O’Fallon Illinois
My last night away from home! A rather uneventful drive across Kansas and Missouri today. There is still some snow left on the ground from the storm that passed through the area a day before I did on my way out.
I stopped at the Stone Hill outlet store and bought four bottles of their Vidal Blanc wine. Stone Hill is a winery in Hermann Missouri. Way back when, Germans moved to Hermann, a small town on the Missouri River and started making wine. The climate is similar to the climate along the Rhine so the wineries make a lot of sweet white wines. The Vidal Blanc is a dry white that tastes a lot like Pinot Grigio. The predominant red grape is the Norton which they think prolly came from Virginia. The Norton wine tastes a lot like a Syrah. An interesting fun fact: Missouri root stock saved the French wine industry. French vineyards were decimated by an insect called phylloxera. American vines were resistant so Missouri vines were sent to France and grafted to the French vines. Yay Missouri!
I also had to stop at a Dierbergs grocery store and buy some gooey butter cake to take back to Atlanta. It’s sumpin’ you can only find in St. Louis. It can be frozen, so I’ll eat one and freeze the other two and eat later.
Looking forward to getting home tomorrow.
Thanks for the French fun fact, Denny. It happened in 1870. In Monpellier, France put a statue of a young woman cradling an old woman in her arms, the New World saving the Old World. It was actually an American invasion. And you never left the soil. Missouri is in every bottle of French wine want it or not.
It will be good to see you back at home, resting on your laurels.
Dierbergs? You should have stopped at Lubeley’s.
Mom always got her gooey butter cakes from Dierbergs. I’ve never tasted the ones from Lubeley’s. I stayed right next to a Dierbergs so it was easy.
Drive carefully and enjoy your butter cake. Makes me think of Last Tango in Paris.
Sounds like you had a great trip, I’ve been keeping up reading each day. Safe travels, seems like you’ve had a wonderful time. Hope the anxiety stuff stays away for a long time.
Yeah – leave it to Missouri to fail to mention the mountains of Texas Mustang Vine stock sent to France! http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/861474/posts
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_wine
A couple of sites to help enlighten the readers đ
It’s amusing that wiki/Texas and wiki/Missouri each took full credit for the French vineyards “Reconstitution” (as it was termed), without mentioning one another. đ
Lifting my Châteauneuf-du-Pape to the good health of the American root stock. Yay, USA!
Actually it was a Missourian who did it. There is a statue in Montpellier France of the guy. I’m too lazy to look him up. I remember reading about him when the restaurant reviewer in the St. Louis Post Dispatch wrote the story back when I was still living in St. Louis pre 1985.
wow, I haven’t been to Hermann in 35+ years.
I wish you had picked up some of Stone Hill’s Norton wines to compare with Geogia’s Three Sisters and Crane Creek’s Nortons. First of all you need to understand that most Norton wines need to age in bottle five-to-seven years. Upon opening the wine needs to breathe 40 minutes of so. Are you catching onto your delima? An exception to this may be Westphaliaâs offerings which are near drink now wines. We are now just opening our 2006 Stone Hill Nortons, 2007 Georgia Crane Creek âHellbenderâ Norton, 2005 Virginia Chrysalis Locksley Reserve Norton, etc. Yes, a Norton wine can become subtle with even a bit of finesse, but Doug Frost, a Kansas City wine writer and Norton fan, describes the wine as âpowerful, muscular, crazy intense in malic acid and capable of staining teeth or even wineglasses. [The wine is] probably something most drinkers have to learn to love, with its rough and rustic personality often evident. There are an increasing number of Nortons that taste modern, clean and even sleek.â After tasting over 130 Norton wines, we have found several exceptional examples. I really like how Kim , a Madison, WI journalist stated an introduction to Norton wines as âI love the way [Norton] wine becomes an example of what it means to be American, a symbol of a country and a cultureâ after reading Todd Klimanâs The Wild Vine.
Yep! I know that about Nortons which is why I didn’t buy any this trip. I opened a 2005 Stone Hill Norton last year and it drank really well.