A few days ago, a box arrived at our door. Upon opening the mysterious package, we were greeted by what can easily be considered the wine lover's Holy Grail, King Tut's golden mask and the Ark of the Covenant all rolled into a bottle of wine: Gallo's Hearty Burgundy.
To be more exact, it was a limited edition of the wine, celebrating 50 years of this variety's production. Yes, it's valued at $9 for 1.5 liters, but price is not the big deal for this wine. The reason is simple. Most American wine lovers cut their teeth on Gallo Hearty Burgundy.
The wine became the instant favorite of the Italian-American community, where there was sure to be a bottle of this wine on their dinner table every evening. It was not long before Gallo Hearty Burgundy became the most popular choice for almost every wine-drinking family in this country. The wine became so popular that it was once featured on Time magazine’s cover as the symbol of America's rise as a wine-producing country. There are very few of the older generation who did not know and adore Gallo’s Hearty Burgundy.
The Gallo saga began a few days after prohibition ended on Dec. 5, 1933, when two brothers of Italian decent decided to try their hand at winemaking. From that very humble beginning, there grew an empire.
Whatever the magic that Ernest and Julio Gallo put into their wines, they became the most popular wines in this country. It was not simply because people would grab at anything alcoholic after all of those years of abstinence; quite the contrary. During that time, the public had been exposed to many poorly made wines and were very suspicious of anything alcoholic because of all of the misfortunes that befell people who drank some of the formerly illicit products. It is also a fact that if you do not make a good product, you will ultimately fail. This product, the Hearty Burgundy, was a resounding success and remained so for many years.
Hearty Burgundy was created from a formula combining what was, at that time, a little-used grape variety, the zinfandel, with another variety that really nobody had any interest in, the petite sirah. They were blended to create a signature style that has proven to be one of the most popular produced in this country for 50 years.
Gallo's Hearty Burgundy is not a great wine; you don’t get a great wine for nine bucks. But it is a good wine that goes with almost everything. We must admit to our pedestrian ways in that many a night we would sit down to a meal of spaghetti and meatballs with never a thought of a chianti or a brunello as an accompaniment - in spite of an extensive wine library that we possessed - but instead, headed right for the Hearty Burgundy.
This 50th anniversary edition of the old masterpiece was reconstructed by consulting with the original winemakers and it comes as close to the first blend as one can get. Gallo's Hearty Burgundy is a dark red wine resplendent with the aromas of dark summer berries and plums wrapped in a mild and mellow oak.
We recommend you try this wine and revel in the great, great granddaddy of all of today’s American wines. It’s living history, not out of a book and not from the History Channel. You might consider Gallo's Hearty Burgundy a simple wine, and that is exactly what it is. It was designed not to interfere or overtake the other foods on the table but to marry and meld with them, making them taste even better. Go ahead, spring for the nine bucks, it will be a great experience and a trip through wine history.
Nixa resident Bennet Bodenstein is a wine columnist and manages ArticlesOnWine.com. He can be reached at frojhe1@att.net.[[In-content Ad]]
