Frontier Red, Lot 92; Fess Parker Winery

Tom's latest. No more guest reviews, he's drinking on the regular now with me and Mike. Hooray!

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“Davey! Davey Crockett!
King of the wild frontier!
Born on a mountaintop in Tennessee
Killed himself a bear when he was only three…”

Not exactly Smoke on the Water, is it? And yet it’s stuck in my head because I’m drinking this Frontier Red, made by the Fess Parker winery in Santa Maria, California. A “value-oriented” wine with a picture of Fess Parker on the label in the coonskin cap he made famous when he played Davey Crockett on TV a little over 50 years ago. How cool is that?

…Okay, you’re right. It’s not really all that cool at all. Really, it’s kind of the opposite of cool.

Last year I reviewed Deep Purple Lodi Zin and I listened to Deep Purple while I drank the wine and wrote the review. It actually created a fantastic mood for wine drinking. A bit sappy and sentimental, maybe, but at least it brought to mind sex and drugs and rock and roll and lots of cool bad-ass stuff like that. It’s not often that a wine tells you exactly what kind of music to play to heighten your enjoyment, but Deep Purple was kind enough to do so.

So naturally now I’m listening to…well, actually, I’m listening to SpongeBob torture Squidward at the moment, since my kids are sitting a few feet away watching cartoons on TV, but if that wasn’t on, I’d probably be listening to Deep Purple, or the Grateful Dead or the Beatles or the White Stripes, or even the Bee Gees or Abba or Rick Astley...anything but that god-awful Davey Crockett theme song. That would drive me crazy.

But I still can’t get it out of my head. Which is especially tragic since I only know those first four lines.

I bought this wine because it was cheap, and because I thought it was unusual that a wine made in 2011 would pay homage to a TV show from the 1950’s. I thought it odd that anything made in 2011 should be marketing itself based on something that you’d have to be over 60 to remember.

Then it occurred to me that the same generation that watched reruns of Davey Crockett while they were being potty trained were listening to Deep Purple’s Machine Head in college dorms 20 years later and are now buying large amounts of wine that pay homage to things they remember from their youth.

Then I found out that Fess Parker died in 2010, and this wine is a tribute to him.

Then I felt like kind of a jerk.

Anyway, the wine is billed as the “Great American Value” and is said to be “made in the same pioneering, genuine, down-to-earth spirit of the frontiersman who first tamed this land.” Honestly, I buy that completely. The true frontiersman were undereducated, generally filthy, social malcontents who spent a lot of time drinking homemade wine-like beverages from dusty bottles or clay jugs.

And maybe if that was the mood I created for myself – campfire smoke, the fear of Indian attack, flasks of gunpowder and muskets all around, squirrels roasting on a spit above an open fire, filthy men in filthy clothes drinking from filthy mugs scrubbed clean with dirt – I would be enjoying this wine a lot more. Maybe remembering Davey Crockett as a 50’s television program starring Fess Parker really isn’t really the point. What I should summon instead is the spirit that Fess Parker was hired to convey, the spirit that made Davey Crockett a legend in his own time and made Fess Parker a star 120 years later. Frontier red has alcohol in it, and it has a convenient screw-top cap. And it’s cheap…ish. (Actually, it’s only two dollars cheaper than the Deep Purple wine, but in this reviewer’s opinion it’s at least $5 less good, and the Deep Purple wine comes with a better theme song.)

The wine has a non-descript taste, characteristic of a wine that is basically a mish-mosh of various grapes – Syrah, Grenache, Petite Syrah, Mouvedre, Cinsault, and Carignane. It does not entirely fail to be pleasing. It’s definitely better than bathtub gin or grain alcohol, which I imagine would have been my other choices on the frontier in the 1830’s.

And I can imagine that it is exactly the kind of beverage that would have very likely been passed around by dirty frontiersman moving across the fruited plain while sending their three-year-old sons out to do battle with bears.

So my guess is that Davey Crockett and Fess Parker would have been proud, and probably a little drunk, if they had known about this wine, and there are many people out there who would enjoy it immensely if they took advantage of the opportunity to buy a bottle and try it out.

I’m just not really one of them.

5 out of 10

Frontier Red
$9.99 at World Market