7th annual Wine Weekend to take place at Story Inn

This weekend, the jewel of Indiana might not be found in the cornfields or in the kegs of the infamous Little 500 parties, but in a bottle waiting to be uncorked.

The seventh annual Wine Weekend launches Friday at the Story Inn, just south of Nashville, Ind., where more than 25 wineries will bring their best to taste and to test. Wine Weekend is one of the largest wine events in the Midwest.

To Taste
Vintage and state-grown grapes create the wines that can be bought on site. None of the wines are reserves, which means there is an extremely small quantity of a wine that is not in enough supply for people to buy. These vintage and state-grown grapes have qualities Hofstetter said are smiled
upon.

“It’s an opportunity to allow wineries to roll out their very best and make money doing it,” Rick Hofstetter, founder of Wine Weekend, said. “It’s kind of a debutante for the wineries.”

With the wineries being housed under tents, rain or shine, the weekend will pour on.
With an estimated attendance of more than 5,000, Wine Weekend regular and current employee of Story Inn Miriam Griffith said she believes the increase is due to the word of mouth previous guests have passed on.

“They uncorked them for us and sold them to us right there,” Griffith said. “We already had our Story Inn wine glasses to drink out of, so we were able to enjoy some live music and drink some cold wine with good friends with plenty of food around the
property.”

The array of food spreads begins Friday with “Wine and all that Jazz,” a musical evening hosted by the IU Jazz Ensemble and including a full buffet dinner.

The event benefits the Brown County Citizens’ Scholarships and leads into Sunday’s “Hoosier Cuisine Gone Wild,” an event of native Indiana dishes matched with one of the seven gold medalist wines chosen by judges earlier in the weekend.

To Test
Although the weekend is about giving the wineries around Indiana a chance to pour, from the Grigios to the Zinfandels, all the wines are tested with a five-point scale on four simple conditions: color, aroma, taste and finish.

“It’s not like sitting back to enjoy wine,” said wine judge Allen Dale Olson. “Judging and assessing wine is a lot different than drinking and consuming.”

To test the wines, judges take a sip of wine to let sit in their mouth before spitting out the wine to record their impressions.

“You have to concentrate, drink and take notes,” Olson said. “You don’t dare swallow much because you’ll be consuming close to 200 different wines over about a four- hour period.”

Regardless of how much is consumed, shuttle service from Story Inn to the Nashville courthouse will take place all day long. While popularity has shown a great increase with each festival, Hofstetter said he was told the idea of having a wine festival would never work.

“I was under the influence of wine when I came up with the idea,” he said. “It’s been a stunning success every time we’ve done this, every time.”