I Ate His Liver with Fava Beans and a Nice Chianti...(slurp)

(My fist blog drop from my iPhone 12!)

I did a wine presentation recently complete with a charcuterie board.  I love hostessing + doing wine presentations and just chatting people up.  Let’s face it, I’m nothing if not full of interesting and random stories.  I often times think I would make for an excellent vintner...(mainly, because I really wanna stomp in a tub of grapes so bad.). Also, I love those Netflix specials called “Som” (about the wine sommeliers/experts who can sniff some wine and tell you the grape, region, and soil type.)

(So, no, I didn’t plan this shirt before this trip to the cemetery...oh but the irony!)

FYI: Wasted Wine is an indie group from Greenville, SC...catch them on YouTube: https://youtu.be/RMMxxdKCeto

If I were a vintner in Denver I would for sure tell people about Alfred G. Packer, the “Colorado Cannibal” while they sipped from their boujie stemmed glassware.  Spoiler alert: This dude ate a lot of other dudes and admitted to it.  He confessed to cannibalism in the winter of 1974...

Alfred Packer, the OG Hannibal (1/21/1842 - 4/22/1907)

Ol’ Al was a self-proclaimed mountain guide + an American prospector, but his critics later argued he was not accomplished enough to be a guide during a winter in the Rockies (referring to him as a “poser”)!  Others said Packer took 5 men into the woods to rob them (one of them had prospecting gold/coins + a nice gun that Packer came out of the wilderness toting as if it were his own!).  Incompetent or greedy!?   Regardless, not a single one of these five men who entered the San Juans with Packer, emerged with him in the winter of 1874.  Packer originally just said the men abandoned him and gave him a gun for survival.  However, not appearing malnourished at all when he emerged, he was questioned + accused of murdering his travel companion to feast, errr umm, “survive” off their flesh.

Packer told about 3-4 different versions of what happened often changing his story even 9 years after the incident.  One story was that as the men died, the other men agreed to + also partook in cannibalism to survive (which a lot of people accepted and understood as a harsh reality of surviving winters of the west and especially a after the Donner Party cannibal fiasco during the winter of 1846-47).  What they couldn’t get over was cold-blooded murder.  The bodies were all actually found together which disproved one of Packers earlier stories that they were spread over miles and died-off one by one.  

Packer was, at first, sentenced to death.  However, at his retrial he was convicted of manslaughter and served time.  I found this super amusing: a local newspaper captured the presiding Judge MB Gerry’s sentence in the first trial:

“Stand up ya voracious man-eatin’ sonofabitch and receive yir sintince.  When ya came to Hilsfale County there was sivin Demmycrats.  But, you, yah et five of ‘em, goddamn yah.  I sintince yah t’be hanged by th’neck ontil yer dead, dead, dead, as a warnin’ ag’in reducin’ the Demmycratic populayshun of this county.  Packer, you Republican cannibal, I would sentence ya to hell but the statutes forbid it.”

Wow, harsh!

Thanks for stopping by today...clink clink, cheers!

Enjoy some photos from Packer’s final resting place + a “bomb” charcuterie board I was served in Denver:

Love, Kimmie