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Fourth of July in Sonoita


Tucson is not far from Mexico; about seventy miles.  Sonoita is grasslands, uphill from here, south and east of us, closer to Mexico, still.  Sonoita is trying to become wine country, and while it still has a ways to go, it is getting there.  Just as I hear thunder this afternoon, here in Tucson, with the promise of a first real rain in a year, monsoon seasons in the Sonoran desert sometimes come with severe weather:  hail, for instance.  Hail stripped Sonoran vineyards of their grapes two years in a row, recently.  

 It takes an hour to drive to Sonoita, where we have fond memories--from years past--of good dinners in a town small enough barely to be able to support restaurants.  The U. S. Census says that there are about 800 people in Sonoita, 700 of whom are invisible.  When we heard that an award-winning chef from Phoenix was moving to Sonoita, and that Dos Cabezas Wineworks had proposed to introduce him to the region with a pig roast at their showroom "in town", we decided that we wanted to be there for the first hint of "Overland Trout"--the name of his soon-to-be restaurant.  ("Overland Trout", we were told, was a cowboy nickname for bacon.)   

  

They roasted the whole pig; not just the trout.  The vintner, of course, having his own legends in mind, stood a fair while between us and the not-quite-ready-yet hog, and told us tales of winemaking in the grasslands, and of the "Kansas Settlement", a bit north, up by Wilcox, where much of their grapes came from, and of Dick Erath (from Oregon) whose Cimarron Vineyards, next to their own, produces most of the rest.  

And I missed the details, because it was deep into the tasting routine, but one of their labels was painted by someone's father to grace their Pink wine, which other, more obtuse people call "Rose".  It was a good Rose, but it was a fantastic label:  even the tear produced in removing the original painting was preserved.  

 The pig--God bless the pig!--came rich brown from the roaster without a complaint.  You might have guessed that.  I am trying, here, to say that, as a sentient member of the carnivore family, or the omnivore family, that I understand, and that I know how we came that way, in our evolution.  But I also know that the delectable beans and summer squash were living once, too.  We do not eat rocks.  

 I wore my Fourth-of-July straw hat, made in Italy, and everybody wore what seemed like a good thing, on a Fourth-of-July in Sonoita, to celebrate wine and a soon-to-be Overland Trout Restaurant, only an hour's drive from Tucson, and closer still to Mexico.  Patagonia is about fifteen miles over that way, and east is Tombstone and Bisbee, with cowboy and copper stories of their own.  




I have a Tombstone hat, too, not from Italy, but from Stetson, bought r'at thar in Tombstone, long since.  Maybe, someday, I will tell you about that, too.  It ain't really no story, but it's all I've got, and you will probably hear it, someday.








































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