Thirty Years of Wondering What the Alcohol in That Video Game Tasted Like

Thirty years ago I played a game called Castle Wolfenstein on my Commodore 64. The graphics weren't top of the line, but the style of the game was unique.

Not a straightforward shoot-em-up, because you had a limited supply of bullets, and firing on the Nazi guards would alert other nearby guards to your presence. Also pretty creepy because the simple graphics look like a starving skull on top of the vertical striped uniform of a concentration camp prisoner.  I don't think I ever reached the end of the first level (finding the secret war plans and escaping the castle with them).

What I remember is that you could search trunks and the bodies of dead guards to find more bullets, weapons, money, bulletproof vests, grenades, bratwurst, and something called Liebfraumilch, which is apparently a wine made in Germany. It's not a brand but a type of wine associated with a region, like Champagne, Merlot or Riesling.

Pretty sure I saw a bottle of this on top of my grandparents' fridge way back in the '80s. I can't remember if I asked them about it or told them I was fascinated with it because of the video game I'd seen it in, as if they should also be excited for that reason. Sounds like something I would have done. Hell, here I am still doing it, just to a different audience.

You might recall from the German words that filter into American pop culture via Scooby-Doo or whatever that "lieb" means love, "frau" means lady, and "milch" doesn't come up much on Scooby-Doo but it means milk. Love that lady's milk! Actually it means Beloved lady's milk, as in the Virgin Mary, and it was the semi-sweet white wine "produced from the vineyards of the Liebfrauenkirche or 'Church of Our Lady' in the Rhineland-Palatinate city of Worms since the eighteenth century." (Good ol' Wikipedia.)

I thought they were calling me and all their customers pigs for drinking this, but "Qualitatswein" on the label means quality wine, not quality swine.

I don't drink, because fucking look at me -- do I look like I have a lot of self-control? But I'm willing to try alcohol every once in a while, just to say I've tried some obscure kind, like hard root beer. Consequently, I've never been drunk or experienced a hangover, never developed a yen for alcohol, and I've never gotten used to the horrible taste of it. Really, you're not kidding anybody. If you're a connoisseur, your goal is finding the least worst tasting toxin to get you intoxicated. The only way to make it really bearable is to make a girly drink cocktail with so much fruit juice and sugar that the alcohol isn't noticeable.

Since I had the camera my phone out, I also took a picture of this pot of Transylvanian Goulash. Fairly low carbs.

How did my first glass of Liebfraumilch taste? It tasted like wine. If it doesn't have a ring of sugar crystalizing around the meniscus, it's not sweet enough for me. And even then, we're still talking about alcohol. I'll use the rest of it for cooking some time. I scanned the wine racks at my local Meijer Thrifty Acres for ten minutes, had almost given up, but I found this one brand of Liebfraumilch on my way toward the check-outs. Five bucks was cheap enough to satisfy thirty years of curiosity and give me something to post about on your friendly neighborhood Eat My Professional Photographs of Food blog. For the rest of the night I'll be burping goulash and alternating between my impressions of Andrei Codrescu and Slavoj Žižek. (I know, Žižek is Slovenian. Can you really tell the difference?)

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