King tells his lover that he’ll make her “sparkle like strawberry wine” in “The Beginning of the End.” David Allen Coe’s “Tennessee Whiskey,” covered by George Jones and most recently Chris Stapleton, uses strawberry wine to paint the portrait of a woman who saves him from drinking. Charley Pride’s “Pirogue Joe” drinks strawberry wine alongside po’boys, as do fans waiting for a Paul McCartney concert in his “Venus and Mars/Rock Show.” B.B. Strawberry wine appeared in Townes Van Zandt’s devastating “Sixteen Summers, Fifteen Falls,” the story of a young lover’s suicide. (One such track has strawberry wine keeping company with plows, horses, cowboy hats, trucks, CMT, and fishing holes.)īut there are stand-outs, too. Not all songs in the playlist transcend: Macho behavior and sexist tropes abound, and plenty of artists pile strawberry wine onto a pyre of Southern clichés. The phrase likely entered the pop music lexicon in 1960 with “lips like strawberry wine” in Johnny Burnett’s “You’re 16.” Since then, more than a hundred songs have referenced strawberry wine. When it comes to lyrics, the strawberry wine catalog is much broader.
There have also been seven post-Carter songs titled “Strawberry Wine,” including one from Pat Benatar, released in 1997. Strawberry wine, however, isn’t the exclusive property of country music or Deana Carter, whose hit was preceded by four songs of the same name, most notably the Band’s 1970 ode to hard drinking. “I was trying to think of all the songs that people have sung about drinking, and I was like, ‘If we don’t put strawberry wine in this song, is it even a country song?’” she says. In “Rosé,” Guyton’s modern-day ladies’ drinking anthem, she insists on a “pretty in pink” glass of wine but reminds listeners: “There’s always a time for strawberry wine / But it ain’t that time right now,” a fan-girl homage to Carter. Breakout country star Mickey Guyton agrees: “When I think of the phrase strawberry wine, I immediately think of Deana Carter.” Even though Guyton was thirteen in 1996, and didn’t fully understand the lyrics, “it definitely made me feel something in my heart,” she says.
“That’s a specific life experience, if you know that song,” says Elizabeth Cook, a singer-songwriter and host of Outlaw Country on Sirius XM. A quarter-century of radio airplay, heartfelt covers, and belted karaoke choruses have cemented Carter and her “Strawberry Wine” as essential country, iconic in the truest sense.
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