I keep a 20-year-old bottle of scuppernong wine at the rear of my liquor cabinet, behind the Southern Comfort, alongside the cranberry-flavored rum. I didn't intend to banish it there. But in the year that has passed since I first popped the cork and poured a glass, as I've jockeyed bottles front and back during dinner parties, that's where it settled.

You have to look hard to spot the ragged cork stopper among the bourbons and ryes, not to mention the fortified wines, the madeiras, the sherries, the ports. That, by the way, is what my bottle of scuppernong recalls: a musky fortified wine that's high in sugar, and, as a result, shelf stable. That's shelf stable as in able to survive 20 years sealed in the bottle, and another year after the initial cork pull.

I opened my scuppernong after discovering it, wreathed in dust and stashed at the back of my father's kitchen cupboard. My father didn't make that bottle of wine. In fact, he's not quite sure how he came to claim it. But, in the 1960s, he grew scuppernongs on an arbor behind our house in Clinton, in Middle Georgia. And he made wine from those grapes well into the 1970s.

That bottle seemed, at first, a token of that time. I took to thinking of it as a product of his hands. I pondered pasting on one of the old labels that my mother designed, the ones that read Clinton Cellars, Edge's Private Stock. But I never did. I just pulled the bottle out every few months and drank a ceremonial thimbleful.

Truth be told, a few thimbles may be my current limit. I rarely drink much scuppernong nowadays. But I do respect the scuppernong vignerons who came before me. And I wonder, each time I pour a glass from a bottle gobbed with sugar, whether we Southerners are capable of making a great dry wine from native grapes.

Yes, I know some vintners are trying. (The brut sparkling muscadine from Chesser Island Winery near Folkston is a good start.) And yet I wonder, somewhat wistfully, if there's more progress to be made. Or should I just take my lumps (of sugar) and settle for something that might be best described as a scuppernong port, or maybe a scuppernong sherry?