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Feature article
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Cheerwine celebrates 90 years
By Fred Sauceman
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=====RECIPE=====
Cheerwine Holiday Punch
- 2 two-liter bottles of Cheerwine or Diet Cheerwine
- 1 two-liter bottle of ginger ale
- 2 46-ounce cans of unsweetened pineapple juice
Mix well and chill. Makes 37 cups. |
I couldn’t let 2007 slip away without noting the 90th birthday of Cheerwine, the cherry-flavored soft drink still made by the original formula and owned by the fourth generation of the same family, in Salisbury, North Carolina.
In celebration of the birthday, Carolina Beverage Corporation ran a Super Bowl spot in the Carolinas this year, showing Yankees hoarding Cheerwine to take back home. “Protecting your right to drink Cheerwine” was the theme.
Tom Barbitta, the company’s vice president for marketing, is a Yankee himself. A New York one, in fact, who had no access to the drink until he took a job with Nabisco in North Carolina in 1987.
“Cheerwine is a brand you have to discover,” Tom says. “People are seeking brands like this to call their own. It appeals to a mindset. People may be drinking less soda these days, but they’re drinking better soda.”
A veteran of the Miller Brewing Company, Lipton Tea and the Oberto beef jerky company, Tom says he’s never seen a product that elicits as much fan mail as Cheerwine.
He gets four or five e-mails from consumers a day and two or three a week from soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“All they want from us is a little taste of home. ‘Can you send me a six-pack? Can you send me a T-shirt? My buddy over here has no clue what Cheerwine is.’”
Tom’s favorite story involves a Lieutenant Commander in the United States Navy, on a boat in the Persian Gulf. The commander had stashed a 12-pack of Cheerwine in his locker. His bunkmate found out about it and started drinking the Cheerwine by punching holes in the bottoms of the cans. He then put the empty cans back in the locker.
“And when the commander went to get his Cheerwine out of his 12-pack, thinking the cans were all full, they were already emptied,” Tom says.
In May, the company held a Cheerwine birthday party in Salisbury, described by Tom as a “Norman Rockwell town.” Over 3,500 people attended, from as far away as Jacksonville, Florida, Pittsburgh, and Norfolk.
Tom says L.D. Peeler, the creator of Cheerwine, got together with a salesman from St. Louis who sold him a wild cherry flavor, which became the basis of Cheerwine in 1917.
“There was an embargo on sugar coming into the U.S. about that time, and Mr. Peeler had to get inventive to make a soft drink that tasted good without having the amount of sugar he would typically want to use.
“What I gather is that soft drinks were created in large part to emulate what was happening with adult beverages. So things like ale became ginger ale, beer became root beer or birch beer, and wine became Cheerwine, which looks like Burgundy wine, with a cherry-type profile.”
I asked Tom about foods that pair well with Cheerwine, and he pointed out that the beverage complements all styles of North Carolina barbecue, from the coast to the Piedmont.
Food Lion, also headquartered in Salisbury, sells a Cheerwine sherbet, and Tom says Carolina Beverage has just developed a partnership with the H.B. Hunter Company in Norfolk to create Cheerwine Soft Serve Sensations, a non-dairy, fat-free product that will be hitting the shelves this spring and summer.
“Imagine how Cheerwine has survived the ups and downs of economic swings, mergers, buyouts and closeouts,” Tom says. “The brand has some real resiliency. We have ‘brand evangelists’ who have taken possession of Cheerwine and consider it theirs. People feel connected to one another when they drink Cheerwine.”
--------GoTriCities--------
Food writer Fred Sauceman, author of the book “The Place Setting: Timeless Tastes of the Mountain South — From Bright Hope to Frog Level” is senior writer and executive assistant to the president for public affairs at East Tennessee State University. E-mail him at sauceman@etsu.edu.
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