But if you cross a Mercedes with a Yugo

a) Do you still have a luxury car?

b) (And will it cross the road?)

Picture, ideally, to follow.

Fragolino, the dessert accompaniment served by our dinner hosts, turns out to have quite a history, one whose strains of truth are proving hard to sort out on Wikipedia.

In one version, (after it had been introduced from the U.S.A.) Vitis lambrusca brought a parasite that began to destroy European wine production.  In another varietal of this narrative, the importation was made (first into France) for the exact opposite reason: to fight the phylloxera plague.

Either way, its cultivation was eventually banned in Europe, nowhere more stringently than in Italy, where sale and distribution were made illegal.  And today, the real fragolino is not to be found.  (Even so, what remains will do.)

On a poetic note: the Isabella cultivar was brought to several former Soviet nations, through the seaport of Odessa.  Given its port name among Georgians, “Odessa” wine was once described by the poet Osip Mandelstam in these most appropriate images: “fleshy and healthy like a cluster of night itself.”