This is the fourth part of a 6-part series about time travel, wine histories, and the bottles of the fall/winter 2025 club shipment.

Part 1: Chablis, or “minerality.”
Part 2: Orange wine, “typicity”
Part 3: Chilled red ate rosé

Hi folks,

I’ve been thinking a lot, as I sometimes do, about the 9th Annual Minnesota Congressional Delegation Hotdish Competition.

(As someone born and raised in west Michigan, I don’t come from hotdish country myself, although I have cousins who live in it. It’s more of a Fargo thing, localized west of the Great Lakes — Minnesota, Wisconsin, the Dakotas — and joins other Upper Midwestern culinary threads I grew up adjacent to but not inside of, like relish plates and rural supper clubs.)

Hotdish layers together meat (often ground beef), canned or frozen vegetables, a starchy something, and a broth or gravy, often canned cream of mushroom soup, with a crunchy topping — say, frozen tater tots, or fried onions. In Michigan, we’d call it a casserole. (In Minnesota, they’d say a casserole is what a hotdish is baked in.) Hotdish gets brought to church socials or dropped off on neighbors’ doorsteps. It was invented in the ‘30s at the dawn of convenience food, as a way to stretch a little bit of meat as far as it could go. It’s the kind of cooking my grandmother, who hated cooking, did when we visited them for dinner on South Shore Drive.

At the time, I’d heard about the congressional delegation’s contest because national news was using it as a throwaway bit of local color for their Tim Walz profiles during the 2024 election. (He was a three-time winner.)

My first follow-up question was, “What kind of hotdish is Ilhan Omar making?” (My expectation was that, if anybody was sneaking a little flavor in the proceedings, it’d be her.)

Her entry for the 2019 competition, “Little Moga-hot-dishu”, is inspired by food blogger constituent Annie d’Souza’s “Samosa Chaatdish” (the puns are a requirement). The recipe chops the flavors of chaat toppings — cilantro, raw onions, two different chutneys, chana masala, crunchy fried chickpea noodles, etc — into the (nearly) obligatory tater tots. The crunchy, salty-sweet tangy spicy salty four-quadrant hit of chaat works really well in concert with American comfort food. (See also Pervaiz Shallwani’s Desi-American hot dog popup, Chaat Dog.)

It did not claim the top prize, however. That spot went to long-serving St. Paul rep Betty McCollum’s “Hot Dish A-Hmong Friends.” The tater tots here are on the bottom soaked in cream of mushrooom soup, and the crispy topping is fried eggroll wraps and Thai chilis. ¹²

This, no disrespect to Betty McCollum’s office, does not sound as good as Hmong-American chef Yia Vang’s hotdish take, which involves a red curry gravy, pork sausage, local root vegetables — and a bag of frozen tater tots — but as Vang says, “To me, the heart and soul of a hotdish is really about using what you have on hand.”

(Here’s an essay by Vang you can read if you’re not up on Hmong communities in the Upper Midwest and the history there. It also links to a timeline if you need brushing up on the CIA’s Secret War in Laos, or how many Hmong teenagers fought and died for this country.)

There’s a temptation to read the capacious improvisation and ability to fold in flavor and perspective from almost anywhere into the hotdish and use it as an optimistic metaphor for America itself. In a cornier and more hopeful moment maybe that’s the bent I’d be on. But I’m too angry and heartbroken for that, right now.

I can, though, think about what hotdish means in Minneapolis, city of heroes and martyrs: a tangible symbol of the care and neighborliness that is getting people out on the streets in their tens of thousands in the coldest air mass in the northern hemisphere, that animates the school parent patrols and civilian observers and people getting groceries to folks who can’t leave their homes, the people being brutalized by masked agents of the state and the people bearing witness.

I opened my phone just now while writing this sentence and the first thing I saw on my feed was a cook in a closed Minneapolis restaurant making samosas for marchers yesterday.

The second was a summary execution in the street in front of a donut shop.

And I can’t separate any of this out, trying to talk to you about wine in America while the abandoned cars of abducted people sit, emergency blinkers on, doors hanging open, in intersections around Minneapolis, because, as is so often the case, talking about wine in America means thinking about who wine gets to belong to, which stories we tell about who grows it and where they’re from, about what (and who) counts as ‘American.’

Six years ago, I drew the maps for Dan Pucci & Craig Cavallo’s American Cider. It was a pretty big commission for me, one of my first: everywhere in the United States that could and did grow apples broken up into regional chunks to kick off each chapter, from the Hudson Valley to the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Northwest.

There are two things about that project that I still think about a lot. (Apart from getting to read Dan & Craig’s book! — which was published in 2021 and is still the most comprehensive and deeply researched account of real cider in this country, aka natural wine made with apples instead of grapes.)

The first is that, in the years since, it’s been a pretty reliable guide to finding where someone is if they’re coming to you with a (grape) wine made somewhere in the U.S. that feels unfamiliar or surprising.

Manseng in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley? Cold-hardy riparia hybrids in the only part in the Upper Midwest not scraped flat by glacial retreat? Five thousand–plus elevation pinot noir from the western slope of Colorado?

I could find them all in the maps that I’d made. They were all apple places, too. The internal logic of regionality, of the flow of water and money and people, the energy of soil and light, ends up being deeper than what kind of plant, exactly, you happen to be fermenting.

The second is the feeling I had when I was drawing them. Without realizing it, I’d gotten pretty used to making maps of places that were very far away from my lived experience, that I’d been taught were important and that I needed to study: your Côte d’Ors, your Mosels, your Piedmonts.

Now, suddenly, I was drawing my own backyard. Lakes I’d swum in as a child, towns that I had family in, places I’d gone to school, where I’d felt hopeful or sad, fallen in love, experienced loss.

The question that I come back to is, to what degree does wine feel like something that belongs to you? Does wine come from where you’re from? What is it like?

I certainly didn’t grow up in a place where wine felt like something that belonged to me. It wasn’t open at home, it wasn’t from where I was from. It might be aspirational, but it was far away.

I could pass in those rooms, of course. Nobody was going to look at me years later and wonder whether I belonged in a tasting. But that still didn’t mean that I felt like I should be there.

Apples, grapes — these were maps that, having drawn them, showed me corners of the places I thought I was from at a new angle, one that I hadn’t realized existed.

When we picture what wine looks like in the U.S., we’re often, statistically, just picturing what wine is like in California — or at the very least, the West Coast.

Eighty-five percent of wine in the U.S. is grown in California. When you add in the rest of the West Coast, it’s over nine-tenths. Where California wine (and the story we tell about it) goes, so too goes the country.

That’s the approach taken by a writer like Elaine Chukan Brown in their 2025 reference work on California, whose timelines and narrative matter-of-factly centers the work of the indentured native people who tended the vines around the first missions in Alta California, the Chinese workers whose deportation after the Chinese Exclusion Act changed the labor market for California wine, and the Japanese-American farmers whose land was expropriated when they were detained in concentration camps by the federal government during World War II.

California as plummy, plush wine country built around cabernet and pinot in Napa and Sonoma is only a generation old. In the 1870s, the state's most important wine region was the Sierra Foothills, where Gold Rush miners arrived with vines in their boots. In 1952, the top four grape varieties in the state were pais, zinfandel, alicante, and palomino (for white). When Gallo launched their Chablis Blanc in 1964, it was operating a world that hadn’t quite gone fully varietal, and was still just as merchant-driven as Burgundy or Champagne. The wine would have been largely colombard, chenin, maybe some green hungarian, and perhaps a touch of muscat, blended from vines throughout the state.

The deep structural disconnect between the people who grow grapes and the people who make wine in the American wine industry has a lot to do with how California got set up: the size of the homesteading grants to settlers, the money pooling at in the San Francisco Bay, and the explosion of planting during Prohibition, when home winemaking was allowed and railroads meant that bricks of fruit could be shipped anywhere.

It’s also similar to a lot of other places in the world of wine where merchants purchased fruit from growers. There are reasons, though, why it’s simply not as easy in, say, Mendocino for a couple of young people to buy three to four hectares of vineyard from a retiring farmer and make natural wine as it is in Anjou. Vineyards in the former are much more likely to look like the Poor Ranch in Hopland, a 100-acre, four-generation settler farm on the ancestral land of the Sho-Ka-Wah (or Hopland Band of Pomo Indians) homesteaded after the Civil War and expanded during Prohibition.

But the West Coast isn’t the only place in the U.S. growing wine, and it’s not the only way American wine can taste. (And the U.S. isn’t the only place in America.)

Before 1860, the most-planted wine grape in country was catawba, a pink-skinned cross between native labrusca and a sémillon seed found growing wild in the woods 15 minutes outside of Asheville. The heart of the country’s wine industry was the Ohio River Valley, where German immigrants from the Rhineland, most of them women, grew hybrids on the slopes of Mt. Adams whose bracing electricity and freshness reminded them of the riesling they’d farmed back home.

Catawba was the most common, but far from the only, hybrid adapted from the vine species who made the landscapes east of the Mississippi their homes. One of the things I never saw coming when I started in this industry, dutifully learning my 1980s Bordeaux vintages and my Beaujolais crus, was the riotous flowering of new projects that would curl and branch out of the places close to where I lived and worked, still marginal in the grand scheme of things but each of them a tiny needle moving towards a future that was assembling itself before my eyes: Lake Champlain in Vermont, midcoast Maine, elevations I didn’t know existed in Massachussets or New Hampshire, vineland in New Jersey and Maryland, chambourçin in Illinois, for godssake, vines a twenty minute’s bike ride from the house I grew up in in Holland, Michigan. Fuck me if I haven’t tasted some muscadine that made me cry. I’m crying a lot, these days.

That’s to say nothing, of course, of what starts to happen if you consider things across the border from the three-tier system, taste some folks in Ontario or Quebec, drink some mission in Baja.

If we’re talking wine club, well. There’s delaware, the “jewel of American wine grapes”, an obscure-origined garden cross ‘from Delaware City, Ohio’ which will get propagated across the country starting in 1855, crossing oceans a century ago to land in Japan and South Korea. Today, there appear to be less than 100 hectares left in commercial cultivation here in the States, which puts it in the same weight class as other rare local specialties being revived, like romorantin or malvasia de Sítges. Something about its creamy core and ability to take on the marshmallow-y richness of lees aging always reminds me of the white center of a kiwi, or a Nilla wafer.

Deanna Urciuoli and Alfie Alcántara of Dear Native Grapes are farming up in the Catskills, although the grapes in the bottling above are from Buzzard Crest in the Finger Lakes, organically farmed and some of the oldest plantings of delaware still out there.

I’m sitting at my kitchen counter at 2 in the morning before the snowstorm. I’m a slow writer; I always have been. And I’ve been worrying over this thing for too long. Here’s what I wrote in the pairing notes for this bottle, to save us all some time:

Pair this (bodega): Egg and cheese with jalapeños.

Pair this (Lei): My go-to order at Lei on Doyers Street was the fried whiting and the Lady Edison ham with [seasonal fruit, it was Asian pear for the late summer that I spent going weekly after service at Bridges]. This would be delicious with those.

Pair this (at home): Personally, I might wait to open this until it happens. What better way to celebrate than with the lost promise of American viticulture?

But if those stakes seem too high to hang around the neck of this bottle, I think gathering and connection are the names of the game. Open it when your friend is in from out of town and you want to catch up while they crash on your daybed, or when you have a circle over for craft night, or at a baby shower. Open it when you're making something with your hands, or instead of doomscrolling, or to reward yourself for a day of community organizing. Open it when you're doing something that makes you a little hopeful for tomorrow.

Talk soon and take care of each other,

<3,
grape kid

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