Chautauqua Vineyard
Highway 331 and I-10
DeFuniak Springs, FL
Open
seven days a week
Chautauqua Vineyard will give you a tour, free. You can look through a window
and see the equipment the grapes are pressed in and the vats, cooled with glycol,
the grape juice ferments in, and a three-minute video will explain the process to
you, and show you pictures of the property ten miles north of the vineyard where
the grapes are grown. They are local grapes. Muscadine (Vitis rotundifolia).
You won't get a dry wine from a muscadine grape. Muscadine wines are slightly sweet,
like wine made from berries. Chautauqua makes a blueberry wine, too.
The
gift shop sells a dozen wines, and you can taste all of them in the tasting room,
if you wish. I sampled, and bought, two $6.50 estate-bottled wines, from vineyard
grapes. A white and a red. (They ship in other grape juice and make wine out of it.
The port and sherry are fermented in oak barrels, instead of stainless-steel vats.
I didn't try the port or sherry.)
The Carlos was a white muscadine and the
Noble was a red muscadine (not to be confused with the excellent Nobile Sauvignon
Blanc (Marlborough, New Zealand), which contains a hint of gooseberries and ripe
passion fruit and has a slightly herbaceous overtone, and sells for $25).
The Noble is the vineyard's most popular seller and makes a thoughtful, inexpensive
gift. It tastes like alcoholic grape juice. I don't know what food it goes with.
What do you drink iced tea with? Some drink sweet tea, some drink unsweetened.
Miller's Farm Market
On the Corner, Highway 331S and Highway 20
Freeport,
FL
Always Fresh Produce, Locally Grown When Available
Butch had a sign out front saying Fresh Peas, but he was sold out of them. He bakes bread, too. And sweets. And is next door to a fish house. He wears an eye-patch and a bandanna and a shakuhachi flute around his shoulder on a leather thong. He looks like a pirate. One time Potter and I made a gallon of wine out of purple-hull field peas. I don't remember how it turned out. I know it was better than the turnip wine Burley Athan and I made in his cider mill. That looked like Liquid Wrench on a mud puddle coming out of the press and tasted like earwax. When I toured the Chautauqua Vineyard the tour guide asked me if I made wine myself. I wonder how she knew. Potter and I made wine out of Lapsang-Souchong tea that tasted like bacon. The tea has a smoky flavor, you see. Any fruit will make a good country wine. And gooseberry makes a decent champagne, if you don't have to have it brut. Extra dry, say. You dern tootie I make wine, lady. And beer. Why, I made an oatmeal stout one time.... I called my production beer OG-37. For original gravity. Heavily hopped. That's a high-gravity beer. I did a single fermentation with a top-working yeast, S. carlsbergensis. (Southern-blotting analysis of the two genes encoding ACBP types 1 and 2 in S. carlsbergensis strongly indicate that this species is a hybrid between S. cerevisiae and Saccharomyces monacensis.) Naturally conditioned, which means dead yeast in the bottom. Cloudy when you tip a champagne bottle up and glug it. Five gallons makes 25 fifths. A champagne bottle will take a crown cap. A connoisseur tips the bottle up slowly, and decants it, off the dregs, raising a nice head. But Larry says it's the dead yeast that gives you the green-apple quick-step. Apropos of cider mills. A man needs a good scour, now and then.
* * *
Brew rode around the tri-states tasting wine in vineyards, then writing about
it.
His life wasn't secret, it was an open book.
Once, up around
Milton--a lot of former hippies live on the edge of the Blackwater River State Forest--he
saw an old Volvo with a bumper sticker that said SUPPORT LOCAL CULTURE - MAKE YOUR
OWN YOGURT.
Hell, Brenda makes her own alfalfa sprouts.
I Drive
to Bagdad.
Brew did drive to Bagdad. Bagdad, Florida. Boarded
up junior stores.
We support our troops. Out of business. Brew drove to Sumatra.
Brew shops for peas.
Brew shops, cooks, cleans up in the kitchen.
Brew goes to the ATM, gets a used tire on the left front wheel.
Will Bridget
lose weight? Will Bridget get a man?
Will Brew get his proposal in on time?
Will Brew sell a book?
How are the Braves doing in the National League East?
* * *
Ernie Pyle drove around the Southwest talking to people, visiting sites,
and writing six 1,000-word pieces a week for the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain.
When Brew was on sabbatical, he wrote six 1,000-word pieces a day, for roman-feuilleton.com.
Blue highways. It's all the Denny's out by the interstate, now. A Wal Mart coming
soon.
Or the bombed-out shopping centers the Wal Marts moved from, to build
a bigger Wal Mart.
You make wine out of the kind of grapes the soil and weather
grow.
Eat local seafood.
Support garage bands and small press web
sites.
Brew listens to the opera, Brew listens to jazz, Brew listens to Dread
Clampitt and The Saunders Brothers: The Doghouse Sessions.