Lammers: "Southern Indiana wineries offer variety and quality."

Bank Street Brewhouse has been selling Turtle Run Winery's locally crafted wines from inception, and will continue to do so. Some Huber products have been sprinkled in, too, as well as wines and ciders from the Thomas Family Winery in Madison. I'd still like to expand the local wine list, as was ventured briefly in the fall of 2009; my vision and reasoning remain the same, but we just haven't gotten there quite yet. We will.

On the trail of a good vintage: Southern Indiana wineries offer variety and quality, Braden Lammers (News and Tribune)

... The more recognition the wines receive, and as the reputation of the quality of wine that is being made spreads, the expectation is that the Uplands Wine Trail will become a destination for both locals and tourists.

But the initial step, getting people to leave their local wine shop or supermarket to visit the local wineries, may be the most difficult.

“That is the struggle, getting folks out to try local wines,” (Wilbert) Best said.

C-J's Dale Moss: "A place to eat as well as to live."

Dale could write precisely the same column, substituting "beer" for "food" at every juncture. Fine piece from a real area pro.

Southern Indiana: A place to eat as well as to live, by Dale Moss (Courier-Journal)

I need, too, to be more adventuresome with restaurants, like with colors of socks or TV shows. Marty Rosen tells me Southern Indiana offers its share of good food, a larger share than usual or ever before. He urges me – and I pass along the challenge – to take a chance on our increasing choices. We need to believe in, to take pride in, the cuisine of our own communities.

A renewed commitment to Southern Indiana wineries promised at the Bank Street Brewhouse.

I expend very little energy thinking about wine. This isn’t because I don’t like wine. It’s because I prefer beer, and having become renowned for preferring beer – in essence, being paid to drink beer – it’s what I drink and think most of the time.

Not all of the time, though, and drinking wine is an enjoyable busman’s holiday for me. Much of the reason why wine is enjoyable for me in limited doses is because I know comparatively little about it. It may be true that I know a bit more than I let on, and yet, overall, my knowledge base is rudimentary. I aim to keep it that way, not out of malice, but rather out of triage. I’ve neither the time nor the liver to become “expert” at a second drinking discipline.

These considerations matter because of a decision we made about the newest of our two businesses, Bank Street Brewhouse. Our goal with Bank Street Brewhouse is to accompany Chef Josh Lehman’s formidable cuisine with the beers we brew at BSB and the original garage brewhouse three miles away. It is a measure of how admirably Josh has succeeded in the kitchen that customers ask for a wine list, presumably having been trained to think that such high quality of food could not possibly be consumed without wine, as opposed to beer.

This is an errant assumption, and one that we’ll change with time. In the interim, we have not neglected the output of the vineyard. Rather, we have taken the position that if our locally produced beer stands the test of pairing with Josh’s culinary creations, so do local wines being handcrafted throughout Southern Indiana and wineries like Huber, Turtle Run, Thomas Family, Winzerwald, Butler, Best, Oliver and several others.

I can tally these wineries here without cribbing off the Internet, primarily because in the past year and a half, I’ve visited all of them save for Best and a couple others not listed here. At each there were greater and lesser wines, but the point is that at their best, these wineries make excellent products worthy of featuring as part of our effort to emphasize local beers and foodstuffs that come from small, independent or family-run operations.

We’re trying to stay consistent with these principles as it is possible to do so. Why should Southern Indiana wines be treated any differently? My own taste buds tell me that while there surely are classic wines from time-honored wine making areas of the world that are “better” than these, and I use that term rationally yet guardedly, locally made wines are good and getting better. They fit the bill conceptually, and I believe some of them are better than just “good.” Besides, a grape like Chambourcin is one grown right here. That’s local. That’s the point, isn’t it?

As with the tendency at one time for beer drinkers to prefer imports over American-made craft beers, I suspect there is an element of snobbery in this prejudice, which provides even more reason for me to reject the notion that for the BSB wine list to be suitable, there must be selections from somewhere else. This is bunk. I’m advising staff that we’re making a renewed effort to build a wine list that features Southern Indiana wines, and I believe we shall make it slightly larger than I first envisioned. Yes, BSB is all about NABC beer, but not to the exclusion of other local products worth enjoying and savoring. Come to think of it, shifting this knowledge back to the original location is a very good idea, too.

If I have to visit these Southern Indiana wineries again, and go through all those samplings a second time, I’m willing to make the sacrifice in the name of science, and local commerce. It's exhausting. Someone must do it.

Cheers.

Indiana Uplands Wine Trail

Wineries of Indiana

New Southern Indiana wineries.

My favorite all-time package store name was attached to an off-license in Skibbereen, Ireland: The Grape and the Grain.

My world’s the latter, and I’m prepared as ever to argue on its behalf, but as evidence that wine is enjoying a resurgence locally:

Southern Indiana sprouts bumper crop of wineries; The word is spreading on the grapevine, by Grace Schneider (Courier-Journal)

The grand opening of the Best Vineyards Winery north of Elizabeth "was a great day" and "a lot of work" said (Wilbert) Best, a UPS computer programmer.

It also marked something of a trend in Southern Indiana.

No one is calling the region a mini-Napa Valley, but it is quickly becoming the state's largest grape producer, with a bumper crop of six new wineries opened or planned to open, from last fall through June 2009.

They join roughly a dozen established wineries within about 90 miles of downtown Louisville.

Tish Dean is our new World Class Beverages sales rep.

If you are a resident beer aficionado in Southern Indiana, by which I mean east of New Albany toward Madison and points beyond, and west to Evansville and perhaps even New Harmony, the state’s largest wholesaler of craft beers and imports has very good news for you.

Our part of the state now has a World Class Beverages sales rep whose exclusive job it is to work the Southern Indiana territory, which quite frankly (and WCB would agree) has been neglected in the past.

Her name is Tish Dean, and we’ve known her for years around NABC, Rich O’s and Sportstime. We finally had a chance to touch base in a professional capacity yesterday, and I’m confident in saying that her arrival bodes well for the expansion of good beer availability in our neck of the woods.

The reason? In the past, accounts like my pub and Todd (Keg Liquors) Antz’s certainly have been serviced by WCB, and often quite well, but never by a full-time sales rep who wasn’t spending much of his or her available time in other markets (Bloomington, et al). Or, as has been the case recently, we’ve worked with someone in the office (the inimitable Bob Mack) who is right on target with our needs, but again, has other jobs to do and no time to expand the company’s mandate.

Tish’s responsibility will be to expand the presence of craft beer and imports in locales and establishments that previously had no one to do business with directly. She reports that in her brief travels around the area to date, many bar and package store owners are expressing interest in the idea of broadening the selection. They simply require appropriate information and personal attention of the sort that only a full-time rep can provide to people who don’t come into the game with their own self-motivated good beer skill sets.

Down here in Hickland, the rising tide will be lifting all our boats for years to come, so good luck to Tish – I think it’s going to be a revelatory experience for all of us.