When deciding on where to go on holiday this year, we thought we might avoid planes. You see, the antics of Captain Crapshispants has made travelling in the air a bit more unreliable. We didn’t relish sitting on a tarmac. No, we thought we might stay on the ground and get around somewhere by train. This led us to the eastern part of the Czech Republic: southern Moravia.

Southern Moravia is known for its white wine, hearty food, chateaus, and for cyclists – seriously, they’re like ants at a picnic. Basically, southern Moravia is like the Czech Republic’s Italy for people who don’t want to leave the country. Since a good chunk of the local tourist draw is wine, we decide to do a private wine tour on the first day we’re there. This is because the most I know about wine is that if you buy the twisty guys you won’t end up with cork in your drink.    

Anna picks us up at 11 am. She has an easy smile and a calm demeanor. This might be because she’s built like a professional volleyball player and can just throw us all into a vineyard if we cause any trouble. Anna tells us the deal: a vineyard, a winery, another vineyard, and then a cellar.

We pull into a vineyard outside of Mikulov. We get to drinking fast, a decision of which I approve immensely. The landscape is a mix of plush and arid. It’s spaces of baked earth next to vast vineyards and rows of grapevines, all under limestone cliffs. One might expect Don Corleone to meander by in a white shirt and a vest and a terrifying look in his eyes. But that doesn’t happen.

What does happen is the beginning of our wine education. Anna tells us what we’ve looking at and what it adds to the local wine. (Limestone regulates water, minerality, acidity, and also looks really cool.) She explains that the heat – while pounding down on us – actually helps the wine quite a bit. I soon feel the heady rush of learning . . . though there’s a chance it’s the four glasses of wine we’ve had since stopping nine minutes before.  

The dog? Well, the dog is like me. (Yes, she’s short-legged, white, pug-nosed, and hairy, but that’s not what I mean.) She too likes basking in the sun . . . for a few seconds before realizing that she hates heat and the sun and sweating and instead wishes she was in that Twilight Zone where the Earth has snapped off its axes and is flying away from the sun. On the other hand, there’s all this dirt to roll around in. She does that for a while.

It’s at our third stop – another vineyard, after a winery – that the now significant volumes of wine coursing through my veins begins to have an effect on me. This time, the dog and I ask permission to go off and look at the grapevines. We are granted such access. A diminutive wine glass dangles from my fingers, a crisp Welsh Reisling sloshing around in it. The dog’s overwhelmed by the new scents and all the new pokey things that can jab her in the eye and cost me a few thousand Koruna. She approaches a grapevine and then honors it, evidently, by flopping onto her back and rolling around in its subservient soil.

Today is the Fourth of July and America’s 250^th birthday. And a lot of us are just not feeling it. Oh, I get it. America is divided, we are torn and entrenched, and peanut butter is too expensive. Worse still, this division is seemingly encouraged and proliferated by Jabba the President sitting in the Oval Office. Not since Jack McCloskey chucked me a bang snap at the block party watermelon table in 1986 have I shed so many tears on a July 4^th.

But if there is a July 4 holiday lesson, it’s perseverance. America has faced tough times before and has fought through. Sure, we did so through rebellion, tenacity, and will. But we also did so through debate, discussion of ideas, communication, and working together. And that’s why today’s hammered history looks at the unsung hero of the American Revolution – taverns.

There’s no way to overestimate the importance of taverns in colonial America. First, you went there to drink your weight in rum. But they also served as post offices, courts, hotels, political meeting places, and local newspapers. Taverns in America served a similar purpose to that of coffee houses in London. They were petri dishes of society, throwing together a mix of people, opinions, and probably body odors. Since everyone shared tables, unlikely neighbors rubbed elbows. Literate drinkers read the news to illiterate table mates. It was a place to drink and talk.

It’s not hard to see a dark parallel to today. We no longer sit face to face and talk. We chat with people from behind keyboards and at the first whiff of disagreement we resort to sending complete strangers seething epithets whose lacking wit is made up for with CURSES IN ALL-CAPS. Dialogue has become a thing as mythic as Santa Claus, the Jersey Devil, or a republican politician with a spinal column. In our separate places, we are being pitted against one another by those in charge – whose greatest fear is open discussion amongst us who disagree. What we need is to talk. What we need is a drink face to face with someone we may not agree with.

What we the people need is a tavern.

In colonial America, it was not hard to find one. You could throw a rock backwards and hit a tavern door. Or, more likely, knock the tricorn hat off a drunk guy standing in a tavern doorway. In 1776 Philadelphia alone there were more than 120 taverns, inns, and ordinaries. Considering there were between 30,000–40,000 people living in the city, this makes about one place of drinking for every 250–300 Philadelphians. Because we the people apparently believed that democracy worked best within spitting distance of a tavern.