From the Editor
Let’s take a look at the “Wine List” first.
This essay by S. Allen Chambers is really a humorous, extended toast to the man who penned both the Declaration of Independence and Lynchburg’s first wine list. Is there any connection between the two documents? Perhaps to think like Jefferson we need to drink like Jefferson.
This is no joke. Wine, especially moderate amounts of the red stuff, is making headlines these days for its preventative potential in the fight against all that ails us: dementia, heart disease, cancer, tooth decay—the list goes on. Had Jefferson succeeded in his efforts to ensure an adequate supply of affordable wines for all Americans—who knows?—alcoholism would be a curiosity and Prohibition as we know it could have been avoided altogether.
“No nation is drunken where wine is cheap,” observed Jefferson. But Chambers notes that Jefferson’s “wishes did not prevail, and wine continued to be the American drink of choice only for those who could afford it, while ‘all the middling and lower conditions of society [were condemned] to the poison of whisky, which is destroying them by wholesale, and ruining their families.’”
This essay by S. Allen Chambers is really a humorous, extended toast to the man who penned both the Declaration of Independence and Lynchburg’s first wine list. Is there any connection between the two documents? Perhaps to think like Jefferson we need to drink like Jefferson.
This is no joke. Wine, especially moderate amounts of the red stuff, is making headlines these days for its preventative potential in the fight against all that ails us: dementia, heart disease, cancer, tooth decay—the list goes on. Had Jefferson succeeded in his efforts to ensure an adequate supply of affordable wines for all Americans—who knows?—alcoholism would be a curiosity and Prohibition as we know it could have been avoided altogether.
“No nation is drunken where wine is cheap,” observed Jefferson. But Chambers notes that Jefferson’s “wishes did not prevail, and wine continued to be the American drink of choice only for those who could afford it, while ‘all the middling and lower conditions of society [were condemned] to the poison of whisky, which is destroying them by wholesale, and ruining their families.’”
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