My youth was largely devoid of alcohol, in rather sharp contrast to the rather booze-sodden nights of my adulthood. I don’t mean simply the act of drinking, though my parents cast a concerned eye every now and again at how free my wife and I are with the pour; it’s possible we have partaken of more alcohol in a single year than my parents have consumed in their entire adulthood. Combined. But how casually present alcohol is in my life – fridge always stocked with various kinds of beers, several bottles of wine at the ready, a fully-stocked, dedicated wine fridge, along with a full wine rack. A vintage bar cart teeming with sundry bottles of liquor. Glasses for serving it all.

Part of this is due to how frequently my wife and I entertain, certainly. Drinking is not the solitary exercise it was for so many of my family’s prior generations (more on that later). And part is due to my willingness to explore on the beverage front, thus the sheer frequency of opportunity to imbibe is increased; I’m always up for trying a funky Sour Ale I haven’t yet seen, uncorking wines from far flung and/or tiny, relatively unknown regions, savoring ribbon after ribbon of cocktail innovations new and complex and, even better, old and simple. But the dichotomy is made more notable by my parents’ relative dryness.

Having each grown up in rather aggressively alcoholic households, my folks both largely steered clear of drinking once we kids arrived on the scene. There was the occasional gin & tonic, a 7 & 7 here or CC & Ginger there, but only on vacation and/or within the context of other celebratory affairs. And even then in strict moderation.

In abstaining, my folks were rather ardent. The lone indulgence was this: a nightly glass of wine with dinner, but one and only one. Given that allowance, I wondered often, as time passed, what it was about their daily wine that left them feeling secure in their ability to indulge without worry of tumbling down the slippery slope toward the ever-feared, and constantly referenced, ‘drinking alone in your bedroom’.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the household’s hard liquor supply was as scarce as it was odd. The family serving tray, slightly gilded and heavily engraved, and broken out maybe thrice yearly, consisted of the same bottles of Beefeater, Sambuca, Midori (a hostess gift, no doubt), and Smirnoff from my age 5 through roughly 18; a strategy which, I might add, created a supply so limited and untouched that it made it nearly impossible for me to steal from it, were I ever inclined to do so.

Thus my brother and I were resigned to an occasional swig from a rather ancient bottle of Southern Comfort, ingeniously stored in a dark and dusty corner of our slightly less dark and dusty basement. As with all things SoCo, however, including their most recent travesty of an ad campaign, the reward was indeed the punishment. It was the only booze I had access to in high school, and man, did I hate it. That said, by the time my sister came of illegally drinking age, the bottle was kicked. Desperate times call for desperate measures.

But there was always wine. Namely, a reliably large jug of Gallo, stored plain as day in the back breezeway – value-bought and utterly untempting to any minors in the immediate vicinity. Usually white – Chablis, somehow. Later occasionally the somewhere between pink and orange of White Zinfandel, it stood sentinel. On daily call.

Reflecting on this, and in delving into why they felt comfortable enjoying wine every evening, it occurred to me that the reason they worried not about setting loose the looming beast of alcoholism at the hand of these huge jugs of utter bile…was perhaps the sheer lack of enjoyability of this partcular wine itself. Having become a rather avid oenophile myself, the thought of drinking these wines for anything short of sheer biological need, and unfettered desire for bulk volume economy, makes me shudder. And maybe that was the genius of it…

The cure for alcoholism? Mass-market 80s Chablis. By the jug. So bad that there is no way possible you’ll want more than one serving.

Or: Riunite & ice. Makes teetotaling so nice.

You want to minimize your risk of drinking too much? Make it as much of a hair shirt as you can. Drink disgusting, yet somehow mass-marketed, multi-billion dollar industry supporting, bastardized wine. There is perhaps no greater representation of the vapid faux-sophistication of the Bonfire of the Vanities 80s than mass-market Chablis. And Lambrusco for that matter. If 80s viniculture is famous for one thing, it is the indisputable popularity of bad wine. Or the odd insistence of wine companies of that era to degrade and diminish otherwise beautiful European wines, depending on how you look at it.

Was this some sort of ingenious backdoor temperance strategy across the 80s alcohol landscape? Between Gallo and Riunite, it is almost as if companies set out to ruin wine for an entire generation of eventual consumers.

Which is partly why I have derived such great joy from the re-emergence of Lambrusco over the past 8 or so years, and why I savor it more vigorously, and its ‘I Love the 80s’ counterpart, Chablis, every time I order it. For despite the best efforts of the mass-market wine industry, 80s ad wizards, and scores of suburban parents: you simply can’t kill a good varietal.

And obviously these wines never experienced the nadir in their eminently more sophisticated native markets that they did in the US. Chablis has always been, and remains, one of the finest examples of French winemaking there is. Compare a heritage Chardonnay with its flabby, I Can’t Believe It’s SO Butter-y American cousins and you see why the old school is the best school. And Lambrusco has been that quintessential of Italian traits – steadily plodding along in its own Old World way, whether or not modernity notices or cares, achieving the utmost in class, dignity, and taste.

To me there are few wines more utterly enjoyable than a dark red Lambrusco. Truth be told, I have always loved a chilled red. I don’t believe at all in the idea that drinking cold red wine (save, of course, a big earthy Cab or a superstar old vine Bordeaux, etc.) is the oenophilic equivalent of putting A1 on a beautiful Argentinian rump steak. Day old, opened up, cold red wine is delicious. As is a white that has had a chance to decompress and show itself after warming just a tiny bit, as opposed to served teeth-rattlingly cold.

So when I saw Lambruscos, reds you don’t have to ask to have served chilled, starting to pop up on menus, I was geeked. I had assumed I was mistaken when I thought to myself “Lambrusco…I could swear that’s what Riunite (a grocery store wine/80s abomination if ever there was one) was.” A holiday visit to my favorite Italian-American household several years back, my high school home away from home, confirmed as much.

“Ha! ‘as Riunite, Lambrusco! You kids t’ink you deescover it. Que cozzo quisto…” Family patriarch Luciano, as proud a first generation Italian as I’ve ever met, laughing about yet another great Italian original, alongside pasta sauce, among others, ruined by America’s attempts to homogenize it, strip it of its inherent character, and broaden its appeal to less sophisticated domestic palates.

So add them to the ever-growing list, including American made denim, French pressed slow roasted coffee, and the ability to walk into a bar and get a simple, well-made cocktail, of ‘what’s old is new again’. And better. And amen, at least in this case, for that.

As for my parents, they have finally, if measuredly, moved on from their hardline stance against enjoying some of that drank. The breadth hasn’t changed much: it’s pretty much wine, a gin or vodka-based social, and on the rare hot summer evening, an ice cold American lager. But thanks very much to my wife’s incredible ability to coax and convince, coupled with her boundless capacity for culinary exploration, my mum now happily tries new wines. And she is much happier for it.

And like the passive aggressive comments and exasperated sighs of frustration from my mother, the booze has in kind started to flow a bit more frequently and freely now that my dad is retired. And he, like somehow every other late-era Baby Boomer of whom I’ve come across, will suck down a fucking Bud Light Lime with alarming relish and astounding speed. (I, literally, don’t get it. All of them. It’s spooky.) But still never to the point that, aside from my wedding, I’ve ever seen him drunk.

Which, as an adult, if not (yet) a father myself, I now appreciate much more deeply. In fact my parents’ willingness to go without, to forsake indulgence in order to create an environment within which my siblings and I were safe and unencumbered and free to explore is about as apt an illustration of our entire lives as I can think of.

And that’s probably the real reason why I feel the warmth of nostalgia when ordering a Lambrusco, or a Chablis, and savor each’s uniqueness: it reminds me of how great I have it, thanks to my parents and their dogged pursuit of the epitome of the American Dream – doing what’s necessary to give your children a better life than you had. Whether that’s via eliminating the specter of alcoholism from their lives – or via consuming borderline criminally poor iterations of what are actually fantastic wines – so that they may come to know something better beyond that. Damn, Mum & Dad. Cheers to you. (Finally.)