There was a wedding at Cana in Galilee,John, Chapter 2.*
and the mother of Jesus was there.
Jesus and his disciples were also invited to the wedding.
When the wine ran short,
the mother of Jesus said to him,
"They have no wine."
And Jesus said to her,
"Woman, how does your concern affect me?
My hour has not yet come."
His mother said to the servers,
"Do whatever he tells you."
Now there were six stone water jars there for Jewish ceremonial washings,
each holding twenty to thirty gallons.
Jesus told them,
"Fill the jars with water."
So they filled them to the brim.
Then he told them,
"Draw some out now and take it to the headwaiter."
So they took it.
And when the headwaiter tasted the water that had become wine,
without knowing where it came from
— although the servers who had drawn the water knew —,
the headwaiter called the bridegroom and said to him,
"Everyone serves good wine first,
and then when people have drunk freely, an inferior one;
but you have kept the good wine until now."
Jesus did this as the beginning of his signs at Cana in Galilee
and so revealed his glory,
and his disciples began to believe in him.
Okay, we've done beer, and we've done whiskey, what about wine.
Lex Anteinternet: Lex Anteinternet: Is Beer the Most Distributist Pr...: A bottle of "double cask" Wyoming Whiskey, which is Wyoming Whiskey that's also been partially aged in a sherry cask. ...
And no, we're not grasping for those lyrics from the famous John Lee Hooker song.
Frankly, I know nothing about wine.
I've always known that, but it really occurred to me after I decided to add this post, following my one on beer and whiskey.
Indeed, I pondered why that might be.
My parents rarely drank wine, but for that matter my father only bought beer during the summer and while we often had a bottle of Canadian Whiskey on hand, it usually lasted an eternity. Indeed, when I was growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, it was considered to be a social obligation to have whiskey on hand for social occasions. My folks weren't huge entertainers (they were definitely better than we are here however), and that's about the only time the whiskey was ever brought out. We didn't stock more than one kind and for whatever reason, the only kind of whiskey my father ever bought was Canadian Lord Calvert. I supposed that this might be because my mother was Canadian, but as she never ever drank it, that supposition might be way, way, off the mark.
One of my aunts and uncles liked Scotch, and liked Cutty Sark for that matter. Asking my father about it, he told me that it tasted like paint thinner, and I have to agree. And not just about Cutty Sark, but all Scotch Whiskey.
About the only wine my parents ever bought was Mogan David, which based upon their website must have been Mogan David Concord. I feel bad, quite frankly, for the Mogan David company, because back at that time it was simply a fairly cheap and rather obviously Kosher table wine. The purple wine came with a Star of David emblazoned upon it. This was all prior to the introduction of tehir horrifying fortified "pop" wines which came out under the MD 20/20 name, and which acquired the nickname "Mad Dog 20/20". I frankly think that their introduction of that brand, while it may have been a marketing mistake, was a mistake. I'm surprised to learn that it still exists, actually.
Anyhow, when I was a kid, on very rare occasion, my father would buy Mogan David. I'm not sure why. It always came in big gallon sized bottles, and it lasted forever. I haven't had it for years and years, and indeed not since I was young, probably ten years old or younger, and I'd get a small glass when they bought it. As it isn't the kind of drink you serve to guests, and as they so rarely bought it, and quit buying it at some point, I don't know what the thought was.
Anyhow, when growing up and still young, "wine" to me meant Mogan David.
When I was in my very early teens my mother, for some still unknown reason, took a wine making class at the local community college and she accordingly started making wine as a hobby. Simply taking up wine making was really odd for a person who basically didn't drink and who was living in a family that nearly didn't, so I don't know what she was thinking. It was a mistake all the way around for a variety of reasons.
For one reason, she was a horrible cook and at least based upon her wine making experiment, being a bad cook equates with being a bad vintner. Her wine was awful. She made most of it from berries that she harvested from where our garden was located and for years and years I assumed thereafter that the berries must have been basically unpalatable. Later on, I found they weren't, when other people made other things out of them. Go figure.
Fortunately, after stinking up the house with the fermentation process for awhile, she gave it up. Pretty bad stuff.
I don't know if that early experience left me tainted on wine in general. I'd had beer obviously so apparently that didn't carry over. As an adult I've been exposed to wine a lot more, but I've picked up a very limited taste for it. Basically, I like Chianti and buy it on odd occasion. I don't like any other wine much unless they are very close to Chianti. Some of the wines that people really like I absolutely detest. Most of them actually. Dry Champagne I like, but it's not like you are going to drink gallons of that unless you are Winston Churchill.
So my knowledge on wine is super limited and will stay that way.
Anyhow, as I did beers and whiskey, and as I'm looking at this from a Distributist and local agricultural level, and as I know there are a couple of wineries in the state, I decided to complete the Tour d'alcohol with that.
Now, going into that I'll note that I'm very skeptical about the ability of Wyoming to produce any wine in the first place, unless it's made out of the wild stuff that my mom used, and I'd discourage that. While my mother, in her brief vintner stage decided to plant a couple of Concorde grape vines over my objection (she never had a grasp on agricultural yield and she couldn't accept that a couple of vines weren't going to yield adequate grapes for fermenting, and she didn't accept that the harsh weather here wasn't conducive to grapes), Wyoming doesn't really have the climate for growing grapes.
Indeed, grapes are sufficiently susceptible to climate that you can actually tell what the climate of a past era was like based on them. The line basically north of the Rhine in Europe and west the English Channel are the beer lines, basically (with some blending of the two) as you can grow grains north and west of there, but not grapes, usually. When you can grow grapes in those regions, something odd is going on. We know, for example, that there was a period when England produced a lot of wine. It was during the Medieval Climatic Optimum. You can't grow them there now. Likewise, during the same era Newfoundland had abundant wild grapes. It doesn't now. There's never been a time when you couldn't grow grapes in France, Spain, Italy, Greece and North Africa, which is why all those areas have been wine regions (the modern exception being North Africa but only because of Islam).
So you can't do much with that here.
Apparently you can do a little, however.
Before I go on, there's one additional thing I should mention that I recently learned. I've always known that there are wines that are attributed to regions that surprise me, but I didn't realize that simply labeling wine is a big deal. I had no idea. Apparently in California, for example, a lot of wine labels are basically that. Some big mega winery produces all kinds of wine and ships it out under lots of labels under contract. People buying the label tend to think that a winery by that name is produced there, but nope, it may be just a label.
Indeed, a Benedictine Monk I know told me that the wine sold under the label of his home abbey was not produced there, but in another state and sold under the abbey's name via contract. He was careful to note that as the abbey did in fact produce other things, but not wine. The abbey was located in the far north so I would have really wondered about how the accomplished producing wine but, nope, they didn't do it.
That's a bit of a shame really as both wine and beer were once widely produced by monastic holy orders and for practical reasons. Somehow, as we've progressed through the 20th Century and became more and more hedonistic and amoral we none the less found more in more in the way of societal puritanism to apply to people otherwise living moral lives. Odd. And its further misguided in that the Puritans themselves were not teetotalers at all.
Well, anyhow, I've come to know something about beer and whiskey but I remain really ignorant on wine.
So, anyhow, back to wine and Wyoming.
There are, surprisingly, a few Wyoming wineries.
The claimed first winery in Wyoming was Table Mountain Winery. It interestingly was the brainchild of a UW student from a southeastern Wyoming farming family who researched the topic while a student and went on to apply what he learned, receiving a grant in the process.
And its a true winery. A ten acre vineyard supplies the grapes for seven different wines which, after looking at their website, I realized that I have in fact seen in the stores. I haven't tried it, but once again, this is a Distributist or Agrarian triumph, as its amazingly all local and they've been at it for nearly twenty years now.
I should note, before I move on, that the "claimed" item above is because well prior to this time, when I was a student in Laramie in the 1980s, there was some sort of winery in one of the small towns up in the mountains west of Laramie. This was the Hiney Winery. I know nothing about it other than that it advertised on radio a lot, back in the days when people, including me, listed to their car radios. I recall it as their kitschy advertisements always closed out with the line "buy a little Hiney" or something like that, featuring that obvious double entendre. I never tried it, and have no idea how it was produced. Laramie is already 7,000 feet in elevation and the towns in the mountains were even higher than that, so I'd be amazed if the grapes were produced locally.
Moving on, Cody Wyoming has a Buffalo Jump Winery. Knowing what a buffalo jump is, I wonder about the name, but the tourist town has a winery so called. The last time I was in Cody I noticed it or at least an outlet selling the wines, but I didn't stop in (I'm obviously a very poor candidate for wine tourism). Their website indicates that the grapes are from California, Oregon and Washington, and they have a second outlet in Arizona. So they're producing wine, but they're acquiring the grapes. The owners also indicate that they're in buffalo ranching, and indeed they were in that prior to being vintners.
There's also a Jackson Hole Winery, making Jackson Hole the location of at least two breweries and one distillery, or perhaps two distilleries if we include nearby Driggs Idaho in the mix. Their website indicates that they produce 2,500 cases of wine per year and a large percentage of the grapes are from a farm owned by the vintner, which is a family operation. However, the vineyards are in the Sonoma region and other grapes are acquired via partnerships and business arrangements. As Jackson Hole is over 6,000 feet high, the lack of local grapes isn't surprising. They do produce the wine themselves.
Weston Wineries, which apparently also produces liqueurs, is another Wyoming winery that relies upon importing the constituents from other states, in this case grape juices. Indeed, their website specifically notes that they do that and that its common in the industry, which it truly is. In looking it up, I realized that it too is something I've seen in the stores but never tried.
A really unique winery is found in Gillette Wyoming and was mentioned here the other day in the context of distilleries, that being Big Lost Meadery. As it name indicates, it specializes in mead.
I'll be frank. I can't stand mead so I'm not going to try this product.
Most people have never tried mead and are only familiar with it, if they are at all, from stories about Vikings quaffing down buckets of mead. Given that, we imagine it in our minds being something like Russian Imperial Stout or something. It's not like that at all.
Mead is made from honey.
That's right, it's made from honey.
Now, I'll confess that my experiences with mead are quite limited. When I was 19 years old, and hence old enough to first drink in Wyoming (the drinking age was then 19), I bought a bottle of mead due to the Viking legends. It was awful. I likely didn't make it past the first glass before I tossed the bottle out.
Recently I've had mead again, but for an odd reason.
Up at the start of this entry I noted that my mother tried her hand at wine making after taking a class at the local community college. About a year or so ago my son, in college, decided to try it too. His efforts were less reliant on products of the wild, indeed they weren't at all reliant on it, and he gave it up after an initial effort. Nonetheless, a friend of his wanted to try mead and so they recently made a batch.
Their mead wasn't nearly as bad as the mead that I had when I was young, and I note that there's "dry" mead that's less sweet. His friend and his family were really impressed with it. While I was much less unimpressed with it than with the stuff I had years ago, I'm not going to take it up.
Which means that I'm not going to try Big Lost Meadery's product. It may be great, if you like mead, but as I don't, I'm not going to bother.
Based on their website, Big Lost (which also brews beer) plays a bit with the manly man image of mead. But the fact that the Norse and other northern Europeans drank it at one time actually tells me something else.
Grapes don't grow in the far north but there are plenty of bees up there, and bees make honey. The fact that the early Scandinavians made mead (and they weren't the only ones by any means) tells me that if people figure out how to make ferment something, they'll ferment anything available. Honey was available. As soon as beer became available, it's worth noting, the Norsemen switched to that.**
And that about covers it for Wyoming's wine.
Except for the homemade stuff, of course.
________________________________________________________________________________*St. John covers here, of course, Jesus' first public miracle, the changing of water into wine at the Wedding Feast at Cana.
The entire story is an interesting one, and not simply (but of course principally) because it was Jesus' first public miracle. Like most of the Bible, the story is multi dimensional in all sorts of ways. One thing we can take from here, from a historical prospective, is the practices that pertained to wine at the time.
Very clearly, then as now, there were various grades of wine. We learn from this story that the wine that Christ created from the water was of superb quality. The steward was amazed that the hosts had saved the best wine for last, a practice that woudl be the reverse of what we'd expect then and now.
Also, based upon the common size of water vessels at the time, this involved a very large quantity of wine.
That's interesting not only because it tells us of the commonality of wine at the time. . .nobody was shocked that there was a lot of wine, but running out of wine would have been a disaster for the hosts, but also because it touches on a theological point, that being that the drink that was brought into the room at the Last Supper was wine, not "grape juice", as some take great straining strides to maintain.
**I've referenced before, but the novel Krisin Lavransdottir, while a novel, gives a really good account of daily life in Medieval Norway including the drinking habits of Norwegians at that time. Citing a novel for factual information is always hazardous, but its so well researched I feel it can be relied upon for those details, and it makes it plain that a vast amount of beer and ale were consumed. Mead is mentioned exactly once in the book.
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