Swig Coach On Tour

If you’ve been following me at all through the PGA season, you know I do my homework, which typically involves googling an entire city’s collection of restaurants and stores in search of the best wine.

If going to Jackson is good enough for Johnny Cash, it’s good enough for us. And judging from the restaurants in Jackson we surveyed, not going would be a mistake.

As noted elsewhere in these pages, California cab is the American golfer’s wine of choice. So when the Tour visits Napa, you better believe there’s great golf-appropriate wine everywhere you turn.

It’s fitting for our mission that the culmination of the PGA Tour and FedEx Cup seasons happens in Atlanta.

I have one word for you regarding the wine scene in Memphis…corkage.

I was surprised by the seeming plethora of wine options in Greensboro. Maybe it’s the presence of multiple colleges or the way it sits in a belt between Winston-Salem and Durham, or maybe it’s just a happening place.

There is no shortage of options in the Twin Cities for a good wine experience. And while it’s hard to comment on an entire metro area, I always felt as if greatness remained just out of reach. I’ll just go sulk in the corner at i Nonni, assuming I can find the wine list…

What comes first, supply or demand? The question occurred to me as I googled the wine scene in the Quad Cities early in the week of the John Deere Classic.

I wouldn’t guess from afar that Detroit would be a strong wine town. Maybe it is, but you’d never know it from what you can see online…

Hartford frankly should be a better wine destination than it actually is. Still, there’s one strong list downtown and a sprinkling of decent options clustered in West Hartford.

I don’t know that any golf course on earth looks lusher and more beautiful on TV than Muirfield Village. Unfortunately, I didn’t see the same feast for the senses when I began looking for good restaurant wine lists and retail stores in Dublin, OH. I scouted dozens of websites and was almost at the point of despair.

I’ve never been to Ft. Worth and have a vague idea that it’s a rustic, cow-friendly exurb about 30 miles west of Dallas. Them’s probably fighting words, so I apologize in advance to the wine-loving citizens of Ft. Worth and hope to visit one day.

I have to say I was more excited by what I saw in Charlotte’s restaurant scene than many larger markets. There’s a palpable energy evident, with a real sense of possibility and adventure.

As diehard Giant fans we find it difficult to say anything nice about Dallas, but there’s plenty to like about the wine scene if not that execrable football team and its equally obnoxious owner (he who should not be named).

The Zurich Classic is the only event on the PGA Tour played in two-man teams, where partners “ham and egg” their way to victory. Speaking of getting your grub on, New Orleans needs no introduction on the food front, but the wine scene is a little less visible.

I haven’t been to Hilton Head in over 20 years so this is a shot in the dark. If you want to offer a strong wine program in a destination with significant seasonal peaks you need the financial strength to “weather” the off-season, hopefully through a dedicated core of locals.

I spent about two hours researching the wine scene in and around Augusta National for Masters Week. While I’ve heard that the Club itself has a fabulous wine program that I hope to profile one day (got about as much chance of that as I do playing there), the rest of the area seems to be devoid of good wine with two noteworthy exceptions.

After conducting my own online research, I was fortunate to connect with Ed Casey, manager of a great wine bar/retail store in the Pearl called High Street Wine Co. (see below).

I wouldn’t have necessarily guessed but turns out Houston has the best restaurant wine scene of anyplace in the entire South. But it’s Texas after all, so first you gotta wade through the herd of national and regional steakhouse chains.

You can paint the town red, white, and rose at the Valspar with these recommendations.

The 17th gets all the love on the golf course, but the 19th at Sawgrass is pretty, pretty good as well…

Wine is not the first thing that springs to mind when considering a trip to Orlando. A recent article I read suggested it’s the home of “fighting varietals:” inexpensive wines prominently labeled cab or chardonnay. Our own research came to a similar conclusion.

The Honda Classic is extinct, now replaced by the more alliterative Cognizant Classic. Palm Beach, however, retains its millionaire/billionaire aura, where with a few significant exceptions. if you have to ask about the wines presumably you can’t afford them.

Awesome wine options, traffic permitting. That’s why we call it Drive For Bor(beaux)…

It feels somewhat sacrilegious to be writing about wine at the WM Phoenix Open, the PGA Tour’s homage to Oktoberfest. After all, I never see anyone showering the pros on 16 with pinot grigio.