I’ve been looking forward to this one.
Ask my mother, the show I was maybe most addicted to during my childhood was The Dukes of Hazzard (okay, perhaps The A-Team was up there too). I loved the car, really. I was a bit younger than the target demo that watched the show for Catherine Bach’s sex kitten character Daisy, but I loved the car. And I thought Roscoe and Boss Hogg were funny.
And that car was awesome.
It may not have had a voice or all the technological capabilities of KITT from Knight Rider, but the General Lee was an awesome American muscle car. I was too young to understand the implications of the Stars & Bars painted on the roof, so all I saw was this awesome orange beast flying through the air and kicking up dirt all over Georgia.
For those who don’t know what the show was about, Bo and Luke Duke are cousins, and they live with their cousin Daisy and uncle Jesse in Hazzard County, Georgia. Basically, they are constantly running into trouble with the local authorities, Boss Hogg and Sheriff Roscoe Coltrane (and Roscoe’s inept deputies, like Enos and Cletus). Hogg is always trying to get Uncle Jesse’s farm, and the boys are always trying to foil his plans.
You know what? Let’s let The Balladeer—Mr. Waylon Jennings, himself—tell you what the show was all about. Mr. Jennings?
Thank you, Mr. Jennings. Can I call you Waylon? No? No problem, Mr. Jennings, sir.
OK, so what to pair with this show? As Uncle Jesse is a moonshiner, and the Duke family have apparently been moonshiners for generations, that would be a tempting answer. But also kind of a cop-out. No one considers moonshine “wine,” least of all the people who make it.
So instead, I’m pairing Dukes of Hazzard with the wines infamously referred to as Super Tuscans.
Hear me out.
I went in to the history of the Super Tuscan wines a bit in my review of the 2007 Felsina Berardenga ‘I Sistri’ Chardonnay, still one of my favorite-ever chardonnays. The men who pioneered the Super Tuscans were absolutely rebels. Doing it their way, and that was just a little bit more than the law would allow.
The Italian DOCG system did not allow for chardonnay or cabernet sauvignon to go into “Tuscan” wines. But these men did it anyway, adding cab and merlot to sangiovese in Chianti. And the entire wine drinking world is better off for it.
Makin' their way, the only way they know how. That’s why I’m pairing The Dukes of Hazzard with Super Tuscans. Bene!