by David Wondrich (Gravy, Fall 2016)
Illustrations by Natalie Nelson

Some think that historiography is a science more or less like ballistics; that the careful plotting of where a phenomenon has been enables you to predict where it is going. If only the world were thus! The future, as history shows us, is essentially impervious to investigation. Sure, every once in a while somebody smart or lucky manages to plot a through-line, like when Isaac Asimov said in 1988 that one day we would have “computer outlets in every home, each of them hooked up to enormous libraries, where you can … look up something you’re interested in knowing, however silly it might seem to someone else.” But that happens so rarely as to make individual attempts at prediction as reliable as trickle-down economics. Still, it’s fun to try.

In fifty years, Southern drinking will be very different from drinking in the rest of the United (or, by then, Disunited) States. Twenty-first-century drinkers have shown disdain for the centralization and homogenization that dominated twentieth-century tippling. They have embraced the small-scale and the localized. By 2066, that will have given us a South where new-wave agrarianism, rooted in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century idea of the region as an agricultural paradise where you can grow the best of everything, coupled with the craft movement and its self-consciously traditionalist ways, will have kicked up a whole range of new-old drinks. There will be local wines, made from cleverly hybridized grape varietals whose DNA is largely American. And beer, of course, made in every county that allows it and often flavored with items from the Southern larder. Cowpea-chicory stout, anyone? No doubt Southern soft drinks will extend their recombinant ways in new directions—for all I know, the drink of the South in 2066 will be an electric-blue, chili-mango soda sweetened with local cane sugar (I’ll get to that) and factory-spiked with legal, synthetic THC.

It was all about spirits, and if there’s one thing current trends tell us, it’s that hooch is back to stay.

There will also be a lot of spirits. Historically, the South was a land where the native grapes were nasty and imported ones were louse-food; a land too hot to brew beer. It was all about spirits, and if there’s one thing current trends tell us, it’s that hooch is back to stay. Whiskey, of course, is made everywhere. In half a century, one can hope, it will also be all well-distilled and fully matured. (One can hope.)

A look at American distilling manuals from the early days of the republic, before whiskey chased off all its competitors, reveals a startling range of crops that were once distilled in the region, all ripe for reviving. Some were terrible: Persimmon brandy was notoriously vile. Some were indifferent: Cornstalk rum, distilled from the juice that wells up in the stalks before they put forth ears, was generally thought to be passable if it was made properly (although it usually wasn’t). Some were good: paw-paw brandy, apple brandy, and whiskeys made from various grains. Even Lowcountry rice produced a decent liquor. One spirit was considered so excellent that it cost more than the finest imported Cognac: peach brandy from the Carolinas and Georgia, distilled from fresh peaches and their crushed pits and aged for many years in oak.

Fifty years from now, somewhere in the South, these spirits and drinks will be crafted, sold, and shaken or stirred into cocktails, flips, punches, coolers, and what-have-you. We’re already well on the way with many of them, as, say, a julep made with Copper & Kings brandy from Louisville will readily demonstrate. As a sort of experiment, here are four reconstructions—or rather, I suppose, preconstructions—of Southern drinks, vintage 2066.

Canebrake Cooler

Chinese Grocery Five-Treasures Punch

The South already grows a good deal of sorghum, a hot-climate grain that is mostly used for animal feed or—when the stalks are cut before the grain develops and then squeezed—as a source for a particularly pungent sort of syrup. Like all grains, sorghum seeds are full of starch, which can be converted to sugar, fermented, and distilled. Now, until recently, we didn’t really do that with sorghum in America, other than for ethanol. Microdistillers such as South Carolina’s High Wire have begun turning the stuff into a slightly wooly sort of whiskey, but that’s just scratching the surface of sorghum spirits. The country that goes deep into beverage sorghum is China, where the resulting spirit is called baijiu, or “white wine.” It bears approximately the same relation to sauvignon blanc that a saber-toothed tiger does to an elderly, declawed lap-kitty. Funky—and that’s an understatement—fruity, dry, and very strong, baijiu is the blue cheese of the spirits world (indeed, much of that funk comes from a fungus, aspergillus, which Asian distillers traditionally use to start fermentation).

Is baijiu going to be the tequila of the mid-twenty-first century? It doesn’t seem that way. But in 1950, Americans were still deeply suspicious of tequila, and just look at us now. As the foodways that Asian immigrants bring to the U.S. South interweave with local traditions, it’s not much of a leap to imagine East Asian spirits influencing Southern drinkways. My example is a variant on the nineteenth-century Mississippi Punch, renamed with a nod to the Chinese immigrants who opened groceries in the Delta at the turn of the last century. It’s not for the faint of heart, but there’s a deep, swampy tang to it that captures the essence of the region.

Lowcountry Julep

In 1854, the New York wine merchant and drinks authority Frederick S. Cozzens wrote in his newsletter, Cozzens’ Wine Press, that “the young rice of our South would make a very fine Arrack, beyond doubt,” and that “American Arrack might be made to rival that of Batavia.” A bit of explanation: Cozzens’s “Arrack” is the English version of an Arabic word, used throughout the Middle East and southern Asia, that means “liquor,” and is just as specific. There are many arracks, made from everything from palm sap to mare’s milk, and yes, even rice.

The Resurrexit

The South isn’t all country honk. It’s also city slick, and I doubt that part of it’s going away. In the South of 2066, there will be elegant cocktail lounges and people drinking elegant cocktails, and I’m sure some of those will be based on peach brandy that has spent seven or eight or twelve years slumbering in the wood. (Modern microdistillers have begun reviving this staple, but it’ll be years before their attempts reach maturity.)

The Resurrexit is a liquid tribute to Atlanta, the Big Peach. “Resurgens,” the city’s motto, is Latin for “rising again,” as a Phoenix rises from the flames. By 2066, I predict we can nail that participle down into a past perfect: “It has risen again.” Resurrexit. The drink is a twist on a 1920s French one, the Burnt Fuselage (flames, what what). Lacking old peach brandy, I’ve used young peach brandy mixed with well-aged Cognac to add the old-brandy notes. The result is as suave and sophisticated as you please, but with a little extra warmth and generosity.

David Wondrich is the James Beard Award–winning author of Imbibe and Punch and the senior drinks columnist at the Daily Beast.

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