Stable Ridges and Twisters

Stable Ridges and Twisters

Taking Route 66 from Tulsa to Oklahoma City, you will see old oil towns, abandoned banks and oil drums from four score ago, some cattle and possibly deer – but you will also see the area of Oklahoma with a burgeoning wine industry in the middle of the Bible belt. Here, cattle pastures and fields of oil derricks are being cleaned and shaped into orderly vineyards, contrasting beautifully with the dark green, twisted oak, the brown rock and red soil and golden wild grass.

In the middle of this cultured cattle country rests a small, antique town straddling a now-quiet cross-roads. But this little stop boasts of three excellent wineries. With a tasting room in an abandoned, century-old catholic church, Stable Ridge hosts a vast array of wines from grapes grown in Oklahoma.

Grapes grown in this hot, dry climate take on a special quality of their own, holding more sugar than their more pampered California brethren. Our old friend, the Zinfandel, when planted in Oklahoma becomes a completely different family of grape. Rather than the warm, smoky, aristocrat taste of the California Zin, the Oklahoma Zin flirts with the tongue with her sweet and sour taste. Her smell is of cherry rather than earth and alcohol. Her color is cheerful and rosy, rather than dapper and dark.

She compliments perfectly the small wild strawberries and melons from Oklahoma. And she relaxes others while sitting on a porch-swing or rocking chair on the patio listening to the thunder roll across the plains and the dark clouds sweep from west to east. She also compliments her home, the quiet old church along Route 66. This renovated church, along with the other two wineries – also inside refurbished buildings – miraculously survived decades of tornadoes, which pummel this region, destroying the unsightly shopping outlet along the highway only a decade ago. But the vineyards and wineries and people that enjoy their product live on, and only joke about the twister that bounced between fields and roads and sandy rivers.