Who knew that you needed luggage for your wine bottles?

Yeah, the USA is flat broke with no reprieve in sight, but the citizens are making do as they have always have. Around here farming in the recent past had been devoted to tobacco, cotton, and soy beans with a few other odds and ends thrown in, but the 2004 Tobacco Buyout has changed that into a very limited and specialized business, cotton has always been tough, and soybeans seem to be grown everywhere. As a result, a lot of the family farmers have been trying new things. Southern grape varieties grow here like weeds, so a number of the old family farms have converted some acreage to vineyards and little wineries are popping up.

I was reminded of this by a crony who dropped by recently and recounted how his son had built a winery business on the family farm complete with wine tasting, tours, and a gift shop for the city folks. Needless to say we were chafing him a bit about the fancy visitors and he was giving back as good as he got. One of the things he mentioned was that a popular item in the gift shop was wine bags like these:

Now to me a wine bag is brown paper with an open top sticking out, but there seems to be a market for leather cases for folks to carry their fancy wines to parties and picnics and BYOB restaurants. While that wouldn't go over too well down the road at Ma's Diner, there are apparently high class city eateries that welcome this sort of thing. Of course, I had to suggest that if you were really worried about your wine bottle breaking you could just get Wine-in-a-Box.

The good news is that I guess the Obama regime hasn't entirely stamped out simple pleasures and luxuries or basic American ingenuity. I just hope that continues because the current mess is going to require a massive clean-up when it all falls down.