I’m still refining my elevator pitch for The Food Section, but I’ve got its basic description down pat: This publication covers food and drink across the American South.
Except that’s not entirely true.
TFS is a publication focused on food, and it limits its scope to the American South. But drink? That important topic doesn’t appear on our virtual pages as often as I’d like.
Over the years, we’ve run lots of beverage stories: Lisa O’Donnell’s feature on Merle’s, a self-proclaimed “super gay bar” in rural Wilkes County, North Carolina, is an all-time favorite, and I can’t walk past the French Market canisters at a supermarket without thinking of Suneil Kamath’s examination of Indian immigrants reconnecting with their coffee histories in New Orleans. Readers of The Food Section are familiar with efforts to make sake in Arkansas, and American rum in Virginia.
But if your personal ratio of food to drink mirrored TFS coverage, you’d be parched.
Since the last thing I want is for subscribers to thirst for more independent journalism, The Food Section is adding a weekly drinks column, featuring the work of four talented beverage writers.
Starting next month, All-Access subscribers each Thursday will receive a drinks dispatch, with wine, beer, spirits, and soft drinks on rotation. I’m tremendously excited for you to meet the contributors handling these beats; you’ll find more about them below.
Before we get to the introductions, though, a quick programming note: When the Thursday drinks newsletter launches, Michael Stern’s newsletter will move to Tuesdays, while city newsletters will continue publishing on Wednesdays. (Don’t miss next Friday’s newsletter for more exciting news on that front!)
In other words, The Food Section is about to become a five-day-a-week publication. I may have to adjust that basic description, after all. In the meantime, please join me in welcoming TFS’ new drinks team, introduced here in their own words.
WINE: David W. Brown
David is a New Orleans-based author whose nonfiction appears regularly in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Wine Enthusiast, and Scientific American, among many other places.
When Hanna offered me the chance to write about wine for The Food Section, I hesitated. She’s set the standard for food journalism and has built a strong bond with her readers. She’s placing a lot of trust in me and the other contributors.
But I could not pass up the opportunity. The Food Section is known for its lively and meaningful work in the Southern culinary space. The wine world needs similar reporting.
Wine is taken both too seriously, and not seriously enough. Winemaking is an art, eliciting emotions through taste, the way classical music does through harmony. But it’s also just agriculture, like asparagus or kale, at the mercy of weather, temperature, winds, and water. Nobody feels intimidated when buying a tomato! Nor should they with wine.
I want to give readers the confidence to take chances when buying wine. I want to look at an industry being transformed by hard times and a changing climate. And I want us to have fun. They’re called spirits for a reason.
When you pull a cork, you commune with a faraway place as it was at some specific moment in the past. And you can take that experience anywhere you want. I’ve smuggled old Bordeaux onto Antarctica, and bribed locals in Afghanistan for a taste of their homemade stuff. I don’t recommend either locale, but let’s talk about the places in New Orleans, where I live, and across the South, where you can have the time of your life, with a liquid passport in your cup.
SOFT DRINKS: Andre James
Andre most recently served as Chattanooga Times Free Press’ food writer, following 20 years in the restaurant industry. The author of Dipped in Neon: The One and Only A-Z Guide to What to Eat to When You’re Hungry in Myrtle Beach, he lives in Wilmington.
I’m a food writer originally from Southport, North Carolina. Usually, I’d be expounding on the saucy, slightly piquant virtues of Haitian spaghetti (yes, Haitian spaghetti is really a thing), or assuring you that eating your gumbo with a scoop of potato salad plopped in the middle is not a cultural travesty, but a common practice in New Orleans.
For the sake of Hanna’s splendid, award-winning newsletter, however, I will be covering anything you drink, except booze. Which means: Get ready for engaging, entertaining, and informative prose about how Boba tea is to my daughter’s childhood what “freeze cups” were to mine, why 7-Eleven’s premium coffee offerings might have Starbucks on the ropes, and—since I’m a proud North Carolinian—Cheerwine, in some way, shape or form.
BEER: Dave Infante
Dave is a James Beard Award-winning independent journalist and editor of Fingers, a newsletter about drinking in America. A contributing editor at VinePair, his work has appeared in The New York Times, Fast Company, Thrillist and PUNCH. He lives in Richmond.
Folks, I regret to report that the rumors are true: We’re getting the gang back together! As both a former newsroom colleague of “the inimitable Raskin” (as I like to call Hanna, mostly because I suspect it annoys her), a longtime pal, and a paying subscriber to The Food Section since Day One, it was probably only a matter of time before I wound back in her orbit. And with such a broad and fascinating mandate, too!
I’ve been covering the American brewing industry for the past decade and a half, and I’m delighted to bring that experience to bear for TFS readers trying to get a (tap) handle on the forces reshaping the Southeast’s mostly excellent beer scene. Plenty of publications write about beer, of course, but I believe Fingers is unique because I cover the multi-billion-dollar brewing industry with the expertise of an insider and the skepticism of an outsider. It’s no easy thing to pull off.
Luckily, I honed my balancing act in Charleston working alongside the best—Hanna herself. Expect a mix of reported news, no-nonsense drinking guides, industry analysis, and so much more. The American brewing industry is having a tough time, lately, and craft brewing has quite the hangover. But national statistics have never told the full story about the South, and they don’t when it comes to America’s favorite alcoholic beverage, either.
SPIRITS: Susannah Skiver Barton
Susannah Skiver Barton is an award-winning journalist with a focus on all things alcoholic; she serves as whiskey editor at The New Wine Review. Barton lives in Fayetteville, North Carolina with her family and the state’s best whiskey collection.
As a fan and reader of The Food Section almost from day one, I’m delighted to join as the spirits and cocktail columnist.
I like to joke that I drink for a living, and it’s true that sometimes the whiskey tastings start at 9 a.m. But most of my work centers on the people, places, and processes of distillation and drink-slinging. I’m passionate about great hospitality—which we have in abundance here in the South—and I love nothing more than talking with fellow spirits lovers about what gets their mouth watering.
I’ve been covering the booze business for over a decade, and I look forward to dialing in on how it’s faring in the South. Expect stories about scrappy craft distilleries, hidden-gem cocktail spots, boundary-pushing bartenders, and more.
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