Backyard Wine

Joelton is in Davidson County. It is not in Kentucky. We have running water, we can rent movies, and we get our History Channel from a dish. The phones work, even the one in the barn. And, despite conventional wisdom to the contrary, it's just 20 minutes from the Green Hills mall. A short distance geographically—but culturally, a world away.

So I have to concede my snooty friends have a point about the rural outback I call home. Instead of bookstores and movie theaters, we have a lot of crusty characters, abandoned cars, hollows full of construction garbage, trailer homes, mullets, fried food, stray dogs, trash fires, dirty kids, NASCAR stickers and, perhaps most insidious, homemade wine.

From where I live, I can step right onto pristine Beaman Park, a 1,600-acre woodland wonderland where you can still find clay pots and remnants of moonshine stills that our (both long-ago and recent) forebears used so they could get knee-walkin' drunk. Only, this practice isn't necessarily a relic of the past. I learned that the hard way a few years ago, but with what my host called "wine"—which, my statutorily erudite staff tells me, is legal to make here in Tennessee. This "wine," however, was more like devil-infused grape juice with an unspeakable proof of pure grain alcohol, and it wreaked havoc on my body for days.

This, all because of a stray calf.

He was a cute little brown guy with big eyes who'd gotten out of his fence and greeted me in the middle of the road on my way home from work one evening. When I saw this meandering critter, I decided to let my neighbor know one of his boys was loose and proceeded to his house to deliver what passes as news out in Joelton. This man—let's call him Old Man Brown—thanked me, offered me an armload of cucumbers, then motioned me into the barn and set about filling a Styrofoam cup with what seemed like an innocent enough after-work nip.

Never one to turn down country hospitality—and on a mission to lose my yuppie status among my neighbor folk—I made a toast to my farmer friend, sat down to pet the ancient canine at my feet, and listened while Old Man Brown and his friends swapped lies and lectured me about the dangers of eating undercooked pokeweed. (Course, to me, it seems pretty dangerous to eat pokeweed at all, but I didn't say so.)

As the sun set, one of the farmhands went to the top of the barn to get another bottle of this homemade stuff. My host didn't offer many details about how he brewed this concoction, though he did say he used local grapes. (Good to know even rednecks buy into community-supported agriculture.)

In any case, what I should have done was climb back into my pickup truck and head home, where I could have had a lovely evening with my husband over grilled shrimp, roasted red peppers and a nice glass of Chilean cabernet. But no. My cup was being filled again, and I made the mistake of accepting this second helping. While I didn't then and don't now have a titan tolerance for spirit, neither was I a complete lightweight. A second cup, I figured, would do no harm, and I made a call home to say I was visiting down the road with the Browns.

Faster than Dale Earnhardt, it hit me. In a single moment, it became clear to me—as clear as anything seemed just then—that my senses were being hijacked by this purple rubbing alcohol that passed for a beverage in cow country. This was no ordinary wine. I could drink half a liter of Italian table wine and not feel this lightheaded. Suddenly, instead of seeing a single, bony, gray-headed pooch beside me, I saw two. And the barn was spinning.

Fortunately, that call home had come in handy, because my knight in a shiny Volkswagen showed up to tell me supper was ready. Unfortunately, he hadn't planned on having to sober me up first with a pot of coffee and a shower. And let's just say that I didn't have the easiest time holding down the coffee, either. To say nothing of the fact that I had landed squarely—face-down—in the doghouse.

Such are the dangers of country living. I still let Old Man Brown know when one of his cows or goats gets lose, but I've not once accepted another sip of Satan in a bottle.

I'd sooner eat pokeweed.