The Wine & Cheese Cask on Washington Street has been a Somerville staple since 1969, providing customers with not just wine and cheese, but deli meats and sandwiches. Around the sandwich-making area are two neon green stickers distracting anyone attempting to order a banh mi, Rustic Royal or Beif Ericson. “I left my heart in the G.W.A.C.C.A.,” and “The G.W.A.C.C.A. is for lovers.”
Those bold black words stand for “Greater Wine & Cheese Cask Area.”
The store is at 407 Washington St., Somerville, hovering between Harvard, Inman, Union and Porter squares at the Cambridge border. That may make the area seem like “the center of nothing,” as the store’s Andy Hunt said, but it has a name shared by residents around the Cask, Savenor’s butcher shop, Dali and Lehrhaus restaurants, PRB Boulangerie and other businesses where the two cities meet at Beacon and Kirkland streets: Kirkland Village. (On the other side of Beacon, where Kirkland Street becomes Washington Street, Somerville’s Duck Village neighborhood can also claim the Cask; it arguably encompasses everything from the store to Union Square.)
Should the neighborhood get ready for rebranding? Hunt, cheesemonger and specialty foods buyer at the Wine & Cheese Cask, said no.
It was not employees at the family business who printed the stickers, but an unknown group of enthusiastic Harvard graduate students.
About a year ago a Harvard professor walked into the store to buy sandwiches for her students, mentioning they had a wild term for the area: the G.W.A.C.C.A.; it was news to the staff. But six months later, a group of students proved the professor right, walking in to drop off the G.W.A.C.C.A stickers. “This wasn’t even the group that had made them,” Hunt said, but he was happy to put them up: “I thought these would blend in with all the other stickers I put around the store.”
“We do display the stickers proudly,” Hunt said, and G.W.A.C.C.A. is just a nicely “funny sounding word.”
He underestimated their influence. Customers and neighbors noticed the stickers and started picking up on the term. “We love being part of the G.W.A.C.C.A.,” said Margaret Sargent, a Savenor’s butcher.
Cask employees themselves feel uncomfortable promoting the idea, though. With the Harvard students having moved out in September, Hunt said, no more stickers are coming and an expansion of the G.W.A.C.C.A. into smootlike popular usages is unlikely.
Hunt is happy enough with the term living and dying with one group of now dispersed students and never knowing the origins. “Sometimes the mystery is fun on its own,” he said.
A stronger
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