In Praise of the Regional Soda

It's the Cheerwine edition.

Despite a lifetime of drinking Cheerwine—thousands of cans¹—I have never quite been able to describe the taste.

The easiest place to start is the fact that it’s cherry-flavored. But the cherry is more prominent than in, say, a Cherry Coke, except saying that invokes a kind of syrupy, cloying sweetness, and that’s all wrong here. In fact, one of Cheerwine’s virtues is that it manages to be fruit-forward without being overly sweet at all, I think. The cherry flavor is a little subtler, a little darker. It’s a bit closer to black cherry. Just… not. “It’s got a depth of flavor with this cherry beginning and a root-y ending—almost like a cross between Cherry Coke and Dr Pepper, but better, obviously,” the chef Vivian Howard told Eater in 2017. It’s not quite like a root beer. But I know exactly what she means by “root-y,” though I struggle to think of how I would define that in my own terms, and I do feel the two flavors are more blended than that quote might suggest. In any event, Howard was right about the fact that it’s better than anything that might be comparable. And Cheerwine’s best feature isn’t the flavor profile, anyway. It’s the carbonation. This is where it really separates itself: It’s noticeably bubblier than most other sodas, and when I think of cracking open a can, I think not of the cherry-ish-root-y taste but of the perfect, decadent fizz. You can hear a Cheerwine.

This is an Instagram post I made in 2016 and, also, my favorite way to drink Cheerwine: in an ice-cold glass bottle. (The cold is so important! Even more so than it is for most sodas, imo, to really maximize the delight of the carbonation.)

I don’t want to play favorites too much here on The Soda Fountain—I’m here because I love a great many types of soda!—but Cheerwine is, well, my favorite. It always has been. I love the versatility of Diet Coke, the zip of ginger ale enjoyed on a plane, the relief of a Fresca on a hot day. None of them touch Cheerwine for me.

If you know anything about Cheerwine, and nothing about me, this is probably enough for you to guess that I grew up in North Carolina. It’s a product of the Carolina Beverage Company, a name that more or less gives the game away here, and it’s based in Salisbury, N.C., where Cheerwine was created in 1917. Which, for much of the soda’s existence, meant that it was moderately to very hard to find Cheerwine anywhere besides North Carolina and other parts of the Southeastern U.S.²

But this has changed. Cheerwine began expanding its footprint in 2011, thanks to a distribution deal with Pepsi, and it’s become far more broadly available over the last decade. If still not commonly accessible nationwide, it’s at least a hell of a lot easier to track down, no matter where you are. I now live in Washington, D.C., and I’ve seen Cheerwine for sale here not only in glass bottles in speciality stores but also in 12-packs of cans in regular groceries. And, sure, D.C. isn’t that far from Carolina Beverage Company HQ. But considering that it used to be all but impossible to find cans outside of the Carolinas and Georgia—that’s a big change.

Which, in theory, should be a dream scenario for me, a person who spent her formative years guzzling Cheerwine and has since moved away but would like to continue enjoying it and ensuring its existence for years to come. In theory! And yet.

I’ve found myself pulling back from Cheerwine whenever I see it anywhere other than North Carolina. At first, I wondered if this was some kind of small-minded provincialism on my part, a weird, aimless purity test. It’s silly. I love Cheerwine. I miss having it as regularly as I did for more or less the entirety of my childhood and young adulthood. I should want to pick one up whenever I have the chance! There is no real coherent principle behind my discomfort here. But it’s proved curiously strong. My love of Cheerwine is more conditional than I’d figured: It’s my favorite soda everywhere, all the time, but I only want to drink it at home.

Despite my love for a glass bottle, most of my lifetime Cheerwine consumption has come in cans of Diet, like this. (Yes, they rebranded “Diet” as “Zero” in 2021, it’s forever Diet in my heart.)

I’ve thought about this quite a bit. (More than I should probably admit to, considering that all of that thinking has yet to result in a definitive, fully-formed answer.) I guess what it comes down to is this: I like a sense of place. I like the idea that some kind of texture, some friction, can still exist on the national map. I realize this can be something of a pointless virtue to endorse in and of itself: I get that regional products might increasingly anachronistic, or even kind of self-indulgent, when the internet just ends up flattening everything, anyway. But it’s nice to have a sense of where you are.³ This means I like regional sodas in general. I love having a Big Red in Texas, or a Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray in New York⁴, and I’ve never had a Moxie while in New England, but I know I’d love to try one. I like to pop open a can and understand exactly where I am.

Each of those regional sodas is somebody’s favorite, I’m sure. But Cheerwine is mine. There’s no grand connection passed down through generations here: My parents moved to North Carolina in 1999, with me and my sister in preschool, and I later found Cheerwine as I might have any preteen obsession. But this one stuck. More than any other soda for me, Cheerwine comes with a host of memories and experiences that I find impossible to separate from the taste (or the carbonation). Each individual can is braided with the taste of however many hundreds of past ones enjoyed on patio tables and in cupholders and passed between hands. If “comfort soda” feels like a misnomer for a drink whose biggest selling point is its audible, frenetic bubbliness, well, it’s comfort to me. And I do miss it. But isn’t it nice to have something to miss? It offers a bigger, more expansive definition of home than you find attached to any one building or city or state, and besides, it offers something to come home to. I drink only a handful of Cheerwines each year now. And every one tastes perfect.

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To everyone who subscribed after the first issue of The Soda Fountain last week — thank you so much! Not to get too sappy about this, but I really did start this project just for me, and I had no clue if anyone would have any interest in reading about soda. It was genuinely touching to see that so many of you did. I have some ideas lined up, but if you have a favorite soda or soda experience or soda mystery for me to solve (?!?!), lemme know. Comments are open for all my fellow enthusiasts. Have a good weekend! And if you’re in North Carolina, drink a Cheerwine for me.

1. I had a three-a-day habit for some of high school that’s doing the heavy lifting here

2. Technically, up to 2011, Cheerwine’s own trucks delivered in North Carolina, South Carolina, and select regions of Georgia and Virginia, per the New York Times, in a blog post delightfully headlined “The Expanding Cult of Cheerwine”

3. Spent a few seconds here wondering if Bill Bradley has ever had the privilege of enjoying a Cheerwine—probably not? though anyone in national politics is probably encouraged to try local drinks when they’re out and about? so maybe?—only to search “Bill Bradley soda” and learn that he’s not supposed to have caffeine because of an irregular heartbeat, even in small amounts, like in cream soda! I’m sorry, Bill Bradley, I bet you’d have loved Cheerwine otherwise.

4. Okay, okay, I do enjoy Cel-Ray here in D.C. quite a bit. (The deli on my block sells it, and it’s my go-to with a sandwich.) But it feels more special to drink it in New York!