What is the first wine you will give your son/daughter?

What is the first wine you will give your son or daughter when they reach drinking age? Curious to hear what the different approaches here are: a low-key wine to get the palate accustomed, a birthday wine for a special occasion, many different ones, or a full flight of Grand Cru Burgundy?

I’d also love to hear from those who are already went through the experience of sharing this hobby with their children, what happened, did they like it, would you do it differently, let’s hear!

Sauternes were my introduction to wine, and I think it’s a good one.

By “drinking age” do you mean legal drinking age? Or just when you decide to first introduce or expose them to a taste of wine?

For my child’s first experiences tasting a wine, which will be before legal drinking age, I’ll go with something with some residual sugar. Maybe a German riesling, as they are some of my favorites as well.

For a celebratory “of legal drinking age” bottle, I’d think maybe a nice Champagne. This could change depending on if they have any interest in wine already and have a different preference, or if they’d like to choose based on what sounds most interesting to them.

I’ve loaded up on a nice variety of birthyear wines for my kids (2010 and 2012) and my plan is to also start with Riesling and Sauternes. Feel like that’s the best way to ‘ease em into it’.

2009 Dom and d’yquem. Go big or go home

It has to be a full flight of premoxed white Burgundy. That’ll teach him a lesson!

Rather than give our son and daughter the wines, we drank birth-year bottles with them after they turned 21. A Montelena Estate Cab with our son and a Climens with our daughter. As nice as the bottles were, it was the experience of sharing the wine with them that was so much more enjoyable. They were both born in years that were good for the California Cabs we enjoy, and for Vintage Port, so there is a modest assortment remaining.

Ed

My stepson is 11. We’ve been allowing him to taste our wine whenever he wants to for more than a year now. So far, he prefers white to red, and champagne to everything. We don’t drink much that’s sweet, but he doesn’t so far seem to have a decided preference for RS. As soon as he starts asking for his own glass, we’ll let him have a small one. I hope by the time he’s in his late teens he’ll have developed enough of a palate to start asking for what he likes. I do hope he likes Barolo, though, because we have a 12L from his birth year.

Well more importantly hopefully he has lots of friends that like barolo.

Mogen David concord wine, served on a cotton ball.

The first liquid my daughter had after mother’s milk was Krug…

We opened birthyear wines - primarily CA Cabernet Sauvignon and a little CA Chardonnay - on our now adult children’s birthdays since they were 3 or 4 years old, when the wines were first available. They seemed to get a kick out of tasting “their” wine even in their pre-teen years.

My daughters have been smelling and tasting dinner wine since they were young. When they hit 14-15 they have been allowed to have a small splash with dinner if they wanted it. Now at 17 and 22 they do what they please. The younger one doesn’t love wine and rarely asks for any , the older one loves it and frequently enjoys a glass or two with dinner and is interested in discovering wines of all kinds.

Same here. I have a few special “birth year” bottles we are saving for milestone birthdays, but for the last 20 years or so I’ve always just grabbed a bottle of something from their birth year to open with our dinner on their birthday. Even if they just had a sip, or even when they declined that because “wine is yucky,” they seemed to get a kick out of it being a bottle from their year that we were having with dinner that night. Luckily all of mine were born in years that produced good to great wines in at least a majority of the regions from which we buy the most wine.

Obviously, the supply eventually runs out but I certainly had/have enough to get each of them through to 25 with something decent, in addition to the big “milestone” bottles.

As for the original question, I don’t remember what the first wine was that any of them sampled. We didn’t make an occasion out of that, or select a specific wine in advance, we just let it happen organically and let their interest, or lack thereof, be the driver.

So far I’ve got one who mostly likes sour beers (which I can’t stand), but who will drink and enjoy most anything I open, another who prefers wine and in particular Barbaresco and Barolo and who will drink and enjoy pretty much anything I open, another who does not care for any beverage alcohol at all, and the youngest who (so far) likes whites (bubbly or not) with a bit of RS but otherwise doesn’t care for wine.

I cannot remember the first wines we had our kids (now 34 and 32 taste), but I am going to go with the following because these are what I remember best:

  1. When the kids were 16 and 14, we took them to France for a week or so. Most of the time was in Paris, but I got one day in Burgundy. Took the TGV there early in the morning and came back in the evening. I managed to get an appointment to visit Jacky Truchot (this was 2002). So, I like to think that their first wines were Truchots, even if not true.

  2. Clearly not her first wine, but still a good story. Once when our daughter came home from college, she told me that the one type of wine she did not like was Chardonnay. I opened a white Burgundy for her. She fell in love with it and white Burgundies are now about her favorite wine.

The best place to start on wine probably is a German Kabinett or Spatlese. They probably will like it because they haven’t yet learned that they are not supposed to like it.

On a recent trip to Italy, we allowed our older children to have a glass of wine at dinner. They both enjoyed prosecco, less so other whites and reds. The proseccos we drank mainly were on the higher end, with much less RS than you typically find in the U.S. However, they seemed to like the relatively sweeter sparklers the best.

Both twins had 1996 Dom at their Baptism.

When my children were born in 1984 and 1987, we celebrated with late 70’s/early 80’s Krug Grand Cuvee (no vintage Krug on the west coast in those days) and 1975 Bollinger RD, respectively. They each had a taste at zero days old.

You mean their favorite wasn’t Foley Claret??? [scratch.gif] Shocking!!!

give him that bottle and a Coravin for college and he’s good for the 4 years.