by David Burn | Feb 5, 2006 | Food & Beverage, Lowcountry
We’ve been feasting on great wines, of late. Thankfully, we’re fortunate enough to do so, because there are some fine reds out there waiting for a celebration. Last night, at Saltus River Grill in historic downtown Beaufort, we uncorked another splendid Pinot from Oregon’s Willamette Valley.
According to Oregon Pinot Noir Club, the Terrapin Cellars Pinot Noir 2004 is a major score.
WOW – pinot noir that tastes good for just $16! I’ve been tasting a lot of “value-priced†pinots from Oregon lately – most of them are simply disgusting, and undrinkable. Thus I was quite pleased to find this gem. It’s made by a guy named Rob Clark, who manages nine vineyards around Salem, and got into winemaking as a very minor sideline. From the ’04 vintage he made almost 1,000 cases of pinot gris, and only 150 cases of this pinot noir. I just want to make a good table wine that sells for a reasonable price,†he told me. He succeeded with this wine, which has plentiful dark-flavored fruit, a bit of plumpness in the middle, and a fruit-based finish that is extended for long seconds thanks to that fresh ’04 acidity. It’s a bona-fide bargain.
This bold wine is earthy and spicy. The timid need not apply.
by David Burn | Nov 19, 2005 | Lowcountry, The Environment
Flickr user, Lorabelle, recently moved to Bluffton from upstate New York. She’s already captured some great images of the Lowcountry’s natural beauty. Here’s one of the May River–the lifeblood of the town.
Locals are rightly concerned about the state of this precious tidal river, given the massive development (and run off from said development) taking place in Bluffton at this time.
by David Burn | Oct 30, 2005 | Architecture, Lowcountry
I learned today that a Frank Lloyd Wright masterpiece is located right under our noses here in Beaufort County. The “Stevens House” is owned today by Joel Silver, Hollywood’s top grossing producer, with films like Die Hard, Lethal Weapon and The Matrix under his belt. According to The Beaufort County Open Land Trust, Mr. Silver has meticulously completed the majority of Wright’s original plan, thus fulfilling Wright’s dream of making Auldbrass a great 20th century architectural treasure.
Here’s more on the plantation from a 2003 New York Times article:
Of Wright’s thousand-odd commissions in the United States, Auldbrass is his only one in the region, and his only Southern plantation. Wright had just completed Fallingwater, the critically acclaimed house perched over a waterfall in Mill Run, Pa., when C. Leigh Stevens, a wealthy Michigan industrial consultant, commissioned a Lowcountry retreat and gentleman’s farm in a swampy, 4,000-acre tract on the banks of the Combahee River, 20 miles upstream from the Atlantic. Wright conceived Auldbrass as a collection of one-story, slender buildings of polished cypress. His design called for a main house, a guest house and cabins, a caretaker’s residence, staff cabins, a barn, stables, kennels for dogs, a ”dining barge” floating in a pond on the property and an aviary, all unified by material and design: cypress walls canted inward at an 81-degree angle, copper roofs, doors with ornamental panes and hexagonal tables.
The monumentality of Wright’s plantation (as all large properties are referred to in the area, whether or not crops are planted) lies in its understatement. Dwarfed by old oaks, obscured by the stables and with a barely discernible front door, Wright’s dark, asymmetrical main house at Auldbrass is a rebuke of the prevailing Southern-plantation ideal — the becolumned brick pile (the most famous in South Carolina being the 1742 Drayton Hall) that rises emphatically out of the grass as the most potent expression of control and order a colonial planter could muster. Commissioned the same year that ”Gone With the Wind” had its premiere, modernist Auldbrass must have seemed as alien to its neighbors in the early 1940’s as Joel Silver does today.
The name Auldbrass is Wright’s modification of ”Old Brass,” the name (which is thought to refer to slaves beyond working age and of mixed African and Native American descent) given to the property in the mid-19th century. Wright’s logo for Auldbrass, a stylized arrow, was his nod to the iconography of the Yemassee Indians, who inhabited this area before the arrival of the British. The same arrow motif is cut from panels just under the eaves of the main house. After dusk, when light from inside the house illuminates the arrow design on these panels, the building has the look of a paper lantern.
by David Burn | Oct 23, 2005 | Lowcountry
We saw a bumper sticker on a minivan this morning while doing errands on Hilton Head Island. It said, “Slow Down: This Isn’t The Mainland.”
Robert H. Frank writing in Deadalus:
Studies have shown that the demands of commuting through heavy traffic often result in emotional and behavioral deficits upon arrival at home or work. Compared to drivers who commute through low-density traffic, those who commute through heavy traffic are more likely to report feelings of annoyance. And higher levels of commuting distance, time, and speed are significantly positively correlated with increased systolic and diastolic blood pressure.
The prolonged experience of commuting stress is also known to suppress immune function and shorten longevity. Even daily spells in traffic as brief as fifteen minutes have been linked to significant elevations of blood glucose and cholesterol, and to declines in blood coagulation time–all factors that are positively associated with cardiovascular disease. Commuting by automobile is also positively linked with the incidence of various cancers, especially cancer of the lung, possibly because of heavier exposure to exhaust fumes. The incidence of these and other illnesses rises with the length of commute, and is significantly lower among those who commute by bus or rail, and lower still among noncommuters.
I’m thankful for my short commute to and from work–a clear benefit to life in the Lowcountry. Although, it could be even better if there was a bike trail along 278. Greater Bluffton Pathways is working on it.
Thanks to The Practical Hippie for the pointer to the Frank article.
by David Burn | Oct 19, 2005 | Lowcountry, The Environment
Island Packet: As the pinch for oil and natural gas supply intensifies, energy companies are beginning a push to seek fuels believed to be off the coast of Hilton Head Island.
Energy industry lobbyists are ramping up efforts to convince state legislators to open up South Carolina’s coast for oil and natural gas drilling. Those efforts come despite federal moratoria on offshore drilling that last until 2012.
Though some state lawmakers insist nothing is in the works for January’s legislative session, lobbyists have acknowledged meeting with legislators on the issue, and the state’s petroleum council actively is soliciting support for exploring offshore resources.
“I’ve had a number of conversations with members of the General Assembly having to do with natural gas drilling,” said Hope Lanier, a lobbyist with Charlotte-based Piedmont Natural Gas, a distribution company that serves upstate South Carolina and parts of North Carolina and Tennessee. “I think there is a lot of positive momentum” for exploring offshore natural gas reserves.
A small provision in a wide-ranging energy bill passed by Congress this summer mandated a national inventory of offshore energy resources, prompting local concern that drilling for oil and natural gas off South Carolina’s prized coastline could be a step closer.
Experts believe most of the oil and natural gas deposits in the South Atlantic region are in an area called the Carolina Trough, a large undersea basin that runs along the coast from North Carolina to northern Georgia. At its closest, near Cape Hatteras, N.C., the trough is about 60 miles from shore.
Near Hilton Head Island, the trough is estimated to be about 150 miles from shore.
by David Burn | Oct 18, 2005 | Lowcountry
Island Packet: Some historians and archaeologists worry that widening U.S. Highway 17 in rural Beaufort County will destroy or cover up significant Civil War artifacts and building sites.
Archaeologists hired by the state Transportation Department to probe the area have found remains they think show the location of a Combahee River ferry crossing used in a Civil War raid led by famed abolitionist Harriet Tubman. An earlier study also found an old black cemetery in the area.
More than 700 slaves from plantations in Colleton and Beaufort counties were freed in what is widely considered the first raid in U.S. history to be led by a woman.
Tubman is best known for escaping slavery and helping others to do the same along the famed Underground Railroad, made up of safe houses and secret passages. But no single act in Tubman’s life would free more people than the Combahee raid.
U.S. Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C., whose congressional district includes a Confederate earthworks on the Colleton County side of the Combahee, wants the area to be included in a proposed Gullah-Geechie history corridor.
by David Burn | Oct 8, 2005 | Lowcountry
Minor league baseball is making a home for itself in Bluffton.
Bluffton Today reports that the newly formed South Coast League has established operations on 29 Plantation Park Drive.
SCL will be an independent league unaffiliated with Major League Baseball. Several other independent leagues already exist, so the move is far from unprecedented.
The new league is headed up by CEO, Jamie Toole. Toole is a Columbia, SC native. He recently resigned his job as Vice President and General Manager of Virginia’s Salem Avalanche, part of the single-A Carolina League, to assume full time responsibilities with the SCL.
The league will be privately financed by a group of backers that prefer to stay silent “for now,” Toole told Tim Wood of Bluffton Today. The SCL will own and operate all teams to start, with the hopes of eventually securing local ownership in each market.
Bluffton is on the short list of potential target areas for a franchise.
Toole said the league plans to have working agreements and facility leases in place for each franchise by next spring. The 120-game schedule is slated to kick off in May 2007.
by David Burn | Oct 6, 2005 | Digital culture, Lowcountry
Swamp Fox: The city of Charleston is drawing up a contract with Mount Pleasant-based Widespread Access to blanket the peninsula with a wireless Internet network in an effort to boost economic development and increase computer literacy in poor households.
Evening Post Publishing Co., which owns The Post and Courier and 22 other media outlets, will provide the network’s content, essentially a home page including links to area news articles, weather reports and restaurants.
“Hopefully, it will drive readership, but it’s also important to show that Charleston can be a technological base,” said Charles Bauman, chief information and technology officer for Evening Post. “This is totally different from news.”
Widespread Access and Evening Post started talking with the city in May and eventually formed a company, Access Charleston.com LLC, to bid on the business. The city put out a request for proposals June 8 and collected two bids by the June 28 deadline.
“These services are being provided in Bangalore, India; they certainly ought to be provided in Charleston, South Carolina,” said Ernest Andrade, director of the city’s efforts to recruit technology companies.
The Charleston Wi-Fi plan, like similar projects nationwide, has come under fire from telephone and cable companies that say municipal Internet services unfairly compete with them and undermine private-sector investment.
The city and bidding companies said the criticism is unfounded, because Charleston is not subsidizing the project.
“This is just a business plan put together by two companies,” Bauman said. “It’s going to provide services that the phone companies and the cable companies weren’t providing, and for a good price — that being free.”
Andrade said that the Charleston public Wi-Fi network will be the first in the nation supported by a media company.
If the Charleston project goes as planned, Evening Post will try to set up similar networks in the other communities where it does business. The company owns 23 media outlets, including newspapers in South Carolina, North Carolina and Texas; TV stations in California, Colorado, Kentucky, Louisiana, Montana and Texas; and a daily English-language newspaper in Buenos Aires.
by David Burn | Aug 8, 2005 | Lowcountry
Last night we ate dinner with a group of Darby’s coworkers inside the “Herb House”—the oldest existing building in Georgia and part of the modern day Pirates’ House restaurant in downtown Savannah. The Pirates’ House occupies the spot where Trustees Garden, the first experimental garden in America, was located.
When General Oglethrope and his little band of colonists arrived from England in 1733, they came ashore in the vicinity of the present City Hall on Bull and Bay Streets. By the end of the first month, a suitable site of land was located on the eastern boundary of Oglethrope’s city plan on which an experimental garden would be developed. The plot of land was dedicated as Trustees Garden in honor of Oglethrope’s men, the Trustees of the new colony. The garden was modeled very closely after the Chelsea Botanical Garden in London. Consisting of ten acres, it was bounded on the north by the Savannah River, on the south by what is now Broughton Street, on the west by what is now East Broad Street, and on the east by Old Fort Wayne.
Botanists were sent from England to the four corners of the world to procure plants for the new project and soon vine cuttings, fruit trees, flax, hemp, spices, cotton, indigo, potashes, cochineal, olives and medicinal herbs were all taking root on the banks of the Savannah River. The greatest hopes; however, were centered in the wine industry and in the Mulberry trees which were essential to the culture of silk. But both of these crops failed due to the unsuitable soil and weather conditions. From this garden, however, were distributed the peach trees which have since given Georgia and South Carolina a major commercial crop and also the upland cotton which led to the creation of such great wealth for the 18th- and 19th-century planters.
by David Burn | Jul 20, 2005 | Food & Beverage, Lowcountry, Place
I have had no Thai food for six months, and that’s not a recipe one wants to follow. Thankfully, all that changed last night, as we met an old friend at Kao, a French-infused Thai restaurant on Savannah’s east side.
Adam and I both opted for salmon in green curry sauce. Darby had cashew chicken and Adam’s friends shared mussles and a bottle of champagne. The service was outstanding, the decor inviting and the food perfect.
