Wine in a bottle

Tune in to read about the adventures of Buck Buchanan, fictional country mailman, delivering mail out of Starz, Texas. He takes his job seriously and knows that customers count on him to deliver every piece of mail entitled to them. He is all about customer service. With a willing ear and a helping hand, Buck Buchanan goes the extra mile.

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After signing out at the Post Office, I flipped through my mail while walking to the car. The headline on the flyer surprised me. I checked the address to make sure it was my name and then wondered why I was on the mailing list. I looked at the smaller print. I sure didn't have 725 million dollars to buy the Waggoner Ranch. It is a Texas icon, though, and seems well worth the price as it is nearly the size of Rhode Island.

The Waggoner ranch spans six counties in northwest Texas, one of the largest estates in the United States. As I read, I whistled in amazement. The ranch has 1,200 oil wells, 30,000 acres of cultivated land, and includes 510,000 acres. The sell price includes hundreds of quarter-horses and thousands of cows. It also includes hundreds of homes and has been held by one family for over a hundred years.

Dan Waggoner established a ranch in 1849 in the Texas panhandle. Twenty years later he began buying land and enlarged his holdings tremendously. His son, W.T., continued the expansion until it was known as the largest ranch in Texas under one fence. The ranch became an estate in 1923, with W.T as executor and his three children on the Board of Directors. He was in a jam because his three offspring were not the business sort. His daughter, Electra, came home from a world tour with a butterfly tattoo on her leg. His son, E. Paul preferred bourbon and all-night poker games, and his son, Guy, was married eight times. None of them were interested in ranching. W.T died in 1934 and through the next decades, siblings and heirs sold their share of the estate until only two remained, being equal partners. It seems neither could agree on the future of the Waggoner estate so a court stepped in and made the decision for them. The legend ranch would be sold. What a legacy.

But Texas is a big state and has lots of legacies. Starz has its share - cotton farms being one. The northwest area of Texas grows sixty percent of the state's cotton. Over the years for lots of reasons, boll weevils being one, production moved from the coast to the panhandle of the state. Land has remained in families over generations, as well as the knowledge of how to till it. Inventions have improved the cotton-farming world tremendously and little hand labor is required these days. It wasn't always that way. Families often traveled to the panhandle of Texas just to hand pick cotton during the fall. Sometimes a farmer had too much land in cotton to harvest himself and sold it as is to anyone who wanted to pick the entire field. Others preferred to pay for the hand picking.

Jim Ryals and his wife, Cecil, from East Texas bought a field to harvest back in the 1920's. They and their three small daughters lived in a wagon drawn by mules and picked cotton every day by stuffing it in large bags they pulled down the rows. Jim didn't have a wagon to dump the cotton into, so they made huge piles of it at the end of the field, planning to borrow a wagon to take it to the cotton gin when they finished. They worked hard and piles of white grew tall with every dump. It was their only source of income for the year, living on a rented farm in East Texas where they only grew crops to exist and feed the farm animals. Traveling to the panhandle of Texas was a big investment, buying the crop in the field was an even larger one. It held the couple's hope of buying their own land in East Texas, no longer living in someone else's house on someone else's acreage.

West Texas has one major natural phenomenon - wind. Rarely is there a day that air doesn't flow and often, so strong, it becomes destructive. Jim and Cecil Ryals witnessed that destruction first-hand. Nearly all their cotton was picked and piles of white stood at the end of the rows, high and bright in the sunlight. Then the wind began to blow, uncommon in the fall. The air filled with dirt and bit by bit, the white cotton that once stood high in the field disappeared until finally, only blobs of dirty gray were left at the end of the rows of bare cotton stalks.

And that was the end of their adventure to West Texas. But it wasn't the end of cotton-growing. Just as most farmers do, they gather their reserves after bad years and make it through the winter to plant again in the spring, hoping and praying for a better year. It's the never-ending hope that becomes the backbone of legacies.

 Besides the cotton farmers who've passed their land down through generations, the grape growers are doing the same. Our part of the country is now the most concentrated grape-growing region in the state. My friend, Edgar Givens is growing grapes, too. He only has sixteen vines. Said he'd start small and see if he could make some good wine before expanding.

The second year after planting the two-year old vines, he raised a whopping crop of grapes. After much discussion as to the right time to pick them, he gathered all his grandkids in the backyard so they could stomp them. It was all very sanitary as he had two kiddy swimming pools, one filled with water for rinsing feet, the other for stomping grapes. I did notice the kids sometimes forgot to rinse before stomping, but I didn't say anything. He had plenty of beer and bar-b-que and all were having a grand time.

A year later, after he'd fermented, strained and racked the wine numerous times, he finally bottled his brew. I received one of the prize possessions and reverently placed it on its side in the wine rack in the kitchen with instructions to let it age one more year. Two days later as I was watching television in the den, I heard a loud POP followed immediately by shattering glass. I jumped up and went into the kitchen, thinking some animal had found its way into the house. It took me a minute to determine exactly what happened. The cork in that wine bottle must have shot across the room and hit the window. The cork lay amidst the glass on the floor. Even worse, the wine had spewed with it because dribbles were bubbling from the bottle, the rest strewn across the floor and running down the wall under the window.

I told Edgar that the cork blew and suggested he store his wine in the garage and not in his house. I didn't tell him the window broke or the wine made a huge mess. I did add, though, that the little bit left in the bottle tasted rather good.