A touch of rural France and Italy amid the cotton fields

To the annual Wine Day at our largest local winery, a few miles south of the city. The event has grown steadily since it started twelve years ago, and today cars overflowed the tiny parking lot and ranged for hundreds of yards along both sides of the roads approaching the site. Experts pronounced several of the varieties as much more than just passable. Food vendors sold sausage and brisket tidbits, and local musicians held forth to a small audience under a canvas sunshade. The vintage car tribe sat in lawn chairs beside their prize vehicles in a central location outside the door of the winery. Entering the sanctuary itself required waiting in a queue for a minute or two, something highly unusual for this thinly populated region except at sporting events. Once inside, we had our choice of wine varieties at half a dozen tables scattered among the giant storage tanks, and an ice sculpture adorned one of the intersections along the walkway. Seeing and being seen took precedence over sampling the wares.

The crowd contained a nice mix of different elements of the community, with many soccer moms and their husbands in evidence, probably the proprietors of the mammoth SUVs sporting "Support Our Troops" stickers parked nearby, but with a number of university people as well, plus a strong showing of twenty- and thirty-somethings. The dominant, extremely conservative local society still seems to make room for new things, and our young wine industry somehow has approached beneath their radar. Perhaps my neighbors will mellow and soften as the ancient wine culture quietly takes root here. Stranger things have happened. I found it delightful -- and just a bit kinky -- to sip a rich merlot while surrounded on all sides by perfectly level fields covered with ripe cotton bursting from the fat bolls.