Tales of the Country

Lord Kissington and I spent a few days in North Carolina visiting his parents, who recently moved down there. I suppose I can say that it’s a nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there. It’s very pretty where the in-laws live, but really far out in the country. They’re in the foothills, but it’s only a short drive to the mountains. The development they live in is a over-55 community, so it’s mostly retirees. The houses are all new, and I get the feeling each new house is trying to one-up the others. The Kissington homestead is large by DC house standards, but modest by local standards. The other houses are ridunkulous. Do these retirees all have 20 grandchildren who will be visiting at the same time?

This area of North Carolina has a lot of wineries and they are trying to position themselves as sort of a “Napa of the East.” On Friday, we spent the day at the Biltmore Estate, a palatial French Renaissance style chateau built by one of the Vanderbilts. It’s a very interesting tour, and the chateau is quite beautiful, but the whole effect is rather derivative. The chateau is basically a pastiche of three famous French chateaus. The furnishings are all European and represent various eras. There is a Louis XVI style bedroom (gold and purple, fairly gagworthy, but I’m not really a fan of furniture styles named after French kings names Louis), lots of Chippendale, tons of Rococo, and some very nice Flemish tapestries. I found it interesting that an estate built in the 1890s, a time of really creative art and architecture in the United States, was done entirely in a European style. It’s as if they were looking backwards.

The Biltmore has a winery on the grounds and you get a free tasting with your admission to the estate, so we headed over there at the end of the day. Sadly, North Carolina only accepts drivers’ licenses as proof of age. I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned this, but I don’t drive. I’ve never had a license*. I’m a city person. I walk everywhere or take public transportation, or my lovely husband drives me. I have a DC-issued ID card, which looks exactly like a license. But that’s not good enough for North Carolina. A valid state ID is not acceptable. They told me they could take a passport, but I pointed out that I was unlikely to have brought my passport on a car trip to another state. I should also mention out that, although I perhaps look a bit younger than my actual age, there is no way I would pass for under 21. Sigh. So, I stood there and watched as Lord Kissington and the in-laws tasted the various wines. The young woman serving the wines asked if she could bring me some grape juice. I know she was trying to be nice, but it was just adding insult to injury at that point.

There is something a bit odd about a state that is half dry trying to position itself as a wine mecca. The in laws actually live in a dry county (horrors!), but they are right on the border of a non-dry county, so they don’t have to travel far to get a drink with dinner.

Since we had planned to try some other wineries, the license law left us with not too much else to do over the weekend. We visited downtown Hickory, which was pretty dead on the weekends. It was cute though and I took some pictures of the movie theater, which is straight out of the Great Depression. We drove through the mountains to a town called Blowing Rock (or was it Flowing Rock?), which was very cute and quaint. Perhaps a little too much quaint for my taste.

On Sunday evening, as my mother-in-law was preparing dinner, she said, “Oh, I forgot to chill a bottle of wine to go with dinner. I guess we’ll just have to do without.” LK and I replied at exactly the same time, in what I hope weren’t terribly frantic voices, “You can put in the freezer to chill!”

*Yes, I know, I’m a freak.