Ditch Wine

The thing I like about riding a bike is the chance it provides to experience your surroundings in a whole new light. At eighteen-miles-per-hour there is much to see, hear, and smell along the shaded lanes and lightly trafficked rural roads of the Felicianas that never connects with the motorist’s senses. I like it because when I slow down and really look into the woods and fields that lean in upon these byways, there are overgrown cottages, skeletal hay rakes, abandoned cemeteries, and other vestiges of the Felicianas’ erstwhile farming economy that never register when I’m flashing by at fifty-five. So most weekends, I try to get out for a spin, picking a route that takes me through as many forested gullies and cow-dotted pastures as possible, keeping eyes peeled for hitherto unnoticed signs of our ancestors’ activity.

But this being Louisiana, not everything spotted by the roadside looks, or for that matter, smells, picturesque. I’m talking about the amazing quantity of garbage that decorates our road shoulders and highwayside ditches. Most of the time in our part of the world it falls roughly into two categories: oblivious dumping—the stuff that blows out of the beds of pickup trucks (Miller Lite cans, fast food boxes, empty deer corn bags); and premeditated dumping—the kind which fills gullies by remoter roads with avalanches of splintered couches and disemboweled La-Z-Boys, defunct TVs, and broken bed frames. Sadly they’re as common as they are unsightly, and having come across my fair share, I’m ashamed to say that they, too, become part of the landscape. I ride by, filing them as the acts of people too stupid or lazy to do something more responsible with their refuse. But once in awhile I come across something that really challenges my predictable prejudices. While trundling along a rural highway that runs roughly between Woodville and Jackson, in a place with thick woods on one side and wide open cow pastures on the other, what should I spot sparkling in the ditch but a bottle of 2012 DaVinci Pinot Grigio, a well-regarded Italian white wine sourced from the Trentino-Alto Adige region and noted for its brilliant light straw color and full, ripe palate. If you are impressed that I could tell this by riding past a bottle of wine lying in a ditch you will be disappointed that I learned it afterwards, having gone back to retrieve the pinot grigio for closer analysis. Now, I’m pretty cheap, but before you conclude that I had designs on drinking the thing, I swear I was just so surprised to find a clearly unopened bottle of pretty good Italian wine lying unbroken beside a country road more commonly littered with burger boxes, beer cans, and maybe the occasional Boone’s Farm bottle (empty) that I couldn’t resist. It didn’t seem the sort of beverage that typically falls (or is flung) from a moving truck. Nor did it seem like something someone would chuck away unopened. And under what circumstance would a bottle of white wine have survived the fall from a fast-moving vehicle anyway? I took the pinot home and stood it on the kitchen counter, intending to properly contemplate these mysteries later in the day.

That evening, I was startled to arrive home to find my wife and her aunt Francis rocking on the front porch, each cradling a large goblet of light straw-colored wine and talking animatedly about camellias. When I explained that their afternoon tipple might be accurately described as “ditch wine,” they both stared at me, swallowed hard, and laid aside their glasses looking rather faint. That was a couple of weeks ago, and aside from not laughing at any of my “ditch” jokes, to the best of my knowledge neither lady has suffered any ill effects so far.

So I never found out how it got there. Perhaps it was a kind of roadside Christmas miracle delivered to a columnist in need of an anecdote to illustrate his wider point: that when you venture off the road most traveled and slow down for a better look around, you find all sorts of unexpected things. My birthday falls at the end of November, about a week from the date of writing, and for the past few years our family has fallen into a tradition of celebrating it by taking just such a back-road trip to Eunice, to catch Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys play their traditional Thanksgiving weekend barn dance at Lakeview RV Park. Each year, a couple hundred folks representing four generations pack the park’s awesome old barn to dance, drink, laugh, and mingle during the friendliest, spirit-soaring night out you can imagine. It’s a great destination and a fantastic start to the season, which sets the scene for the month to come and makes us prouder than ever to call Louisiana home. Eunice has the added benefit of lying at the other end of one of my favorite drives: cross the Mississippi via the Audubon Bridge, then follow the succession of bayou-side byways that wind their way through rural Pointe Coupee Parish before depositing you on funky U.S. Highway 190 all the way to Opelousas and beyond; for me, it’s a night spent dancing with my wife, my kids, and my friends to the finest music Acadiana has to offer. There’s no better way to begin a holiday, and I hope yours is off to a good start, too. See you in the new year.

—James Fox-Smith, publisher

james@countryroadsmag.com