Cheap Wines of the 50s

MD 50/50 (Mad Dog)
Thunderbird
Gallo

All of the above are wines known back in my father's day as super cheap wines. (The type of thing my aunt thinks I shouldn't know about, because you only know about it when you live in the gutter.) These days, however, Gallo makes more expensive wines.

These brands, and others, are known as low-end fortified wines and can be read about on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thunderbird_(wine)). Such wines aren't sold in the downtown and tenderloin areas of San Francisco, NYC, and Seattle, because the only thing they're good for is getting drunk, and thus contribute to vagrancy and public drunkeness of the homeless (Wikipedia).

People often made fun of wine connosiers when drinking these wines, which is why they came to be called Wino Wine. They may also be called Rotgut Wine, Bum Wine, and a number of other things.