Heine Wines

A number of years ago we would take US Highway 12 out of Binghamton, NY heading up to Utica and our Adirondack cabin north of there. Along the way we would pass through Norwich and then Paris, NY at which point we would be able to pick up Froggy 104.3, a country music station out of the Utica/Rome area.

In the mid to late 1990s we began to hear radio commercials for a winery near Paris called Hiene Wines. I still don’t know if the winery actually existed but the commercials were a hoot.

Allegedly this was a family winery run by two brothers, Big Red and Thor. Think about that for a moment. Big Red and Thor Heine ran the winery.

One of the selling points of the wines wasn’t their taste. No, they packaged their wine not in bottles but in aluminum cans. Sometime around the second year (yeah, these commercials ran for two or three years) the two brothers—Big Red and Thor, remember—noticed that a lot of their customers liked to put ice cubes in their wine to chill it on a hot summer’s day. As a result they came up with an innovation. They would widen the opening in the pop-top can so you could drop an ice cube or two into your wine. Their new tag line at the end of the commercial: “Heine Wines now in the new wide-mouth cans with the big ice hole!”

The first time I heard it, I had to clean coffee off the inside of my windshield.

I still don’t know if the winery really existed or not but the commercials stopped and I never heard about Heine Wines again or on any other radio station in the area.