The Internet -- ironically -- is a great place to reminisce about old times. Anything you might be nostalgic about, from scratch'n'sniff stickers to Schoolhouse Rock lyrics, has at least a dozen web pages devoted to it, attentively maintained by collectors and trivia buffs who rival the Comic Book Guy in their obsessiveness.

As a result, it genuinely surprises me when a phenomenon from my youth completely lacks any Google footprint. Lander's Cove was a cheap fortified wine, ubiquitous when I was a teenager in Toronto. I have no idea who made it, where the company was based, or for how long the wine was in production. I don't even know where "Lander's Cove" is supposed to be, though one (one) Internet site has a picture of a Lander's Cove in Newfoundland.

This lack of information notwithstanding, I can tell you a few very important facts about the product. It came in two colours, pinkish and yellowish, which the labels inexplicably identified as "red" and "white." The pinkish tasted like the liquid that lettuce turns into when it has been left in the crisper for a couple of months; the yellowish tasted like the stuff that pools beneath your air conditioner. Its alcohol content was around 20%. It cost about four bucks a bottle -- about as much as I pay for a latte these days.

Though I wasn't old enough to buy alcohol myself (and I had not yet mastered the art of forgery), my no-good "friends," bad influences to a one, would buy Lander's Cove from the liquor store beneath Union Station, which we would then share as we skulked around the harbourfront. Interestingly, I don't remember ever getting 'faced on the stuff: I think it was so vile that the human body evolved in such a way as to reject the amount it would take to get really drunk. (Though no doubt we consumed enough to acquire a legion of other health problems; I'd bet money that stuff was carcinogenic.)

Someone made a fan page for Lander's Cove on Facebook, which is literally the only website I've found that mentions it even in passing. The fan page sports a blurry black-and-white photo of the bottle I remember so well, adorned with a woodcut of a schooner. Squinting at that awful picture, I wondered how many other beloved products have been lost, or almost lost, to memory. We sometimes think the Internet preserves everything, but some adolescent memories simply never get that far.