Wine Memories

I left the college campus the next morning in my fuel efficient rented Prius and headed for Springfield. The plan was to arrive there by nine, visit the Lincoln Library and be out no later than noon which would give me a few hours to investigate before such wineries as there were in Illinois closed. I had one more extra day, the next day, to head south for Alto Pass near Carbondale which is where the mother lode of Illinois wineries can be found. Southern Illinois, I was surprised to find out, actually has some hill country—well, they aren’t very big hills unless you compare them to the ones in Texas. Wine vines, by and large, do best on well drained soils with good aspect which uses the angle of the hillside to capture more direct rays from the sun. In Central Illinois, about all you see when driving along is corn. At one of the wineries I stopped at, I asked the proprietor, a decorated Vietnam veteran, “where are all your vines?” “We don’t grow our own grapes,” he said. “We get ‘em all from California.” For some reason, I thought this was kind of disingenuous and I asked him why he didn’t grow his own. I mean, I look forward to drinking ‘le vin du pay’, wherever I go, no matter what it’s like, just to say I’ve done it. “Well,” the farmer said, “I tried growin’ grapes. First year, the deer ate all the shoots right off the vines,” he said, sadly. He continued, “So the next year I put up some fencin’ but that didn’t stop the derned hail from destroyin’ every vine I had.” He went on, “Finally, after five years, I got some grapes to grow and even got ‘em harvested. We made some wine and then I tried it. The damn stuff tasted like corn.” Well Farmer John’s wine now tasted like cheap California Central Valley plonk, which is what it was, at more than twice the price. One begins at some point to cease wondering why California retailers do not sell Illinois-made wine. But I wasn’t finished with my quest, not even in Illinois.