are from a generation ago. You'd have the older gents who went for mellow flavor, with a kick, and the middle-aged guys who brewed for horsepower.
Hence the name, Dago Red. Its one of the very few epithets you can get away with like that. I suppose some of the young turks might take some offense to it, but thats what we always called it, and everyone knew what it was. It wasn't a smear to call it that.
Nowadays, you don't see much of it. People still do it, its not a lost art. But its more like a keeping-with-your-roots thing, and they don't make it in that fuckin volume. "Grandpa used to do it, so I do it once in a while. He taught me a few tricks"
Last time I had it, it came into the bar in a Gatorade bottle. We all sat there praising it, it was a treat. Try bring booze into a bar sometime, only stuff like that would fly. Even the cops around here would probably let you slide if you were hauling a dozen bottles on your back seat (but weren't drunk), "Whats that, in da jars?" Dago Red, officer. "Oh, any good?" Yeah, I wouldn't have a dozen bottles if it sucked, right? "Ha, true! Okay, seeya."
ok, i'm on board with ya. (just thought that, maybe, some piss-hole company might be selling this shit , on a regional basis)
my town has/had a lot of itals, stoneworkers that came here in the late 1800's to work in da quarries.
they all made basement wine. it is a lost art, sad to say.
i made wine once. it kinda sucked, but....practice, practice...
the old guys my dad grew up with, told stories of how the quarry owners would allow them 'one' bottle of homemade, at lunch each day. imagine that shit? working with multi-ton slabs of granite overhead? after drinking an entire bottle in a 1/2 hr???