EVERY YEAR, I MAKE VENISON STEW FOR ABOUT 30 PEOPLE
the day after Thanksgiving. It’s become a time-honored
tradition, if 15 or 20 years of doing so counts as time-
honored. I am able to do this because my uncle-in-law
is basically a WASP banker with strong good ol’ boy ten-
dencies, and he spends much of his free time shooting
things; the trailer hitch of his SUV is a brass plate that
looks like the end of a 10-gauge shotgun shell. Last year,
on the day I was actually making the stew, I ran out to get
gas for my car, and the local deer community decided to
exact retribution for all those years of stewing up their
relatives with juniper berries, mushrooms, onions, and
so on. (Evidently deer do not have a sense of humor when
it comes to being turned into stew.) The deer chosen for
the honor did a kamikaze bolt into the front driver’s side
of my car, destroying the car (and itself) but failing to kill
me in the process. Ha! Nice try. I went back, finished up
the stew, served it to everyone, and headed out the next
day to look for a new car. Take that, you furry bastards.
—RAY ISLE, EXECUTIVE WINE EDITOR