Louisville Magazine is Louisville's city magazine, covering Louisville people, lifestyles, politics, sports, restaurants, entertainment and homes. Includes a monthly calendar of events.
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: Their Spice of Life Since the Kentucky General Assembly rolled out its 1990s incentives, vineyards and wineries have been popping up across the Bluegrass State — with some surprising successes. "T en years ago I probably wouldn't drink a Kentucky wine," says Logan Leet, winemaker and general manager at Old 502 Winery (formerly River Bend Winery), when asked about the booming local industry. Within the last decade, vineyards and non-growing wineries like Old 502 have mushroomed across the state. Te latest count on kentuckywine.com is 65, which, Leet says, makes it hard to keep up. "Every time I go to a meeting at the Grape and Wine Council (a nine-member, state-funded body he belongs to), they have an announcement: 'We've got two more wineries,'" Leet says, "but most of these guys are tiny tiny tiny." David and Teresa Weyler's story is that of the tiny newcomer. Both have had successful careers in Louisville — he as president and coowner of Specialty Manufacturing, she as the senior systems analyst at UPS. Tey raised their two kids and lived comfortably in the Highlands in a 4,000-square-foot house, which had a built-in pool. About a decade away from retirement, they began to tire of city life. In 2003 they bought a 175-acre property in Tremble County, 40 minutes northeast of Louisville of I-71, where David could hunt and Teresa could garden and can vegetables. Te kind of people who, David says, "naturally like wind in the face," the two decided to deepen their passion for wine and start a vineyard on their now 640 acres of land. "Tis gave us the opportunity to do and learn something together," Teresa says of their "part-time retirement career." Four years of research — including visiting and volunteering at local wineries to fnd out what works and what doesn't — and many weekend projects later (renovating the original farmhouse), the Little Kentucky River Winery is now in operation. Te Weylers grow, harvest, make and bottle, and they host tastings, dinners and concerts. Financial wherewithal and years of preparation aside, though, can Kentucky-made wines possibly provide competition for the Pinots and Sauvignon Blancs put out by California, Oregon and Washington, not to mention Europe, South America and Australia? "Wine is kind of a weird product compared to other things," Leet says. "We think of wine as an agriculturally based commodity, and obviously it is, but why isn't beer thought of that way? You can make beer anywhere. Your hops and your barley don't necessarily come from here. In wine. though, (it's) 'where do your grapes come from?'" Elk Creek Vineyards and Winery in Owenton, one of the largerscale players, boasts on its website that it makes "the fnest wine Kentucky soil has to ofer," but the question then becomes, what can we expect from Kentucky soil? A history lesson may give us an idea. Tere's the little-known fact, according to A Wine Lover's Odyssey Across Kentucky — a 2012 informational and photographic book about the state's commercial wine industry — that the commonwealth was home to America's frst commercial vineyard (aptly named First Vineyard) in 1797. By the mid-1800s, Kentucky was the third-largest wine producer in the nation. (According to 2010 statistics from the federal Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau, Kentucky ranks ffth in stored wine waiting to be bottled.) "Grapes used to grow really well before Prohibition," says Leet. After that 14-year halt, the Great Depression and World War II left local wineries and vineyards for dead. Trough the '60s and well into the '70s, any attempts to revitalize the industry were unsuccessful. Ten, in 1976, the Kentucky legislature made it legal to operate commercial wineries in the state, and by the early '80s a few vineyards began yielding wine-grape harvests. Te "pioneers," as referred to in A Wine Lover's Odyssey, included Jeferson County's Broad Run Vineyards, Barker's Blackberry Hill Vineyards in Grant County, Bravard Vineyards in Christian County and Springhill Winery in Nelson County. 2.13 LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 2 9