Wine and Country Music Have More in Common Than You Think

“No, no, no, no, no, country is beer and pickup trucks!” That’s what Hannah Ellis, whose first album, That Girl, is out now, heard from a radio DJ back in October when she released the album’s first single. That song, “Wine Country,” is — spoiler alert — a country song about wine. Ellis, who loves wine and sings country music, probably rolled her eyes at the comment (though not until she left the station; when you’ve got a song to promote, pissing off well-known DJs is a pretty poor strategy). 

“Wine Country” is pretty damn catchy, and Ellis has an amazing voice, but the DJ did have a point. If you tried to tally the number of country songs about drowning your sorrows in a glass of whiskey, for instance, you’d probably end up with one for every play Chris Stapleton’s heartsore and brilliant cover of the classic “Tennessee Whiskey” has had on Spotify (841 million, and counting). Wine, not so much. 

 Ellis begs to differ. “Sometimes in the country music world there gets to be this ‘are you country enough’ competition,” she says. “And sure, we’re drinking beer at bonfires, not wine—but then I thought, well, actually I do drink my wine like that. That’s why I say country’s a state of mind. You don’t have to have grown up in a town of 200 to love it.” (Note: Ellis grew up in Campbellsville, Kentucky, population 11,000; more than 200, but not exactly a major urban center.) “You also don’t have to be bougie to love wine. And as an artist, I like the challenge of bringing people or things together that don’t normally go together.”

Wine’s bougie- or non-bougie-ness is one of those can’t-win-no-matter-what arguments, because, compared to a Bud from a can, well yes, it is. (Never mind that it was invented by stone-age farmers living in mud-brick huts under the shadows of the Caucasus mountains, who definitely weren’t sipping the stuff from crystal stemware; it got hijacked into snootiness much later on, like 9,000 years or so.) 

But in a weird way, wine and country music are similar: both suffer from people having serious preconceptions about them. I know this because for years I thought country music was basically twang-twang music for morons. I was wrong, of course, but hey — it wasn’t my fault. I blame D.B., this kid who was on my bus in high school years ago in Houston.

 D.B. wore Wranglers and boots and trucker hats, and was good at things like thumb-and-forefinger thumping you on the head when he walked past you, spitting dip into a McDonald’s cup, and telling you that unless you listened to country, your music was shit, and you had shit for brains. His initials, he’d tell you, stood for Dirt Bike, he listened non-stop to KIKK, one of our two local country stations, and his dream was to marry (ok, “do”) Crystal Gayle. Say one bad word about Ms. Gayle, and he’d threaten to kick your ass. D.B. also thought he was incredibly cool, which was an interesting delusion. 

For me, the nail in the coffin for country music was the day that D.B. decided to exit the bus while it was still moving. Our bus driver had a habit, thanks to the Houston heat and a dire lack of bus a.c., of driving with the vehicle’s folding front door wide open. (This was back in the 1970s, when people didn’t worry much about the possibility of kids randomly falling out of buses on the way to school.) One morning, as we were rolling up in front of our high school, D.B. sauntered up to the door. Our bus driver said, “D.B., get back in your goddamned seat.” D.B. ignored him. 

What happened next involved a basic misapprehension on D.B.’s part regarding the speed of a slow-moving bus (15mph, say) versus walking speed (about 3mph). His intention, it seemed, was to simply step off the bus as it was rolling up to the school and coolly walk off into the sunset (or Houston morning) leaving the rest of us in awe at his savoir faire and unquestionable cool. Instead, as his foot touched the grass, there was a sort of explosion of tumbling limbs and dirt, ending with D.B. sprawled on the ground and the bus stopped short about 20 feet past him. “Damn,” our bus driver said, looking back at him in the rearview mirror appreciatively, “that boy’s a fool.”

So I was, for many, many years, pretty sure that country music as a genre belonged in large measure to the D.B.’s of the world, who did things like blithely step off of still-moving buses.

Like I said: preconceptions. The cup of truth often contains a bitter draught, and my youthful self was just as wrongheaded about country music (though not about D.B., I maintain) as a lot of people are wrongheaded about wine. Is the stuff pretentious? Only if you want it to be. Is it country? Sure, if you want it to be. Hannah Ellis got into wine  “from visiting my now-husband’s mom on her farm. I always brought a bottle of wine. We’d drink it out of solo cups.” That memory’s in the song: “City sippin’ on a tailgate / Cabernet in a solo cup / I’m throwin’ down with my pinky up.”

Ellis laughs: “I got some pushback from serious wine drinkers on that: ‘mm-mm, doesn’t taste the same. Wine glasses are designed the way they are for a reason.’ And sure, if you're drinking a $300 bottle of Realm Cabernet or something, yeah. But for a person who’s just getting into it, serving them a $12 cabernet in a solo cup, if it gets them into wine? That’s great.”

So the real question is not ‘can wine be country,’ because wine can be as country as you want it to be. (In fact, wine can even be Norwegian Black Metal, at least since Sigurd Wongraven of Satyricon recently started making his own wine; I guess drink it while listening to “Tied in Bronze Chains” or possibly “Filthgrinder.”) But hey, don’t take my word for wine’s countryness. Just listen to Hannah’s album.