a dishCheerwine

A cherry-flavoured soft drink — burgundy-red, sweet, with a strong black-cherry note and more carbonation than most sodas — made in Salisbury, Rowan County, North Carolina by the Carolina Beverage Corporation since 1917, and run by founder L.D. Peeler's family throughout. On a Piedmont barbecue counter it is the soda beside the tea: Lexington Barbecue lists Cheerwine and Diet Cheerwine with the Cokes, and the Barbecue Center sells it by the 10-, 16- and 32-ounce cup. It is bottled in glass with cane sugar as Retro or 'Original 1917 Formula' Cheerwine, comes as ice cream and sherbet in Food Lion, and has had its own festival in Salisbury each year since its centennial in 2017.

Two accounts of 1917 survive, and they agree on the man and the town. Wikipedia's: when the Maysville Syrup Company of Maysville, Kentucky went bankrupt that year, L. D. Peeler, Hughston Kirby, Kurt Weinmann and other investors bought its assets, moved them to North Carolina as the Carolina Syrup Company, and the same year bought a cherry-soda recipe from a St. Louis flavor salesman and sold it as Cheerwine. The company's own: Peeler made it during the wartime sugar shortage from a wild-cherry flavour a St. Louis salesman brought him, and named it for its burgundy-red colour and cheery disposition. The trademark was registered in 1926. Peeler's son Clifford took over in 1931 and kept the company profitable through the Depression; the plant moved to its present Salisbury site in July 1967; Clifford's grandsons Cliff and Mark Ritchie joined in the late 1970s, and Cliff Ritchie has headed the parent company since 1992 by Wikipedia's account, since 2007 by the company's — which makes it, by its own claim, the oldest soft-drink company still run by its founding family. The rest is reach: Pepsi distributors bottling it outside the Carolinas from 2005, a Krispy Kreme Cheerwine doughnut in July 2010, a New York Times piece on 'The Expanding Cult of Cheerwine' in 2011 with a plan the same year to be nationwide by the centennial, and a festival in downtown Salisbury from 2017 that drew over 100,000 people in 2025 and, the Salisbury Post says, $5.9 million to Rowan County.

Carbonated water, high-fructose corn syrup (cane sugar in the glass-bottle Retro line), caramel colour, phosphoric acid, natural and artificial flavours, caffeine, citric acid, sodium benzoate and Red 40, as the label read in 2021; the flavour is cherry with a black-cherry edge and the fizz is high. It is sold in glass bottles, cans, 12-packs and two-litre bottles, and as a fountain drink at some restaurants and convenience stores, Cook Out and Bojangles among them. At the barbecue counter it comes in a cup over ice with the tray; at home it goes into a Cheerwine cake — a commercial one has been baked in Salisbury since 2008 — and into a float, and with Captain Morgan rum it is a 'Captain Cheerwine'.

Lexington Barbecue: Cheerwine or Diet Cheerwine $2.90 cash, $3.00 card (September 2026); the Barbecue Center: 10 oz $2.50, 16 oz $2.90, 32 oz $3.75. Sold from Maryland to Florida and in specialty-soda shops beyond. The 2026 Cheerwine Festival was Saturday, May 16, in downtown Salisbury; Cheerwine Zero Sugar arrived in 2021 and a Cheerwine Ale with NoDa Brewing in 2023.