Grapes and Velvet
Buy Now

Emporium Wine will celebrate its 20th anniversary Memorial Day weekend. 

 Kenneth Boone

My love of wine goes back to a time when wine in Alabama was either homemade sweet muscadine or a smattering of inexpensive “fine” wines. Now that I think about it, my yearning for anything grape probably goes farther back than that. 

At my grandmother’s house, Welch’s grape juice was a staple. I think that’s where it all started. We did not drink a lot of sodas as kids, but when I could, I was drawn to Grapico, Nehi Grape and eventually Fanta Grape, though it never measured up to the first two. Grape chewing gum, grape jawbreakers, anything purple (except eggplant – pretty to look at but never cultivated a taste for it).You might say I was a “grapaholic” at an early age, or a budding oenophile.