UGA IS THE MOST FAMOUS MASCOT IN COLLEGE athletics and probably the most pampered dog in the world. Pronounced uh-guh (not you-juh), the name is a portmanteau of “University of Georgia,” where the dog has been the mascot for the university’s sports teams for more than six decades, since then law student Sonny Seiler received a bulldog as a gift in 1956. He has owned every Uga since. A solid white English bulldog, the tenth and current dog in the Uga line is nicknamed Que. He is driven to Georgia football games in the back of his very own SUV, its thermostat set at sixty degrees to prevent him from overheating. Que wears a Nike football jersey and a red collar decorated with spikes. Like Ugas that preceded him, he sleeps on a bag of ice in his red doghouse on the home sideline of Sanford Stadium. He is the four-footed galoot of football, a big pink tongue hanging out of his mouth.
The dog has always been the consistent star of Georgia games—fans line up by his doghouse for photos and visit the stadium’s Uga mausoleum, where past mascots were laid to eternal rest. Though one Uga or another has, er, desecrated the end zones of both the University of South Carolina’s and Vanderbilt’s home fields, and stuck his nose in a pan of roast beef tenderloin with demi-glace sauce in a Sanford Stadium suite, he is known, invariably, as a damn good dawg.
AS THE FICTIONAL NARRATOR OF THE ATLANTA newspaper editor Joel Chandler Harris’s popular folktales starring the trickster Brer Rabbit and his foils—Brer Bear, Brer Fox, and other “creeturs”—the former slave Uncle Remus has prompted no small amount of debate. As a teenager, Harris spent four years working on a plantation outside his hometown of Eatonton, Georgia, and he credited a few of the slaves he befriended, including George Terrell and Old Harbert, with both telling him the African fables that he interpreted in his collections and serving as inspiration for Remus. Harris considered Remus—named in part after one of the mythological twin founders of Rome—his alter ego, the “other fellow” that took him over when he wrote. He first introduced Remus—complete with a thick regional dialect inspired by what Harris heard during his time on the plantation—as a city dweller who would pop up in Harris’s Atlanta Constitution column to opine on life in the burgeoning metropolis; inspired to preserve the Brer Rabbit stories, traditionally passed down mouth to ear, he then began having Remus chronicle those tales in the paper. Harris published the first of seven collections, Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings, in 1881; the stories spread worldwide, making him one of the most famous writers of the day—fans included Rudyard Kipling, Mark Twain, and T. S. Eliot.
In recent decades, some critics have labeled Harris’s contribution as nothing more than nostalgic “plantation romance,” perpetuating the myth of the “kindly darky,” and cultural appropriation—later abetted by Walt Disney’s 1946 animated adaptation, Song of the South. (The acclaimed author and fellow Eatontonian Alice Walker has espoused this viewpoint.) Other scholars point to Remus’s slyly subversive teachings to the white plantation master’s son, from endorsing mixed-race couples to his claiming a knowledge superior to “Mars John,” as an effort by the relatively racially progressive Harris to both critique and alter the opinions of his post-Reconstruction audience in a way they would find palatable—not unlike tricking a child into eating spinach. In any case, by committing the stories to paper, Harris preserved them for generations to come. As the New York Times Book Review noted after Harris’s death in 1908, “Uncle Remus cannot die.” See Song of the South.
THERE IS NEVER A QUESTION OF whether TO have a chili dog at the Varsity, the world’s largest drive-in restaurant, which opened in 1928 in Midtown Atlanta—but only how many of them to order, and how to decorate them. What’ll ya have? echo the servers behind the counter to patrons who’ve elected to leave their cars and stand inside. Some choose onions, mustard, slaw—or, naively, nothing, which the menu disparagingly refers to as “naked.” In keeping with the parlance of the restaurant, it is a sin not to also order an “FO”—a Frosted Orange, a cold, thick drink the color of a Creamsicle.
The Varsity sits off North Avenue near the infamous I-75/I-85 Connector, its spinning “V” sign as constant a presence as the traffic. On football game days when Georgia plays Georgia Tech, the restaurant—now too small physically for the number of customers it typically draws—might feed up to thirty thousand. The food is served, to go, in rectangular cardboard boxes and is a memorable cure for hangovers and also ideal for graduations and family reunions, the onion rings and chili cheese dogs perennials on any Southern bucket list. There are now seven Georgia locations, including one in Athens and two at the Atlanta airport.
THE SCIENTIFIC NAME Dionaea muscipula does little to convey how terrifyingly ghastly this plant is to unsuspecting flies. Tiny hairs on the inside of its leaves trigger a clamp-down before enzymes slowly digest the flytrap’s prey, which also includes ants, spiders, and beetles. With bright red inch-long Mick Jagger lips, these meat eaters grow naturally in clusters in just one area of the entire world—a crescent of boggy land along the North and South Carolina coasts, primarily within sixty miles of Wilmington, North Carolina, in an area called the Green Swamp. Around that preserve, two forces stalk the plants—poachers seeking profit on the botanical black market, and state biologists who tag the plants with dye that glows under a black light. The tagging helps track plants that turn up for sale. In 2014, the conservationists won one battle in the ongoing war—flytrap pilfering went from a misdemeanor citation with a fifty-dollar fine to a full-on felony. These plants don’t mess around, and neither do their protectors.
A VERANDA IS A GROUND-LEVEL COVERED porch enclosed by a balustrade and stretching across one or more sides of a house. Some consider veranda a ten-dollar word, preferring “wraparound porch” for its sturdiness, familiarity, and polite understatement. Like bungalow, cummerbund, toddy, and punch, veranda is an English word imported from the Indian subcontinent. After centuries of assimilation, it still echoes a faint exoticism, and it’s that lyrical echo—the slow unfurling in the mouth—that conveys the cultural significance embodied by this beloved architectural cornerstone.
That cultural significance runs deep. The veranda is and always has been equal measures practical and romantic. Existing neither fully indoors nor outdoors, it symbolizes the Good Life—domestic freedom, leisure time, family togetherness, hospitality, a love of nature. The veranda keeps you cool in summer and fills your lungs with fresh air. On the veranda, you knock mud from your boots and brush your dog. You eat—and dine—there, sip juleps and iced tea, smoke cigars, slurp Popsicles without anyone fretting over sticky drips. You greet passing neighbors from the veranda. You string lights below the open eaves and throw magical outdoor parties.
Verandas—exterior porches of any kind—were not a European architectural convention during the colonization of the Americas. The first houses along the Virginia coast were slab-sided boxes built to keep out Atlantic storms, bears, Indians, and other New World dangers. Porches evolved as a way to adapt to the region’s heat and humidity. Some of the first showed up in the eighteenth century in what is today Louisiana. Enslaved Africans and poor white farmers improvised covered, wraparound galeries using concepts brought from the West Indies. During the 1800s, columned verandas showed up on Greek Revival houses. As the frontier melted away and the South grew more hospitable and prosperous, verandas of all styles—front porches on more modest homes—became de rigueur. The arrival of central air-conditioning in the mid-twentieth century altered the equation but only slightly. We Southerners still put them on houses today, not as a bonus feature, like a swimming pool, but rather as an integral part of the home.
A veranda invites you to sit, rock, swing, and joggle, to read and nap and marvel at an afternoon thunderstorm. A veranda begs conversation—news, gossip, confessions, tall tales. A veranda “is like a room in your house that’s really part of the world,” Eudora Welty once told a reporter. In his memoir, The Lost Room, Reynolds Price, recounting a day spent on a porch, wrote, “I’ll never be gladder than this on Earth.”
Call it a ten-dollar notion, but maybe this liminal space is an integral part of the Southern spirit.
IT STARTED IN TOOMBS COUNTY, GEORGIA, west of Savannah, with a farmer named Moses Coleman. In 1931, he unintentionally grew a crop of sweet onions, which mild weather, high rainfall, and low-sulfur soil had conspired to mellow. After Coleman fetched a respectable $3.50 per fifty-pound bag, his neighbors began growing sweet onions, too. In the 1940s, the state of Georgia built a farmers’ market at the intersection of two highways in nearby Vidalia. From there, the onions’ reputation spread. Several decades later, the variety had become so popular that the Georgia General Assembly was compelled to stave off competition, in a majestic flourish, with the Vidalia Onion Act of 1986. Since then, only twenty Georgia counties have been legally allowed to produce the famous onions, sold all over the country and the world.
THE VIEUX CARRÉ IS THE SECOND-MOST-FAMOUS cocktail in New Orleans. Or possibly the third, or fourth. Let’s just say it’s definitely in the top half dozen. Named after a once-common term for the French Quarter (French for “old square”), the drink was invented in 1938 by Walter Bergeron, head bartender of the city’s Hotel Monteleone. That’s according to the writer Stanley Clisby Arthur. Cocktail lore further asserts that Bergeron concocted it so the Monteleone could compete with the popular Sazerac, the city’s most famous drink, which was closely associated with the Sazerac Bar at the Roosevelt Hotel. Like the Sazerac, the Vieux Carré is not a drink for callow youth, nor for those who have otherwise failed to acquire a taste for hard liquor. It’s made with equal parts brandy, rye whiskey, and sweet vermouth, further enlivened with one-third part Benedictine liqueur and a few dashes each of Peychaud’s and Angostura bitters.
It is an excellent drink, deserving of wider renown outside the city of its conception. To this day the hotel’s Carousel Bar serves it frequently, often with lots of ice. But many prefer it served as an “up” drink, chilled fleetingly with ice and strained, then garnished with a twist of lemon peel.
HISTORIANS HAVE PRETTY MUCH GIVEN UP on determining when people first started consuming vinegar: Roman soldiers probably slurped it on the march, and Greek physicians prescribed it for a variety of ailments. Anyone who’s fooled with making wine has accidentally made vinegar at some point, meaning the liquid was extremely well known when America was colonized: in the 1700s, Southerners could produce vinegar at home or purchase premade varieties. Either way, they used the stuff for just about everything: halitosis sufferers were advised to sip vinegar after eating onions, housemaids were urged to scrub the floors of sickrooms with it, and nurses applied it to burns. Early Southerners who didn’t have access to lemons or limes found vinegar was a fine acidic substitute for citrus in desserts such as chess pie. But vinegar’s most valuable use, in a hot climate prior to refrigeration, was as a preservative, and Southerners quickly acclimated to the taste of it in their vegetables, relishes, and sauces. Even today, restaurants keep cruets of pepper vinegar on their tables so diners can perk up their greens, and vinegar looms in the forefront of the South’s most revered barbecue.
MORE THAN TWO CENTURIES AGO, THOMAS Jefferson dreamed of Virginia as prime terroir for fine wine. The author of the Declaration of Independence hoped that vines would provide an alternative to tobacco plants, which wore out the Commonwealth’s soil, and that affordable wine made from the grapes would wean the yeoman farmer from hard cider and whiskey and help civilize him. “No nation is drunken,” Jefferson wrote plaintively in Notes on Virginia in 1781, “where wine is cheap; and none sober” where spirits are the common beverage.
Some of this vision has come true in Virginia. Jefferson himself imported two dozen varieties of Vitis vinifera—wine grapes—from Europe for planting on an acre on the south slope of Monticello, and an Italian, Filippo Mazzei, to do it. The vineyard was to serve as an incubator and an example, but Mazzei planted the vines on overlays of clay that didn’t drain well, and animals often ate the grapes instead. Lacking the knowledge and the science available today, in this endeavor Jefferson failed. However, the dream hung on, nourished by Jefferson’s musings over expensive, imported Lafites and Haut-Brions. Though these wines have no equals in Virginia today, some Commonwealth cuvées are creeping up on the interlopers like old Mosby’s Raiders. (There’s even a very creditable Gray Ghost Vineyards in Rappahannock County.) The most exciting Virginia wines tend to be red and are made in the Piedmont, which runs from the Maryland line south to Monticello and beyond, along the foothills of the Blue Ridge.
The vinous pilgrim can do worse than to start at Monticello, where the vineyard has been restored by the man who could be called the living father of Virginia viticulture, Gabriele Rausse, another Italian (this one successful) who has an eponymous winery nearby that offers very good quality. A bit north of Charlottesville is Barboursville Vineyards, where yet another fine, long-serving Italian vintner, Luca Paschina, nurtures both Italian and Bordelais blends.
Farther north and about an hour west of Washington, D.C., is Linden Vineyards, founded by Jim Law, an incubator of apprentice winemakers. Some have gone on to achieve distinction on their own, such as Jeff White, at Glen Manor Vineyards on the west slope of the Blue Ridge overlooking the Shenandoah River, and Rutger de Vink, of RdV Vineyards near Delaplane. De Vink’s winemaking adviser is from France’s Médoc, where he receives RdV wine regularly by jetliner, a nice turnabout since the wines of the Médoc so inspired Jefferson in his time that he had some shipped to Monticello. To have such a representative in the Piedmont completes a historic connection that no doubt would have pleased the third president greatly.
Other notables include the Bordeaux varietals of Boxwood Estate Winery, outside Middleburg, and Afton Mountain Vineyards, high on the Blue Ridge. Ox-Eye Vineyards over in the Shendandoah Valley, on the steppes of the Alleghenies, makes an excellent Riesling grown in limestone soils.
Beware pop-ups and vanity operations in various parts of the state that invite you to bring your dog, your pony, or your swingers to the equivalent of modern-day circuses. Such blatant tourism plays could undermine Virginia’s promise as a worldwide contender just as it’s getting off the ground. But the postponed vision of the sipping sage of Monticello has definitely come to pass, and sorting the good from the less so has become an industry in its own right.