hello Bottlers.
The 1100 road miles from New Orleans to Charleston (via Apalachicola, St. Augustine and Savannah) are so far as I can tell a wasteland, a Death Valley, of wine. The problem isn’t that the beverage is entirely unknown there, but that there is so little evidence of anything that could be called wine culture.
This may not strike you with full force until you recall that this part of the world was settled by Latin peoples – French and Spanish who thought of wine as a necessity of life – not some sort of option package. It was second nature to them, in part because one couldn’t practice Catholicism without the wheaten bread and grape wine that are required for mass.
Its true that vinifera vines proved stubbornly resistant to acclimation here, and the native vines didn’t make a palatable wine — but this was also the case in New England and the mid-Atlantic states. Somehow they overcame the impediments. In the South, wine, despite a strong head start, seems never to have quite taken hold.
I left my bona fides as a cultural critic in my other jacket, but I’ll have a go at articulating the questions that kept occurring to me as the miles rolled by, to wit:
- Why with so much wonderful seafood on offer does one almost never encounter the classic seafood wines: muscadet, vinho verde, chablis, riesling, chenin?
- Why with so many months of steamy weather are pink wines scarcely in evidence?
- How did the high-culture south develop such an enduring attachment to the cocktail and cocktail culture?
- Where are the craft breweries that are thick upon the ground in most other regions of the U.S.?
- Should sweet tea be considered the sworn enemy of all good taste in beverages?
- How is it that even in the hippest bars Charleston can muster everything feels so . . . uh . . . dorky.
That’s it for the moaning- let’s move on to the highlights of which there were plenty:
- Jambalaya, glacially cold beer, and a knock-out quartet at the New Orleans Pharmacy Museum with a young woman who could make her trumpet burp – in the most charming way.
- Bacchanal Wine Bar in NOLA’s Bywater neighborhood (a section of Hell n’ Gone just beyond the beyond). We ate a spendid bowl of mussels, sipped good wine, and listened to The Courtyard Kings do their Quintette du Hot Club homage as we sat on discarded lawn furniture and searched for our food in the dark. (A $20 cab ride from our B&B in the Treme each way.) See a little video here.
- Boss Oyster on the docks in Apalachicola, where they let us in even though they were closing and sir and ma’am-ed us to death. Here one learns that a fried oyster po’ boy is nothing to be trifled with.
- A picnic supper in our tiny room in St. Augustine consisting of a nice Macon-Vire (purchased at Bacchanal days before) with smoked fish and a loaf of homemade wheat bread picked up at the Gainesville farmer’s market that afternoon. We ate it seated on the air-conditioning unit with TP for napkins.
- Boiled peanuts, shrimp po’boys, and Bud Lite at Whaley’s gas station (est. 1948) on Edisto Island SC.
- Lunch with Sarah Markham
-stephen