| I put three plans together to go wine tasting while in Missouri. We usually love the wines from the Hermann Trail area along with the wines from around the town of Augusta, so that would be our first stop. Since we had a couple of weeks to work and play while here, I thought I would try to sneak in a couple of other areas, tasting around the St. James area and also the Ste. Genevieve area. | |
| Our first stop was in the Augusta area after Jim got
off of work for the day. If we had time, we would then head
over to the Hermann area or save it for another day. May 21, 2008 |
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| The Klondike Cafe is in the Montelle Winery, what a way to go, we bought a sandwich and shared it (it was huge) and then we went back in and did a little wine tasting. | The tasting room at Montelle. They can accomodate a lot of people. That's Jim standing to the right waiting for me to get my picture taken so that we can go and eat :) they have a great patio to the right of the tasting room, we took our sandwich out there and enjoyed the view and the outdoors. |
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| Next was Augusta, one of my original favorites. Come to find out on this trip, the wine maker at Augusta is the same one at Montelle. Hummmm | The white building on the left is the tasting room at Balducci's. The tent is for the live music they have on the weekends. Almost all of the wineries have music or something going on during the weekends. |
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| We found time to run down to Robller because we passed on a couple of other wineries in the Augusta area. Robller is a very friendly place to visit | A view of part of the vineyard at Robller looking over the bearded Iris and down to the bandstand area. |
| I hate to say it, but we were a little disappointed
in the tasting of this area this time :( Jim said he didn't
like anything, though we did buy a couple of bottles. I wasn't
enamoured either, I think part of it is because they lost 60 - 80%
of their grapes last year over Easter (a huge freeze after the bud
break) and they had to find grapes elsewhere. Some just didn't
make wine, some purchased grapes from Michigan, Washington, or
California, or just brought out older vintages from their libraries.
What ever the reason, we just didn't buy as much as usual. I
would normally come out of Augusta with a case, I bought 1 bottle! We never made it over to the Hermann Trail area (Stone Hill, Adam Puchta, Hermannhoff). I figured we probably should try some new places instead. The following week we drove down to the St. James area, we had never tasted down here before and wanted to try something new. |
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May 29, 2008
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| St. James Winery is the largest producer in Mid-Missouri (so they say). They will produce about 200k cases of wine this year. The tasting room is fairly large and the people were very friendly. We actually poured our own wine to taste with someone watching over us (in small plastic pill cups :P ) I guess they don't like doing dishes. | Just down the street was Meramec Winery, named for the river running through the area. They had a small bistro inside for lunch a pretty small tasting room. We enjoyed chatting with the gal pouring our wine. |
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| The front of Meramec, that is a grape vine trailing over the front door and you could see the tiny, itty, bitty clusters of grapes if you looked hard enough. | This is the front entrance to Ferrigno Winery. It definitely is in a very old barn but very picturesque. |
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| The sitting area for Ferrigno for enjoying the outside, Jim is looking at the entrance to do the tasting. The barn was very musty smelling inside where we did the tasting and I am not sure it didn't affect how the wine tasted. This winery is for sale if you want to get into the business :) | Our next to the last stop was Heinrichshaus, way out in the boonies and I am not exaggerating! We had to press a buzzer (one unit of a walkie talkie set) to get their attention. They were out in the vineyard mowing down the weeks between the vines. |
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| This is Heinrich :) we had so much fun talking with him! He has been making his wine for over 30 years and pretty much knows his stuff. He never went to school for it, just on the job training. We enjoyed his wines. As we were talking, he picked a couple of ticks (Yewwww) off his legs from when he was out mowing (double yewwww some more!). | We fit this winery in, it was just down the road at the next town of Steeleville. Not much to write about, but we enjoyed the drive and the scenery. I sat next to the winery cat at I was trying the various wines. Actually, the dry whites were pretty good. |
| We didn't make it to the Ste. Genevieve area, we will save that for another time. I just hope the next time we pass through that the wineries have been able to recover from the freeze from last year and their wines are back up to what I know they can be, but don't take my word for it, you should always try them for yourselves :) | |