At the New Albany Farmers Market on Saturday morning, both the Indian Creek Winery and Best Vineyards were on hand. Both are small, local farm wineries. They seemed to be doing a brisk trade.
In Indiana, wineries set up and conduct their trade at farmers markets, and what they're doing is both legal and generally lauded. Meanwhile, small breweries are not permitted to follow suit. Presumably, this discrepancy owes to a lingering suspicion on the part of undereducated legislators that while wineries make a product suitable for civilization, breweries corrode civilization with malt liquor and keg stands.
Note that the state representative for NABC's legislative district is Ed Clere, who labors mightily to change the discriminatory law governing breweries at the farmers market. He is to be applauded for this, and there'll be another spin of the wheel next spring.
In my world, wineries and breweries are precisely the same, except that one uses grapes and fruit to render adult libations, while the other deploys grain. After all, fermentation is a natural process. The continued existence of one set of rules for small wineries and another for small breweries is plainly ludicrous.
Parity. Why is this such a difficult concept?
