Giving my kids wine

[Blue]

Thanks for the advice.

The first time I tasted wine was at christmas when I was 4 1/2 years old....it was...yucky.

Every christmas thereafter I always tasted a little bit. By the time I was 16 I grew to enjoy wine. I still had very little. I never got drunk (okay a couple times) because for me alcohol was something that was savoured, studied and appreciated, the affect was really in many ways, only a hinderance to the experience (I add to wine scotch and cognac here). All of my family had a part in my wine education, but most of all my grandfather, with his delicious old bottles of Chateau Margaux and Chateau Latour (w/ a little Chateau La Gafelliere, Chateau Yon Figeac and Chateau Sociando-Mallet). It saddens me that in this country, teaching my son the value of wine like I was is seen as shocking to many and, as you say is technically against the law.

I think that this kind of education to the young has tremendous value. I remember when I went to college binge drinking seemed completely absurd. I'd drunk too much wine before, and too much beer, and it leaves you with a major head-ache...fine its fun a few times to try to get girls in bed and because you don't yet know how to have real conversations with friends, but it gets old very quick.

I remember the time when some friends of mine decided to get drunk. They bought jug wine. I don't know what was funnier, the look on my face when I took my first sip of the wine, or the look on theirs the next morning with their hangovers.

Can someone please explain to me why people in this country are so hung up about making sure that an 20 year old can't have a glass of Sancere with his Sole Meuniere in a restaurant?

</get off soap box>

PS I was recently naturalized americain, and there are many many things I like in this country...I just wish they took the drinking laws and applied them only to hard liquor and wine below a certain grade.