Purple Possum Winery

Navasota ,TX

The grape arbor at the edge of the property has purple Texas Muscadine grapes. Now, one thing about those Muscadines- they are PURPLE, and anything they touch tends to be purple, too. We picked grapes that day, de-stemmed a bunch and crushed them. Then, in the middle of putting them away we got distracted by I-don’t-remember-what (probably deviled eggs). It was evening time about then and we forgot about the bucket we’d left on the porch. Until the loud crash, and all of us were scrambling for the porch to see what had happened. We reached the porch to find our bucket of crushed grapes off the table and all over the porch. I was thinking “well, we thought about painting the porch??? when I saw the cause of the catastrophe. It was a small bundle of fur and a hairless tail. I also smelled it about then (phew). The possum had apparently decided to investigate our grapes and had somehow managed to drench itself. Startled by the fall or the noise or our appearance it was “playing possum??? in the middle of the crushed grapes. We had lost that bucket of produce, but we gained a genuine Muscadine-colored possum. We saw him from time to time out on the porch. There was no mistaking him. Even months later, the grape stain was in his fur, making him a Possum of a Different Color. Of course, when the question of a name came up for the winery it was only natural to think of our little nocturnal visitor with the very visible taste for our goods, so…