Indiana Wine Trail Fall Haul

Saturday was a beautiful warm Fall day for Indiana.  It was a perfect day to head to Southern Indiana for visiting some wineries.  There are 6 wineries on Indiana's Wine Trail (although there are about 50 total wineries in Indiana) that do special events periodically throughout the year.  In the Fall, they all do something called Fall Haul - they feature wines either in recipes or pair them with recipes.  They feature the food and the wine.  It sounded like fun and a good time for Lane and I to have some adult time without the kids.

We invited my sister, Edite along for the ride.  In all my years as an Indiana resident before I moved away, I have spent very little time venturing to other areas of the state.  Besides spending time in Bloomington during college and the Indiana metroplex, I haven't seen much of Indiana.  Completely disappointing since I'm proud to call myself a Hoosier.  Upon moving back I made the decision that I wanted to take more day or weekend trips to areas undiscovered.

In our adventures on Saturday we found that Indiana tends to produce wines that are either on the semi-sweet or sweet side or are fairly dry.  Not that I mind sweet wines, but they are not necessarily my first pick.  There were some wineries that we really liked, others we'll never buy wines from.  One thing I'd like to see is some Indiana wineries maybe import some grapes to blend with the sweeter grapes.  I think one of the reasons Indiana wines are sweeter is because the soil is more conducive to growing a sweeter grape variety.  By far my favorite Indiana winery is still Oliver Winery.  Their wines are sweeter but unlike the majority of the wines we tasted on Saturday from the 5 wineries we visited are that they're not overly/sickly sweet to me.

We came home with 4 bottles of wine.  There were others we would've liked to have bought but it just wasn't in our budget right now.  So we'll start looking for them in local groceries.  One winery we visited that was my 2nd favorite of the day doesn't sell in stores because they can't keep up with the demand.  So we'll have to get in touch with them directly to ship to us or make another trip.  We're hoping to visit other Indiana wineries and maybe even start making trips to Illinois since they have quite a few wineries there too that I've been told are pretty good.

Some of my photos are from a few of the wineries.  Unfortunately, the wineries around here aren't the typical wineries with tasting rooms in California that we encountered.  And yes, one of the wineries had already started decorating for Christmas but their decorations were pretty cool.  A few of the photos are from downtown Madison.  I wish I would've had more time to walk around and take photos of the amazing older buildings and homes.  I guess that's one thing I love about this state - the smaller towns have so much history and character.  My other slight disappointment was that I had hoped So. Indiana still had quite a few leaves on their trees but most of the color was gone.  Actually, I think more trees were missing leaves there than up here in the Indy area.  Oh well, might just have to see Fall down their earlier next year!  I can't wait to keep exploring around the state.