A History in Wine

Arkansas has a distinguished wine-making history and vintner Robert Cowie is doing whatever he can to carry on that tradition.

“At one time, there were 148 bonded wineries in the state of Arkansas,” says Cowie, founder of Cowie Wine Cellars, one of only five remaining wineries in the state. His Arkansas Historic Wine Museum in Paris, Ark., documents the state’s love affair with the grape—an often tempestuous courtship blended with equal parts of Prohibition and passion—and is the only one in the nation dedicated to preserving the wine history of an entire state.

As early as 1845—when German immigrants produced wine in the small town of Hermansburg—to the “Golden Age” of winemaking from 1935 to 1965, Arkansas wineries flourished.

Cowie’s museum honors that legacy and was a natural outgrowth of his nearly lifelong fascination with the art of wine-making. A fascination, he adds, that developed more as the result of happenstance than intention.

Cowie moved to Paris (pop. 3,707) from Columbus, Ohio, at age 9. His recently widowed mother had decided to relocate to the Ozarks to be closer to her brother—a priest who, due to the strong Catholic presence at nearby Subiaco Abbey, already was living in the area.

A state historic landmark, Subiaco Abbey was founded by Benedictine monks who immigrated to the Arkansas River Valley from the German-speaking region of Switzerland in 1878. Over the years, the grounds of the Benedictine’s Romanesque abbey expanded to include a college preparatory boarding school. Cowie, a 1959 graduate, helped build the abbey’s retreat house while working his way through college.

The monks’ immigration prompted more Swiss Catholics to follow, and they soon discovered a region ripe for the cultivation of vineyards, the area’s sandy soil and sloping hills providing the perfect climate for a wide variety of wine grapes.

Besides Cowie Wine Cellars, the state’s other four wineries—Wiederkehr’s, Post, Mount Bethel, and Chateau Aux Arc—all have roots in that 19th-century wave of migration. The four are located on the north side of the Arkansas River in Altus (pop. 817), a 20-minute drive from Cowie’s operation.

Cowie’s first foray into viticulture came in 1955 when he gathered five gallons of wild elderberries and began experimenting with the process of fermentation. It was, he says, a life-changing experience. And, although he worked as an accountant for a while after graduating with a degree in business administration from the University of Arkansas, he always dreamed of one day operating his own winery.

That dream came to fruition in 1967 with the opening of Cowie’s winery. Since then, Cowie, his wife, Bette Kay, and their seven children have built a family-run business into an award-winning operation with wines such as Robert’s Port, a recent “Best of Show” recipient at the Arkansas State Fair. Cowie’s second son carries on the tradition as a winemaker in Florida.

Housed behind the winery’s showroom, the Arkansas Historic Wine Museum began as a way for Cowie to display the many wine-related items he’d collected over the years. An assortment of artifacts fills the museum: row after row of bottles from now-extinct wineries sporting labels such as Arkansas Razorback and Ozark Girl; antique presses and casks; and a wall of wine-filled barrels hand-painted by Cowie’s wife with scenes of vineyards and wine-related sayings. In Vino Veritas (“In wine, there is truth”) is one of them.

“I’ve been making wine since I was 15,” says the 62-year-old vintner, who can’t imagine what his life would be like if his mother had stayed in Ohio instead of moving to Arkansas wine country.

Margaret Dornaus is a regular contributor to American Profile.

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