Sow the Field, Savor the Moment
Rice, crawfish, and liquor from one efficient farm
Mike Frugé’s heard my question before. “Oh, everyone loves that story,” he says, looking at his wife with a wink.
It’s an easy story to love, strewn with swoony elements of chance and “nearly didn’t”s. Two young American strangers on a bus were seeing Europe for the first time, only thrown into the same tour group because the bombings earlier that year, 1986, had scared other travelers into canceling their plans. The Louisiana boy was shy; the Florida girl teased him. On a separate flight back home, the boy missed his connection due to strong headwinds. “Well, do you have anything going to Miami?” he asked the clerk.
[Read about another Louisiana distillery, Cane Land, here.]
A quarter of a century later, I stand with Mike and Courtney on Frugé Farms in Branch, Louisiana, the oldest settlement in rice-rich Acadia Parish. The rice crop is gone from the ground in early January. I see grains tufting up from the flooded fields, but these are merely feed for thousands of breeding crawfish, the second major export from the farm. In the old tractor barn a hundred yards to my left waits a third product. But we’re not there yet.
The Louisiana boy was shy; the Florida girl teased him. On a separate flight back home, the boy missed his connection due to strong headwinds. “Well, do you have anything going to Miami?” he asked the clerk.
Mike, with his brother Mark, is the fourth generation to farm this land. Their great-grandmother Helen Meleck Frugé joined her siblings in relocating from Germany to Louisiana at the end of the nineteenth century. In between, they lived in the industrial Midwest, took up the reins of a covered wagon, and headed south, stopping every few months to make a crop and pay their way forward.
“It was all about having their own land to farm,” says Mike. The Melecks were just a few of the recent immigrants lured down from wheat country to Southwest Louisiana, where property was cheap and eagerly hocked by railroad agents looking to improve upon the company’s investment. The more aggressive the agriculture, the more a rail line might carry out of an area. Cajuns already in residence tended small farms of cotton and corn. With the soil, combined with straw, they built their houses in a method called bousillage that’s still practiced today. But the dirt proved otherwise difficult for farming. A hard clay beneath the surface kept most crops from taking root. Even trees struggled, leaving the fields flat and open.
Today the International Rice Festival, held annually fifteen miles away in Crowley, celebrates an industry that yielded nearly 7,000 pounds of rice per acre last year. But in the mid-nineteenth century, a Cajun farmer was content to toss a few grains in a pond or let rain gather on the higher part of the property to irrigate the planted field below. This practice was called providence rice. If a crop came, thanks be to the Lord.
Their reputation among other landowners suffered. Les Acadiens were “lazy vagabonds” who preferred fishing, fiddling, and lying in the shade of catalpa trees, complained one plantation owner, whose opinion of labor and motivating a workforce should be looked at critically and was—he had complained to Frederick Law Olmsted, who included the quote in A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States in 1853-1854. The text helped galvanize the Civil War. (German immigrants and descendants would get their turn as pariahs, following the First and Second World Wars.)
But in the mid-nineteenth century, a Cajun farmer was content to toss a few grains in a pond or let rain gather on the higher part of the property to irrigate the planted field below. This practice was called providence rice. If a crop came, thanks be to the Lord.
From the Midwest, the new arrivals brought experience with large-scale wheat farming, discovering in the decades after the Civil War that Southwest Louisiana soil, stalwart as it was, turned out to be ideal for rice. Shields of clay beneath the earth could hold a veritable flood of water, for irrigation, and tools like the twine-binder, the steam tractor, and the thresher ramped up production far beyond what providence may have provided before.
Begun in 1896, the twenty-acre Meleck farm soon became a thousand acres (and today is four thousand). Rice and cattle carried the family through the Depression. Mike and Mark’s grandfather, Rufus Frugé, took the farm from there. By the time the brothers reached young adulthood in the 1980s, the recession called for a new revenue stream. The breeding and harvesting of crawfish grew into more than one business: cajuncrawfish.com, which ships live crawfish nationwide, and Frugé Seafood, a wholesale provider of everything from crawfish, crab, and mussels, to flounder and Atlantic salmon; the menu’s been expanded to include short ribs and steaks.
Their success with selling fresh proteins to restaurants and wholesale suppliers has given Mike the confidence (and funds) for a new venture—the first product he’d put on grocery shelves. To market himself, he needed a label. And for a label, he needed to learn his own story.
Is it the two sides of his ancestry: the German’s industry and the Cajun’s drift toward leisure? The hard-driving patriarch who led his family from foreign land to foreign land looking for fortune? Or was it that a single farm, growing rice and crawfish, now dared to distill alcohol too?
I finally reach the old tractor barn with Mike and Courtney. Inside I climb the stairs to a massive steel vat, where a mixture of yeast, sugar, and Frugé rice sat bubbling. Along the back wall, a four-column still transforms the frothy fermented rice into liquor. The next room is stacked high with white-oak barrels, where the rice whiskey will age for at least four years.
“No one’s making whiskey with rice,” Mike was told by master distillers when he attended a convention with this germinating idea. On a marketing panel in the next room, experts stressed that budding booze businessmen should differentiate themselves.
So Mike went home to Branch, to make his rice into something altogether new.
The first product to hit store shelves was Louisiana Handcrafted Rice Vodka. The vodka bears a white label with a silver crawfish, glinting among grains of rice, all draped in a blue banner emblazoned with the words: “Louisiana Handcrafted Rice”. “Vodka” sits below, on the crawfish’s tail, creatively catering to rules preventing “rice” and “vodka” from being on the same line, since the term isn’t regulated yet. Courtney, a trained graphic designer, helped draw the final logo with their branding agency, DAf. The agency asked Mike questions to unearth the history that made a liquor from rice not only possible but a natural next step for the innovative farmer. The details can be seen on the label: “1896,” the year the Melecks arrived; “Providence,” an uncomplicated hope for good things ahead.
As we sit at home and wait for better news this year, I can say with some experience that a chilly glass of J.T. Meleck vodka brings pleasure. But for its creators, quarantine cut off key marketing strategies, like tastings in grocery stores and craft distilling conventions.
As we sit at home and wait for better news this year, I can say with some experience that a chilly glass of J.T. Meleck vodka brings pleasure.
There remain opportunities to spread the word, including social media and a recent addition to the bottle itself. Now a cardboard crown details three awards J.T. Meleck scooped up from the American Distilling Institute in 2020: Best of Category, Best of Class, and a Double Gold Medal. The pandemic pushed the award ceremony into the virtual realm, but Mike jokes that he doesn’t care to compete again: “I can’t do better!”
A farmer plots, then pivots when misfortune comes. A distiller puts his fortune in a barrel, sometimes for decades at a time. A man who met his love in another country, on a bus trip he almost didn’t take, knows it’s the steps and sips in between that can matter most.
Periodic tastings give Mike good reason to believe the whiskey will be outstanding too when he begins to bottle it, in 2022 at the earliest. He plans to keep apportioning more of the rice crop to this venture as demand grows. Behind the whiskey barrels sits a pile of lumber from his grandfather Rufus’ farmhouse, which was destroyed by lightning years ago. “If we build a visitor’s center, we’ll definitely incorporate this wood,” he says.
A farmer plots, then pivots when misfortune comes. A distiller puts his fortune in a barrel, sometimes for decades at a time. A man who met his love in another country, on a bus trip he almost didn’t take, knows it’s the steps and sips in between that can matter most.
You take some vacations, says Courtney, and when you’re asked later if you had fun, you have to think for a moment. “This trip, you knew the whole time it was a thrill.”
Find Lucie Monk Carter's recipe for crawfish pie with flakey J.T. Meleck vodka crust here.