How much does a MD 20/20 cost?
Some call it “bum wine” or “brown bag vino”. But the cultured call it “fortified wine”, that ultra-sweet, high-octane “grape wine with citrus spirits” that gets a, um, bum rap because it’s high on alcohol and low on price (though, averaging $5 a bottle, MD 20/20 is out-pricing the Three Buck Chuck).
How do you spell mad dog?
How Do You Spell MAD DOG? Correct spelling for the English word “mad dog” is [mˈad dˈɒɡ], [mˈad dˈɒɡ], [m_ˈa_d d_ˈɒ_ɡ] (IPA phonetic alphabet).
Mogen David’s success launched a concord grape mini-boomlet, Pinney writes. E & J Gallo Winery jumped in with a sweet concord called “Gallo-ette,” while Roma Wine Company introduced a knockoff with the strange name of “Jo-Ann.” Even The Welch’s Grape Juice Company, founded by the fanatical teetotaler Thomas Welch, tried to ride the wave and announced plans to start fermenting concord wine. But the Welch project never got off the ground, and the other two copycats quickly flopped in competition with the original.
Enter MD 20/20, so-named because it was 20% alcohol and came in 20-ounce bottles. No source that I have found, not even Pinney’s encyclopedically-thorough work, can say exactly when it appeared or how it was received. Mad Dog just showed up. The original labels on the bottles claimed, in ALL CAPS, that it was “THE WINE OF THE CENTURY,” and “The perfect balance of select American grapes!” Evidently enough people liked Mogen David’s new offering to nickname it Mad Dog and to keep the MD 20/20 flowing from the Chicago winery.
Mad Dog’s roots go back to the Mogen David copmany, formerly of Chicago, which first started making kosher wines for religious use in 1947. Mogen David (“shield of David” in Yiddish) imported concord grape juice from upstate New York and turned it into a cheap, super-sweet wine that was palatable to religious people who might never taste alcohol outside of Passover ceremonies. It filled a niche and made the company a nice little profit.
Uglier than a bad palindrome is MD 20/20, aka Mad Dog, the famous bum wine of strange origins. For a drink that’s just a headache in a bottle, MD 20/20 has had amazing staying power. This dog’s been hunting since the 1950s, and shows no signs of being put down anytime soon.
Gallo, rarely outfoxed in the wine business, upped the ante in 1957 with the launch of Thunderbird, another sweet and fruity quasi-wine but with 21% alcohol, far more potent than any kosher stuff. Thunderbird bigfooted the competition, and Mogen David was back to where it started, serving its small niche market.
