The United States Through the Windshield

A Report From Wine Explorer Diego Samper
Paris, France

“If you want to hate the United States, watch the news. If you want to love the United States, drive through it.”

I read that in a tweet this week from a German soccer fan visiting the US for the World Cup.

It feels like the right line for the Fourth of July weekend.

And stay with me to the end, because I need your help with something for summer.

I’m writing this from Paris, France, where the United States often arrives first through headlines. From far away, it can look like one long argument. News turns a country into a problem. Politics turns it into a team sport. Social media turns it into a fight you did not ask to join.

But then you land there, get into a rental car, and start driving. Suddenly the United States is not an argument. It is the size of things.

A parking lot big enough to lose your car in. A Best Buy next to a Target, next to a food court, next to a Petco, next to some other store you did not know existed but now somehow need.

When I was a kid in the ’90s, Petco did not feel like a store to me.

It felt like a field trip with fluorescent lights and better air conditioning.

Fish tanks. Hamsters. Birds. Reptile lights. A whole aisle of dog toys. Another aisle for things I did not know dogs needed. Sometimes, if you were lucky, there was an animal you were allowed to touch.

I was not thinking about retail strategy. I was a kid. I was amazed.

How big can a pet store be?

In the United States, apparently, very big.

But America is also smaller than that.

A few years ago, I spent the Fourth of July weekend at a friend’s lake house in Conneaut Lake, PA. It was the lake where he spent summers growing up, which is a different kind of travel.

Not monuments. Not the polished version of a place. The other kind. The kind where someone points at a corner and tells you what used to be there.

We visited the Amish country. We bought German pastries. We stopped at an ice cream shop that seemed to have been there forever. And then there was the boat club: wood, water, summer shirts, and a menu without prices.

I still think about that menu. Not because it was good or bad, but because it told me I was inside a little world with its own rules.

That weekend ended with Fourth of July celebrations by the lake. Families, boats, flags, fireworks, food, and the easy noise of people who know how the evening is supposed to go because they have done it before.

The Country Between the Headlines

That is the United States you do not get from the news. The scale. The sweetness. The excess. The local rituals. The places that make no sense until someone who loves them shows you around.

And with the World Cup happening across North America, there will be more of that kind of looking. People will come for soccer, but they will meet the country between games too. The highways, the lake towns, the giant grocery stores, the hotel breakfasts, the backyard grills.

And the hospitality.

The United States is good at that. Water on the table before you have even opened the menu. A stranger giving directions with more detail than you asked for. Someone making room for one more person at the table.

It goes both ways. The United States will get to see people beyond their headlines too. Not as countries, governments, or whatever argument was attached to them that week.

Just as fans. German fans, Colombian fans, Mexican fans, French fans, Brazilian fans, Moroccan fans. People in jerseys, waiting in lines, asking for directions, complaining about the heat, taking pictures of things Americans forgot were strange.

That is the beauty of a tournament like this. For a few weeks, the world stops being an idea. It becomes the person standing next to you, ordering fries.

Maybe that is what I like most about bottles from real places too. They push back against the easy version.

A California wine is not just “American wine.” It is fog, sun, dry hills, old vines, harvest calls, family risk, and someone deciding this piece of land was worth the trouble.

That is the part I care about. The trouble. The particular. The thing you only notice when you stop treating a country, or a bottle, like a headline.

This summer, I’ll be traveling too. When I travel, I usually drink what is local. That is part of the fun. You sit down somewhere new and let the place tell you what belongs in the glass.

At home, the job is different. You want a few bottles close by. Not hidden away for ceremony. Not waiting for the perfect dinner. Just there, ready for the small summer moments that arrive without warning.

A friend stops by. The grill is already hot. The game is on in the background. The sun is going down and nobody wants to go inside yet.

That is where the fridge door matters.

Bottles for the Summer That Actually Happens

Today’s Fridge Door Collection is built for that. Four whites and two reds. Bottles for the part of summer that actually happens: the porch, the lake, the grill, the friend who stays longer than planned, the bottle you open while something is still smoking on the fire.

Not bottles for ceremony. Bottles close enough to reach before the moment disappears.

And books, too.

In my suitcase this summer, I’m packing a couple. I’ll be in the south of France, where the wine will probably be local, cold, and exactly what the place asks for.

But the books are coming with me.

One is about the creative mind: The Creative Act by Rick Rubin. As a new father, creativity hits me in a different way now. You watch a child look at the world before everything has a name, a price, a job, or a practical use. A spoon is not just a spoon. A dog is an event. A ceiling fan is theater.

The other is Nature and Selected Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson, which feels right for a few quiet mornings in the south of France.

And with a new Anthony Bourdain movie coming, I may go back to his books too. Before the television legend, there was the writer: appetite, impatience with anything fake, and the understanding that food and drink are a way into a place.

So here is my summer request.

Send me one book recommendation you think belongs in a suitcase.

And for this weekend, pull something American from the cellar. California, Oregon, Washington, Virginia, New York, whatever fits your table.

If the fridge door is looking a little empty, today’s Fridge Door Collection is built for the long weekend, the next game, and whatever summer decides to become after that.

Happy Fourth of July,

Diego
Wine Explorer

P.S. Reply with the book I should pack for the south of France. And if your fridge door needs a few bottles for the grill, the porch, or the game, the Fridge Door Collection is ready today: four whites, two reds, and no ceremony required.