Features
MAY 2022
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LOUISIANA
T E R R O I R S // 3 8
LOUISIANA
LITERATURE
// 4 2
S I N C E R E LY O U R S
LOUISIANA
FLORA
W
CLINK
Virtue & Vines
MINDFUL GUZZLING AT WILD BUSH FARM + VINEYARD
T
he merlot burbles straight from the barrel into my waiting glass. I raise my hand and part my lips, but the winemaker stops me. “Don’t drink it just yet.” Well, that’s fine for him! Neil Gernon has learned patience, or maybe he was born with it. He was the strange bird making fruit beer in the nineties, long before the trend. “What’s wrong with your beer?” his friends would ask, cringing. Gernon met his wife, Monica Bourgeois, when the two worked at neighboring Brennan family restaurants in New Orleans and wooed her with wines he encountered as a beverage manager. Soon the two were each running their own small bottle shops—Monica at Sip and Neil at Cork and Bottle. In 2009, they picked out a growing partner, Chris Vandendriessche, at White Rock Vineyards in the Stag’s Leap region of Napa Valley, and began
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Story and photos by Lucie Monk Carter blending the bright fruit of northern California into a small-batch line, Vending Machine Wines. “We’d been joking about how you can get anything out of a vending machine,” said Gernon, and the initials promised a premium. “Like a high-end car,” he laughed. In March 2020, the couple’s regular trips to Napa for harvesting and bottling became impossible. Only so content with a virtual vineyard, when St. Tammany Parish’s Pontchartrain Vineyards went up for sale, they saw an opportunity to expand their passion project to their home state. “We really wanted to make wine in Louisiana and put our mark on it, said Gernon. “What we’ve done with our experience in Napa, we wanted to bring here.” Now I’m standing with Gernon at their new venture, Wild Bush Farm + Vineyard in Bush, Louisiana, just outside of Covington on Old Military Road. In the
years ahead, Gernon and Bourgeois are overhauling the thirteen-acre property—which operated as Pontchartrain Vineyards for thirty years—into the farm and venue of their dreams. They’re pairing all they’ve learned from the world of wine with a homeland terroir they’re eager to understand. Good flavor takes time: whether it’s for tannins to mellow in a bottle or two winemakers to learn their craft. Bourgeois and Gernon were still ripping old, ailing bushes from the fields at their new farm when I visited. But they’re digging space, too, and sowing fruit with sights set on exquisite vintages that could only come from this place, hopefully to be available within the next four years. For the antsy whiners among us, I’ve documented all the activity I expect to enjoy between now and the first glass from Wild Bush’s Louisiana vines.
