“Here Comes Buttercar!”

When I got into the booze business, years ago, I didn’t realize that I was carrying on a family tradition.

My grandpa came from a struggling farming family in North Carolina. To bring in extra cash, he’d make a little hooch and sell it to workers at the local tobacco warehouses.

In the early 1930s, this kind of side hustle was definitely not legal. What’s more, he came from a Quaker family in which alcohol was not favorably regarded. To keep his operation from scrutiny, he’d sell other items like milk, butter, and eggs … whatever the people craved.

When folks saw him coming, they’d whoop and holler in glee:

”Here comes buttercar! Here comes buttercar!”

This is the way my dad tells the story, anyway. I don’t know if “butter” referred to the smooth hooch, or to the actual dairy products. And I don’t know what kind of car he drove. I can speculate, though, that Grandpa’s buttercar offered some mix of comfort, vice, and inspiration.

For years, I’ve been writing about these very same topics—and selling alcohol and miscellany along the way. Apparently, all along, I’ve been running my own “buttercar”.

I only learned of this story recently, long after I’d built a well-recognized wine business. The tale is not meant to glorify my grandpa, or romanticize the Prohibition Era. It does, however, reframe my own work with more joy and levity. We could all use a bit more of that. So…

”Here comes buttercar!” Gather ‘round.

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