Wine made for rowdy celebration

It was, perhaps, the best Ronald family Thanksgiving ever.

It certainly had to qualify as the rowdiest.

(Pardon me if I’ve told this story before. At my age, I reserve that privilege now and then.)

It was the late 1970s or early 1980s. Connie and I had not been in Portland long. I was a ridiculously young and very green reporter at The Commercial Review, and my cousin Jim was a reporter for the New Castle paper. (He was somewhat less young and decidedly less green than I was.)

For decades, descendants of my Ronald grandparents had gathered for Thanksgiving, sometimes in Portland, sometimes in Richmond, sometimes as far afield as Centerville, Ohio, and this particular year in Centerville, Indiana.

My cousin Jim and his then-wife, Pauline, were living in a home that was once the domicile of Oliver P. Morton, one-time governor of the State of Indiana. The house had been secured for future restoration by local organizations, but it had not yet been restored. In the interim, it had been rented to Jim and Pauline, who made their home there with their daughter Alexia.

What made that particular Thanksgiving celebration unforgettable and rowdy was my uncle Jim Luginbill.

Jim, who would go on to become one of the best and best-loved mayors in the history of the City of Portland, had jumped with both feet into the hobby of home wine-making.

In those days, the Luginbill house on Wayside Drive would routinely have half a dozen large glass containers scattered around its rooms attempting to impersonate end tables. But they were full of wine halfway through its production process.

It was Jim who decided that this particular Thanksgiving should also be a wine-tasting.

His plan was pretty simple. He assembled several bottles: Some were those filled with wine he himself had produced as a rank amateur, some were high quality wine with a price tag that could make you choke, some were made by the late great Max Naas who had led Jim into the wine-making hobby and some were bargain basement finds.

Jim removed all the labels and numbered each bottle, keeping track of which was which.

Then he showed up for the festivities in Centerville.

The idea was that everyone would have a taste of each wine, rate it on a scorecard, then we’d tally things up and see how the blind tasting went.

Jim, obviously, hoped that his hobby wine would rank well when it was blindly compared to well-known labels.

But he made a fatal miscalculation.

There had never, to my knowledge, been wine present at any of the Ronald family Thanksgiving celebrations. Many of them took place in Presbyterian fellowship halls, not exactly the sort of place one would wander into for a taste of the grape.

So the whole celebration took on a new aspect.

It was louder, for one thing.

Those who were seated at the “children’s table” still recall how noisy the grown-ups were.

And there were those of us who cheated.

Connie and I found ourselves at a table in the front hall of the Morton house. I’m not sure who else was at the table. But I do know that we cheated.

Early on we discovered that the numbered bottle that had been placed at our table was really good. How good? We did not pass it along for others to taste.

We’d found the good stuff, and we were determined to hang onto it.

No one else seemed to mind, based upon the din and laughter.

Finally, Uncle Jim did the unveiling.

There was some grumbling that our table had had the best wine and hadn’t shared it, but that was quickly overtaken by laughter that a self-described wine snob in the group had rated Gallo’s Hearty Burgundy as No. 1 overall.

Trust me, it was a Thanksgiving for the ages.