There’s a heckuva road trip to be had by tackling more than one of Arkansas’ designated grape-growing and wine-making clusters (officially known as American Viticultural Areas, or AVAs), but a tight schedule and limited finances dictated that my wife/travel companion/photographer/driver and I stick to a day trip. Because we’re based in Little Rock, that meant heading to Arkansas’ original wine-making hearth: a stretch of the Arkansas River Valley a little west of Clarksville and centered in and around the Franklin County town of Altus.
Beyond hitting up as many wineries as possible once we got to Altus and finishing up the day with a meal at Wienkeller Restaurant, we had no plans as to how we would occupy our time en route, but with only 120 miles or so between the front door and our own personal “Sideways” remake (no adultery in this one, though, or Paul Giamatti, either), we figured the world was our wine cork and we’d just merlot with the flow.
The problem with that (aside from “merlot with the flow” being a deeply, deeply stupid thing to even think, much less say or, God forbid, write) is the fact that our route is shot through with good and fun things to do, and also that I am — according to my wife, anyway — notorious for turning short drives into very long ones, mainly owing to my distaste for the interstate highway system and my not-unrelated tendency to toodle around on little ancillary adventures and sightseeing jags on the way to wherever it is I’m going. The compromise here was to hit Interstate 40 right out of the gate, unwind the trigger and blend in with the rest of the scofflaws. My companion (having added “time management consultant” to her job description) assured me that 90 mph was plenty slow enough to see anything really interesting with ample time to peel off the highway, but fast enough that I couldn’t pull my “Family Circus” routine and dotted-line my way into missing Last Call for the only thing I was actually supposed to be doing, which was still quite a ways down the road.
The first sign of Arkansas Wine Country popped up earlier than expected, just east of Morrilton. Credit: Brandy McNair
We got our first opportunity to test my wife’s faith in her eyesight, and my reaction time, just east of Morrilton with the appearance of an official Arkansas Wine Country Trail sign. I wasn’t expecting it, having thought from the get-go that we wouldn’t see any wineries till the Altus city limits and not having seen any listing for a Morrilton-area winery when I peeked, however begrudgingly, at the official Wine Trail website that morning.
That’s probably on account of the fact that Movie House Winery, toward which the sign pointed, squeezed its last grape several years ago. That really bummed me out, because not only was I excited to see what a Morrilton winery could do (Point Remove Brewing Company is making some awfully good beer just down the road, after all), but also because I like it when analog sources are right and the internet is wrong. No dice on this one, though.
So I was feeling kind of low right off the bat because we had no wine and the internet wasn’t wrong and now the dramatic exit from the highway was seeming pretty anticlimactic, but my wife pointed out that, even though the winery being closed was not a good surprise, it was a surprise nonetheless and we’d left the interstate as a result. Aha, that’s right! According to Road Trip Law, any impromptu exploration off the straight and narrow path, successful or not, means the soul-numbing “making time” portion of the drive is over, and the actual, true, honest-to-goodness road trip has begun.
We were free to toodle.
A little time for wastin’ while en route to some tastin’
While I really do have a bit of a problem with planning things, such as road trips, with any degree of detail or farther than, oh, two or three hours in advance, I had managed to hammer out a rough itinerary for our post-speedster, pre-assignment interregnum: history and hoarding.
Well, not hoarding per se, but antiquing or junking or whatever you like to call stopping at roadside thrift shops and flea markets and all the other various and sundry collections of slightly unsettling treasures — cast-off cast iron, haunted portraits, vaguely racist tchotchkes, and on and on — to be found on the backroads of this great land.
The “history” is just history. Nothing to goof on, presentation-wise, but if everything is a gag then nothing is, so I’ll take it. There’s a lot of it, too, if you’re into that sort of thing, which I am.
The path from Little Rock to Altus, understand, once you get off I-40 and onto U.S. 64, is chockablock with historical sites, especially the bite-size kind that are perfect for little road trips with a time limit. And so that’s what we hit up, starting with the Potts Inn Museum, the pride (along with a small general store with a very cool lineage and a crackerjack settin’ bench out front named for a local luminary) of Pottsville, a small town that has most probably saved a fortune on street signs since 2016, when medical marijuana became legal and therefore uncool, rendering theft of Pottsville’s official signage a crime bereft of cachet and beneath the dignity of local rowdies. (The public works department of Weiner, up in Poinsett County, presumably remains on high alert.)
Potts Inn Museum Credit: Brandy McNair
But said rowdies (and also readers) would do well to visit the Potts Inn, one of those rare structures that can pull off the neat trick of being simultaneously grand and unassuming, and all this with its ample green grounds unpaved and uncluttered, save for a few excellent historical markers that do a remarkable job of recounting the equally remarkable story of the property, and the people who built it. My faithful companion — now busy toggling between the demands of principal photography and time (re: me) management — was impressed mainly by the economy of the signs, in that they satisfied my curiosity without being too awful long or numerous for her, as she’s more of a big-picture history buff (i.e., an acolyte of the “take a picture and take off” school of historical appreciation), and I appreciate a little more detail (i.e., I compulsively read every word of every sign and exhibit, whether I’m actually interested in that bit of history or not).
Along with promoting marital harmony (thank you, Arkansas Historic Preservation Program!), the signs single-handedly (single-postedly?) made the stop a successful one, considering we showed up to the Potts Inn on a day that it was closed. I should note, however, the Case of the Closed Museum is maybe more of a feature than a bug for this particular road trip itinerary: Even if you happen to be a well-adjusted and responsible person who can make plans like a functioning adult and regularly does so, there is a very good chance you’ll be learning your local history peeping through a locked door and wandering around the (admittedly beautiful) grounds surrounding this or that tucked-away museum.
Potts Inn Museum Credit: Brandy McNair
But for all that, the day was already beautiful, and the towns, from tiny to kind of big to actually big — like Atkins and Pottsville, Morrilton and Clarksville — nestled in this stretch of the Arkansas River Valley are also very beautiful. For all their Southerness — and it is very Southern here — the river valley’s small towns evoke, to great degree, the New England of popular imagination, with its storybook hamlets and tidy town squares. So far as museums and their ilk go, you are likely to find that these storehouses of history, lovingly tended, will be in a retrofitted railroad car or abandoned depot, or an old church or courthouse or other such lived-in place, and sited directly on the square.
Keep your eyes open for historical markers as well, as this stretch of U.S. 64 is a designated section of both the Trail of Tears and Butterfield Overland national trails, and just about every town along the route has at least a few markers, ranging from local remembrances to federal designations. To see them all is a trip unto itself — if you count the local ones, Morrilton has more than a dozen all by itself — but as an excuse for leg-stretching with a side of history, any town square is going to cover both.
The only thing on our sort-of itinerary that we missed out on was a proper junk-store adventure, as the few we saw were either closed or, occasionally, ominous. I’ll note that we didn’t put our noses to the (vintage, pedal-cranked) grindstone in any of the towns we stopped in, and so might have missed a few, but I’d also point out that this is also the site of “Bargains Galore on 64,” a yearly bacchanal of dirty deals held on the second full weekend of August in which folks line the highway with folding tables, all of which are laden with bunches of stuff they no longer need (but you do), and hold one long continuous yard sale up and down the 164 miles of U.S. 64 from Fort Smith to Beebe, an event you absolutely must experience if you’re into that kind of thing.
Posting up with the sellers in the cellars
The stops on the way to Altus are pretty interchangeable (to that, though, Altus’ town square is, like most every town on the route, well worth visiting, and in fact, between a genuinely moving memorial to the area’s long-ago coal miners and three very distinct bars — one for ghosts, one for tourists and one for making tourists into ghosts — is definitely one to put on your itinerary), but once you get to where you’re going, the options are more limited (albeit much more fun and, in the instant case, to the point): Altus is the heart of Arkansas Wine Country, it is very small (pop. 683), and most everybody that lives there presumes anyone who does not live there (that’s us! and probably you!) has shown up for the sole purpose of visiting a winery and have planned accordingly by building only wineries for the provision of entertainment (save those three bars catering to the primary stages of ghosthood), necessities and sundries.
Altus is the heart of Arkansas Wine Country, it is very small (pop. 683), and most everybody that lives there presumes anyone who does not live there has shown up for the sole purpose of visiting a winery. Credit: Brandy McNair
That’s OK, though, and between the town’s wineries you really can get just about everything you need. There are several of them, but not so many that you can’t hit them all on a single trip, especially if you have someone to manage your time and drive you around like I do. If you don’t, just find someone who enjoys watching you drink yourself to near-insensibility and driving you around as you hold forth on current events, and you’ll be set. But in the event that very good plan doesn’t come together, you can either take it easy on the tasting flights (ugh), or just opt for samples of the unleaded wares — grape juice, fruit juice, soft cider — on offer at all the wineries, and made from the same stuff and in the same way as the hard stuff (yum!).
Disclosure time: Except for the fact that I do indeed enjoy a glass of wine or three with my supper now and again, I only claim to be an oenophile so I’ve got an excuse to write it out, on account it’s a bonkers-looking word to me and, like that glass of wine or three, is a handy little way to tamp down the ol’ existential dread for a couple of seconds. Beyond that, I can’t speak about wine with any authority and don’t try to. So I’ll just say that all the wines we tried at all four wineries were good — good enough, in fact, that I’m going to add it to my list of things to get riled up over when somebody From Off gets snooty about it.
While the Arkansas Wine Trail as a whole has plenty of wineries that have sprung up in the past few years, the new wave is mostly along the sections in Northwest and Central Arkansas; in and around Altus — wine country proper, I’d argue — most of the wineries are old, and even the relative upstarts tend to be run by descendants and offshoots of the families (the Posts and Wiederkehrs) that established the area’s first commercial wineries in the late 1800s and early 1900s. (Wiederkehr’s, established in 1880, is the oldest continuously operating winery in the state, having received a dispensation, on religious grounds, to manufacture wine throughout Prohibition; both families can trace their winemaking heritage — including for commercial purposes — to a time that predates state licensure of either winery.) That’s who still runs them for the most part, too, and the result is a wine tour that doubles as a history tour, and feels a little bit like you’ve tagged along with a buddy to their big family reunion.
Mount Bethel Winery Credit: Brandy McNair
We got a good dose of the family-reunion vibe (as well as several very good wines, including an excellent chardonnay) at our first stop, Mount Bethel Winery, which sits on the original Post family farm and is still operated by Post family descendants. That includes the tasting room (itself the original Post family wine cellar), where we found a delightful woman who is the spitting image of my wife’s aunt and who was happy to give us an impromptu lesson in both local history and genealogy, laying out all the family trees (or grapevines, I suppose) of the important wine country families. I could’ve stayed there all day.
Next on tap was Post Winery, just a little ways up the road from Mount Bethel. While the winery itself is one of the two oldest in Arkansas’ wine country, Post’s tasting room and wine-making facility is one of the newest; where Mount Bethel’s tasting room is situated on the original (still working) Post farm and dates to the 19th century, Post ushers the visitor into the 21st, a tipsy minimalist vibe to set it apart from Mount Bethel’s equally tipsy cottagecore setup down the road. The tasting room also boasts a great big window that looks onto the production floor, with places to sit and watch the action when it’s bottling time or otherwise bustling along. Our bartender, while not a member of the Post family, had a sommelier’s command of a wine’s particulars delivered so that a layman (me) could grasp it; relaying is a different matter altogether, my voice recorder having given up the ghost five minutes into this little adventure, though I can report that the merlot was delightfully dry, and a far cry from the tired charge of “too sweet” that I often hear about Arkansas wine.
Post Winery Credit: Brandy McNair
Chateau Aux Arc is the new kid on the block as far as the wineries in wine country go, being only 25 years old or so. The most modern and modern-looking of the wineries by a good deal (the Post facility was new, but newness of the building is offset by the history of the place), Chateau Aux Arc offers a line of excellent wines that include a few zigs and zags to set it apart from the more traditional lineups of the old guard (such as the Quartz Rose, which has a more balanced front end and a much sharper finish than is standard, which I found to be excellent at the time, and in my shopping bag later), and a gift shop given over to a mesmerizing collection of plants.
Our last winery of the day was Wiederkehr Wine Cellar, which is located in Wiederkehr Village and encompasses a good chunk of the mountain that overlooks Altus from the north and is the smallest incorporated town by population in Arkansas. Wiederkehr Wine Cellar, which is the reason there is a Wiederkehr Village in the first place (in the 1970s, the city of Altus wanted to annex the mountain, including the Wiederkehr operation, and in response the little community — every resident of which, or nearly so, was a member of the family or employee of the winery or both — successfully petitioned for incorporation), is a complex of vineyards, warehouses, hangars and houses where members of the Wiederkehr family have been living and working and making wine since the 1880s.
Retired wine barrels at Wiederkehr Wine Cellar date to the late 19th century. Credit: Brandy McNair
After admiring the grounds for a few minutes, we sampled a series of what I found to be the driest and most robust wines of the day (and my taste in wines, such as it is, runs to the dry and robust) that included a standout shiraz and phenomenal cynthiana. Most important to my faithful (and very hungry) companion, along with the tasting room — in Wiederkehr’s case, a tasting building, cavernous and wood-paneled, the massive hand-carved bar holding court over an array of wines and pickles and gifts and steins, ancient wine barrels and presses standing sentinel on the floor and in the darkened corners — Wiederkehr Village also boasts a restaurant (“Weinkeller”), and while it’s not the only place to eat in Arkansas Wine Country, it’s the place, and we’d never been. (We didn’t make reservations, either, which worked out OK on a random weeknight, but it was busy nonetheless and we were told by a local that we had gotten lucky and that it was a good idea to make reservations regardless of the day.)
Walking into the restaurant, which occupies the original Wiederkehr family wine cellar, is a disorienting experience, albeit a pleasant one. The weight of history is as palpable as the weight of the old homeplace, which sits directly above, the air thick with cooksmoke and the savory smell of Old World food. The whole menu is very traditional, including the appetizers (we started with a pot of fondue) and the sides (the German potatoes are on point), and features entrees such as Back Hendel Vienna and hand-cut steaks. It’s one of those rare places that’s not just old, but seemingly unchanged, a little world unto itself that, rather than being unstuck in time, has found time unstuck from it.
Weinkeller Restaurant at Wiederkehr Wine Cellars Credit: Brandy McNair
Back to the future
And it’s that kind of talk — time-traveling restaurants and what have you — that is a sure sign it was time to get this show back on, and ultimately off of, the road. We weren’t driving an RV, but if we were, then we might have eased back up to the top of the mountain where, right across from Chateau Aux Arc, there’s a shiny new RV park with big hookups and plenty of shade, and a great view of the River Valley sunset. And if I were more persuasive, we could have headed over to Ozark, just five miles to the west, where there are rooms at the Oxford Inn, or better yet, hook north up the Pig Trail (Arkansas Highway 23) and slept to the sound of the Mulberry River at Around the Bend Cabins (the better to score a sandwich at Turner Bend Store the next day for the ride home).
Alas, I’m not that persuasive, and so count among my many blessings an affable chauffeur. If I were a napping man (I am, most emphatically, not a napping man), I would have drifted to sleep to a tinkly lullaby, as we were unable to leave a single winery without picking up a unique vintage or two (including a few bottles of unleaded juice, should a fit of temperance overtake us), but I stayed awake instead and advocated for a return trip.
That argument was getting some traction, and I believe I’ll be able to make it stick.