Wild Bush Farm + Vineyard
Mindful guzzling at the Northshore's newest vineyard
The merlot burbles straight from the barrel into my waiting glass. I raise my hand and part my lips, but the winemaker stops me. “Don’t drink it just yet.”
Well, that’s fine for him! Neil Gernon has learned patience, or maybe he was born with it. He was the strange bird making fruit beer in the nineties, long before the trend. “What’s wrong with your beer?” his friends would ask, cringing. Gernon met his wife, Monica Bourgeois, when the two worked at neighboring Brennan family restaurants in New Orleans and wooed her with wines he encountered as a beverage manager. Soon the two were each running their own small bottle shops—Monica at Sip and Neil at Cork and Bottle. In 2009, they picked out a growing partner, Chris Vandendriessche, at White Rock Vineyards in the Stag’s Leap region of Napa Valley, and began blending the bright fruit of northern California into a small-batch line, Vending Machine Wines. “We’d been joking about how you can get anything out of a vending machine,” said Gernon, and the initials promised a premium. “Like a high-end car,” he laughed.
In March 2020, the couple’s regular trips to Napa for harvesting and bottling became impossible. Only so content with a virtual vineyard, when St. Tammany Parish’s Pontchartrain Vineyards went up for sale, they saw an opportunity to expand their passion project to their home state. “We really wanted to make wine in Louisiana and put our mark on it, said Gernon. “What we’ve done with our experience in Napa, we wanted to bring here.”
Now I’m standing with Gernon at their new venture, Wild Bush Farm + Vineyard in Bush, Louisiana, just outside of Covington on Old Military Road. In the years ahead, Gernon and Bourgeois are overhauling the thirteen-acre property—which operated as Pontchartrain Vineyards for thirty years—into the farm and venue of their dreams. They’re pairing all they’ve learned from the world of wine with a homeland terroir they’re eager to understand.
Good flavor takes time: whether it’s for tannins to mellow in a bottle or two winemakers to learn their craft. Bourgeois and Gernon were still ripping old, ailing bushes from the fields at their new farm when I visited. But they’re digging space, too, and sowing fruit with sights set on exquisite vintages that could only come from this place, hopefully to be available within the next four years. For the antsy whiners among us, I’ve documented all the activity I expect to enjoy between now and the first glass from Wild Bush’s Louisiana vines.
Six-Second Sangria
In the sale of Pontchartrain Vineyards, which John Seago established in 1991, Gernon and Bourgeois bought the vineyard’s inventory too. Some barrels suit their palates more than others, and many wines are available to drink in the taproom. Gernon cites “VA,” or volatile acidity, as what causes my merlot to smell sharp but taste just fine.
As my glass hovers, Gernon darts over to the back wall and siphons port with a pipette called a barrel thief. Then he swirls the dark wine into my merlot. The final kick: orange soda, from a two-liter he pulls out of a nearby fridge. He grins at me as the Sunkist crackles into my drink. “There, I fixed it. It’s sangria.” My head swims with happy wails a la Jerry Jeff Walker.
In their other concoctions, which do not include Sunkist, the Wild Bush proprietors favor fruit-forward flavor profiles with minimal chemical inputs and without the added sugar. “Adult Capri-Sun,” Gernon calls it.
A Man and Woman on a Mission
Winemakers chase good fruit. Gernon’s a geek for the Mission grape—the first fruit used to make wine in the United States. He and Bourgeois secured a crop for their recent batch of Wine Dive, a Vending Machine vintage, and were appropriately reverent in the processing. “We went whole cluster and didn’t destem,” said Gernon. Carbonic maceration produces the juiciest wine. “You take the clusters, put them in a tank, then seal them off from oxygen,” said Gernon. Carbon dioxide fills the tank, and the grape ferments from the inside out instead of the outside in. “They blow up, like fireworks.” Wine Dive is a blend of these macerated beauties with conventionally de-stemmed Mission grapes.
I grabbed a bottle of Wine Dive at Calandro’s the night I finished this article, to get in the spirit, and saw purple slivers of Grenache grape in the bottle’s neck, a quality marker of Gernon and Bourgeois’ unfiltered approach. Their white wines are orange, a signature of skin-contact wines, when the true color of the grape carries through. A few clusters of Mission grapes were saved for Like Swimming, a Wild Bush sibling to Wine Dive.
Wild Questions and Whimsical Labels
Visitors to the Wild Bush taproom can sip in silence or come ready for sport. Gernon’s installing a disc golf set (he’s an enthusiast and president of NoTeam, New Orleans Disc Golf Club) and the board games are piled high on the taproom shelves, as is a marble notebook filled with handwritten questions that will enliven any conversation. After grabbing an appealing plate from the cheese fridge, choose, if you dare: your favorite Star Wars character, the one meal you’ll eat for the rest of your life, the next cabernet you’ll have while pondering and probing each other’s psyches …
And you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover (“Is that title in Helvetica? I’ll pass.”) but you may gain some insight into your trusty winemakers by their bottles. Gernon designs many of the labels himself: the Wicket Piquette features a leering Ewok, while a more endearing baby goat fronts The Kid’s Got Heart, a mélange of syrah and pinot noir.
A Crush in Full Color
Sorry, Nicole Kidman, but I have been training my whole life to imitate Lucille Ball. (She died the month I was baptized! I’m telling you, there’s something there!) When Gernon mentioned an opportunity for future Wine Club members to shoelessly participate in the winemaking process, I immediately saw myself in a stomp-by-stomp recreation of comedy’s most famous grape obliteration. If it so happens that I misheard him about this amenity, I will have some ‘splainin’ to do.
Gernon waved his arms towards the fields to show me where each fruit would one day bloom: a front row of muscadine will be pluckable for visitors (“You can make jelly, or just eat it. It’s a superfood!”) while blueberries run amok on “Thrill Hill,” so named for another homegrown treasure, Fats Domino.
Other grapes include Lenoir, also called Black Spanish (“for our pink program—we’ll use it to make rosé”), Blanc Du Bois, four recently-released hybrids from California, and six varieties of muscadine. The farm will grow mayhaws and pawpaws, crab apples and persimmons, and even one day pears, for cider and wine blends.
A winding path behind the taproom is ornamented with native plants, to attract butterflies, hummingbirds, and bees. “Blueberries and bees are like peanut butter and jelly,” said Gernon. Bees will pollinate the blueberries, and honey from future hives will drip into some future Wild Bush blends. “We’ll be infusing fruit wines and grape wines, too,” said Gernon. “There’s going to be a lot of experimentation here.”
Sunsets and Sunrises
Pontchartrain Vineyards’ devotees needn’t worry: the concerts will continue. The former vineyard’s Jazz ‘n the Vines series has drawn crowds to the gently rolling hills for spring and fall concerts for twenty-three years. In April, Wild Bush welcomed Amanda Shaw, while May brings The Tin Men and Mia Borders.
And if you come to Wild Bush and can’t bear to leave (or can’t drive home)? Tents are available to glamp among the grapes.
The next day, head into the taproom to see what’s fresh. A pet-nat (petillant naturel, naturally sparkling) from muscadines? A Wicket Piquette labeled with the large paws of Gernon’s 120-lb. catahoula, Jughead? It’s an ever-changing process, one that invites adventurous drinkers. “We plan on this being an open door to people who are interested in learning and participating in making the best wines Louisiana’s ever had.” Gernon said he’ll have something for every palate, “But really we’re doing things more traditionally. We’re the older school of thought.”