The Southern Agenda

DRINK

Mad for Madeira

SAVANNAH, GEORGIA

In 1825, when the Revolutionary War hero General Lafayette visited Savannah, the local newspaper recorded fifty-one arm-wearying toasts to him over glasses of Madeira. The brandy-fortified wine, which crossed the Atlantic from the eponymous Portuguese island, had been the city’s drink of choice since its founding, in 1733. “The Ann, the first ship to bring English settlers to Georgia, stopped in Madeira and loaded up with wine from the island,” says Jamie Credle, director of Savannah’s Davenport House Museum. Along with her husband, the writer Raleigh Marcell, Credle is resurrecting the Madeira toasting tradition at the circa-1820 Davenport House. Every Friday and Saturday night in February, visitors can reserve a spot to experience Potable Gold: Savannah’s Madeira Tradition, an immersion into the city’s—and the drink’s—history. After exploring the historic house by candlelight, seeing the fanciful hand-stamped wallpapers and stately Federal furniture, guests encircle a table to pass around a decanter of Rainwater, a dry Madeira long favored here, and make toasts. Credle and Marcell then move the party up the massive staircase to a long-unfinished garret laden with candles to taste Malmsey, a darker, sweeter variation. From there, imbibers can soak in the dazzling nighttime views of the river and city where the wine first touched Southern ground. “The British sent whole shiploads of grapevines over from Madeira in the eighteenth century in hopes of turning Georgia into a wine-producing colony,” John Berendt wrote in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, his bestselling 1994 portrait of the city. “Well, the vines died, but Savannah never lost its taste for Madeira.” If the folks at the Davenport House have anything to do with it, Savannah never will. davenporthousemuseum.org

ARTS

Alabama

BEAD BY BEAD

As the birthplace of Mardi Gras in the United States, Mobile has Carnival traditions and history that go together like beans and rice. (Sorry, New Orleans—Mobilians were celebrating the festival fifteen years before your (through March 9). “Walker’s artistry tells not only the story of Mardi Gras during the early twentieth century, but of the first generation of professionally trained Southern artists,” says curator Cartledge Blackwell. Walker studied at the St. Louis School of Fine Arts and became a heralded Works Progress Administration muralist during the Great Depression. But his float designs—elaborate moving sculptures such as giant popping champagne bottles and wildly colorful butterfly wings bursting from spools of yarn—helped lay the foundation for the way Mobilians celebrate today. Proof: In a concurrent exhibit, the museum showcases mementos from all seventy-three still-thriving mystic societies, such as the Order of Myths (founded in 1867) and the Maids of Mirth, one of Mobile’s first women’s societies.