Cheerwine at O.O. Rufty's

A hometown favorite...

Earlier this afternoon I stopped at a small bait and tackle shop to get some gas and bought a bottle of Cheerwine. I just had to take some time and write about it. The taste of that drink brings back so many great memories.

Cheerwine is a drink that was born right here in my hometown. It is basically a cherry cola and has nothing at all to do with wine. Growing up, it was always funny to travel to different parts of the state and ask for Cheerwine. Folks would look at you funny and say, “We don’t sell wine here, son.”

I guess even that statement says a lot about the world that I grew up in. There were still blue laws on the books that prevented stores from being open on Sundays when I was a kid. There were also a lot of “dry” counties in North Carolina back then. I remember there being major battles to bring liquor by the drink to Salisbury. It was a very polarizing issue. And there are still remnants of those old laws on the books, preventing people from buying alcohol at various times. But I digress.

Anyway, Cheerwine has A LOT of carbonation. Back when I was a kid the only way to get it was to buy a carton of glass bottles (see the picture above) and these bottles had the pry off bottle caps. That saved a lot of headaches, because anyone who has opened a 2-liter bottle of Cheerwine can tell you that if you aren’t careful when opening its twist off cap you’ll likely be wearing it! The other caps seemed to prevent this unpleasant experience!

Cheerwine has finally expanded its horizons past Rowan County. Apparently, it is now available throughout the Southeastern United States. Sadly, in the years of its expansion the quality of the drink seemed to decline. I am not quite sure what the cause of it was, but the quality of Cheerwine was becoming sub-par. If you got it from a soda fountain it tasted right, but getting it from any other source was bound to be disappointing. Perhaps the soda sat around too long and wasn’t fresh anymore; or perhaps the formulation got changed. This was incredibly sad to me because when outsiders would sample my favorite soda they would blaspheme it, saying that it wasn’t good. It was like saying that America, baseball, and apple pie just weren’t up to snuff anymore!

A couple of years ago the company changed its bottles to match an older logo that had been used before I came along. This change seemed to correspond to the change in quality. Recently, the company has gone back to the bottles that I am most familiar with, and the quality has gone back up. The only difference that I have noticed is that the bottle touts real cane sugar as an ingredient. I wonder if that is the source of the difference in the taste of the drinks. Perhaps the company tried to substitute high fructose corn syrup for sugar. Well, whatever the problem was, I’m glad that they’ve got it fixed.

Cheerwine figured in to a lot of my childhood memories. I remember going to my grandfather’s home during the summer months to make homemade ice cream. My favorite kind was the homemade Cheerwine ice cream. It was just awesome! (As if the drink weren’t sweet enough, you go and add MORE sugar to it!) Those were good times. My brother and I would play as the preparations were made, and then we had to take our turn sitting on the ice cream freezer to hold it steady while my dad or grandfather turned the crank. It always took much longer than we wanted it to. I’m not sure which was the worst part: having a frozen behind from sitting on that melting ice, having to wait for the ice cream that was in the freezer, or just having to sit still that long!

Another memory that Cheerwine figures in prominently had to do with trips with my dad to O.O. Rufty’s General Store. The store had been in existence since 1905 and was an absolute wonderland to a kid like me. The front windows were full of all kinds of interesting things, many of them antique. As you walked into the front of the store there were seed bins with many varieties of garden seeds and plants on both sides of the entrance. Once inside the store you could find anything from farm tools to house wares, to clothing. The floors were worn wood with a heavy layer of dust and dirt, and the air had a smell that was a combination of machine shop and farm supply store. There was always more to see in that store than you could ever take in in a million years.

Even beyond all of that wonderment, my favorite part of going to Rufty’s with my dad was getting to go to the old drink coolers that they had there and get a bottled drink. I usually got a Cheerwine, but would sometimes break tradition and get a Brownie or a Sun Drop. It was a ritual with us. (Perhaps you have never seen the kind of coolers that I am talking about, but they are like a chest-type freezer. They had a sliding top and when you went to get a bottle you could tell what you were getting by looking at the bottle cap. I’m sure that is why you rarely ever see this kind of cooler anymore, they just don’t show off the bottles as well as the refrigerator style coolers that they have today.) Every time we ever went into Rufty’s we would get a drink before we left. Usually we would drink it right there in the store because there was a 10-cent deposit for the bottle that we could save by drinking it right there. I don’t remember a single time that we ever went into the store without getting a bottled drink. In fact, up until they sold the business, I would buy a drink when I went in there, even if I was by myself.

There was something special about those times. I am not exactly sure what it was, because I don’t remember a single conversation that we had while drinking those soft drinks, but there was something about it that was just like a Norman Rockwell painting or like the cracker-barrel in the old stores. If I had to guess what it was, I’d say that there was a sense of connection and acceptance between me, my dad and grandfather, and that place and the people around us. It was as if in those times there was never any feeling of being in the wrong place or the wrong time. Time, place, and personality joined in the lobby of O.O. Rufty’s in perfect harmony.

Sadly, the proprietors of Rufty’s have sold out to a new owner. I haven’t been to the “new” store yet. But somehow it just doesn’t seem the same.