Post by Bill Oliver, President and Director of Winemaking
I spent a fabulous evening at West Baden Springs hotel on Friday hosting a wine pairing dinner at Sinclair’s, their five star restaurant. Wine Dinners, as they have become to be known, have been a focus of ours in the past year. The opportunity to share with foodie types a great meal paired with Oliver wine gives us a great opportunity to showcase our drier varietal wines in an intimate relaxed setting. West Baden delivered the goods for us with a big receptive group, creative and well prepared food, and fantastic service.
West Baden Springs Hotel in French Lick, IN
Have you ever read a menu where more work was put into flowery descriptions of the dish than the actual preparation? Not the case at West Baden. The “Truffle-Maple Glazed Pork Tenderloin” tasted even better than it sounds and paired perfectly with our 2006 Zinfandel. On another pairing note, I was floored by our 2009 Pinot Grigio served with a fresh and tasty Avocado Crab Salad. That wine was bottled a mere four weeks earlier and might be our best Pinot Grigio ever. Bottom line is the food was creative and well prepared and made our selection of wines all the better.
What a tasty menu!The beautiful dining room at Sinclair's
I had the opportunity to spend a little time at each table during the evening and there were two common comments; “I had no idea that you made wine this good,” and “We come here all the time. We love West Baden.” This grand hotel has a rich history culminating with its recent resurrection by Bloomington’s iconic entrepreneur, Bill Cook. I always wondered how Bill Cook manages his diverse enterprises. After my experience at West Baden I believe I know the answer: Hire the best and get out of their way.
West Baden is an amalgam of history and modernity – 1800s ambiance and a flat screen HDTV in your room. Mix in wonderful food, first rate service, and maybe 18 holes of golf and you have a first class resort. Don’t take my word for it. Treat yourself to weekend at West Baden and see for yourself.
The Atrium under the historic Dome at West Baden Springs HotelOriginal invite for the event. Click here for a list of event packages available at West Baden Springs
2009 introduced new wines and new experiences for our customers. Sangria Classic, an instant favorite, was released this year followed by Sparkling Catawba that came and went like a penny spent.
Sparkling Catawba was released on Black Friday and was sold out before Christmas Eve. There was actually a slow motion dash for the last bottle. Whoever got the last bottle (you know who you are), I hope you toasted to a great year and enjoyed the wine with great friends!
Creekbend was a big focus for us last year. We realized that we were still getting questions like “So, what is Creekbend? Is it another winery? Why are you selling another winery’s product? It doesn’t say Oliver anywhere on the label, I don’t get it?” Creekbend is our commitment to produce great wines from Indiana grown grapes. Creekbend is the name of our vineyard that is about 5 miles west of the winery. It is a beautiful place that produces wonderful fruit. We wanted to share this special place with our customers and began to offer Creekbend tours for the first time ever in the fall of 2009. A special weekend in September was also reserved for a Creekbend Open House.
Bill Oliver conducts a tour at Creekbend Vineyard
The weekend was filled with tasting Creekbend wines and the grapes they come from. Trekking through the vineyard with our Vineyard Manager, Bernie Parker and Winemaker, Bill Oliver, they shared stories and information about growing grapes in Indiana. A picture can say a thousand words but going out to Creekbend Vineyard to experience the shear beauty of growing grapes in Monroe County is a special experience. We had a lot of fun sharing this place with you. We are going to continue to share it with you through 2010.
We also launched a new website, a Wine Club and we can now ship wine to customers to 18 states!! We were full steam ahead in 2009 and we appreciate that you were along for the ride.
We entered into 2010 with the same mission as we have in the year’s past. Continue to produce quality wines, bring new wine experiences to our customers and provide customer service that is sensational! Hard work but pretty darn easy when you love what you do! Here is a little preview into what 2010 holds:
Wine Club Events – We want to meet all of our wine club members. There will be some special opportunities that will be reserved just for you!
New Wines – Looking forward to all of our 2009 wines from Creekbend. A brand new one on the list this year – Semi-Dry Vidal Blanc. Perfect for all of you Riesling and Gewurtz fans. I tasted it last week. Fabulous.
Tunes on the Terrace dates are set – June 25th, July 23rd, August 20th
Creekbend Vineyard Tours – We want to make Creekbend more accessible! Keep an eye out for scheduled tour dates.
We love Facebook!
Communication – We want to keep you in the loop. As we entered into the e-commerce world with the launching of our new website, we realized that we need to let all of you know what is going on. Facebook, Twitter, this blog and our monthly emails are going to allow us to keep you “in the know”. So fan us, follow us, tweet us, whatever you prefer!
I look forward to seeing all of you in the tasting room this year. Keep in mind that January and February are quiet months for us. So if you don’t want to fight the crowds of the summer and fall. Come out and see us. We are excited to share our wines and our stories and to make new friends. Don’t be surprised if we ask you a little about yourself – it’s what we do.
*Please note- This is the first in a series of posts featuring some of our beloved customers. Dan and Amanda were a natural first choice (and we had plenty of photos of them-they are so photogenic!) I intend for future posts to have more of a question and answer style to them, but Amanda’s description of how they met, fell in love and then fell in love with Oliver Winery was too good to mess with. If you want to share your Oliver Story, email me at jhane@oliverwinery.com.
Meet Dan and Amanda Bureau!
Dan & I met through a professional organization. We lived in different states, but saw each other at conferences a few times a year and became friends. In the fall of 2002, that friendship turned romantic. After months of email flirting, we had our first date at a conference in December 2002. Our relationship developed over long distance with Dan in Illinois and me in Georgia. In July 2003, we went to a wedding in French Lick, IN. On the way back to Indianapolis we decided on a whim to stop at Oliver Winery, mostly to postpone the inevitable airport goodbye that always followed our weekend-long dates. I moved to Indianapolis in September 2003; we started going to Oliver more often and it became a special place for us.
That summer, Dan started planning his proposal. One Friday (while I thought he was at work in Illinois) he was in Bloomington setting up everything at the winery. That Saturday we had an appointment to go house hunting with our Realtor all day. Little did I know, Dan got her in on the plans as well and had her to tell me at the last minute she could only meet with us in the morning. He also got one of our Illinois friends to send me an email asking us to go to Oliver Winery to pick up some wine for a family gathering – and since we suddenly had the afternoon free, I agreed to go down to Bloomington.
At Oliver, we did a wine tasting and bought some wine just like we usually do. We had typically sat by the lake to drink our wine and eat our picnic, but this time Dan really wanted to sit on the patio. Several of our favorite romantic songs were playing on the patio speakers. By the third song, Dan told me that he had lied about our friend asking us to pick up wine. He also told me he had spent the day in Bloomington and Indy preparing for that day. Still confused, I didn’t really know what was going on. Dan then told me loved me and wanted to spend our lives together.
Dan pulled out the ring, got down on one knee and asked me. As I said “yes,” we heard cheers from about 150 people in the tasting room and around the patio (they had a concert on the patio earlier that day, so the place was packed). Word had spread inside that we were getting engaged on the patio, so people were watching at the windows. We went in, greeted the crowd and toasted to our future with our Oliver friends and family, few of whom we knew, but many were quick to congratulate us and wish us luck.
Look, it is Dan and Amanda at a vineyard event!
The big engagement production began our “groupie” status at Oliver. We continue to love the wine, and got to know several of the staffers and enjoy them just as much. We take friends and family to Oliver every chance we get, including coordinating several large groups over the years. We love to introduce people to Oliver and prove that good wine really can come from Indiana!
When Dan started grad school at IU, he had a class with Mindy Metzcar (wife of assistant winemaker, John Metzcar) and we became friends with them. Mindy told me that several Oliver staffers’ spouses help with the booth at the Vintage Indiana wine festival and she encouraged me to “volunteer” with her. That was the year of the major flooding that prevented most of Oliver’s staff from getting up to Indy for the festival, so I ended up being part of the skeleton crew that manned the booth in the mud. Even though it was chaotic and dirty, I had a blast and asked to volunteer again the next year with Dan. It was even more fun in dry weather!
This past summer, we took a trip to Oregon’s Willamette Valley. Paul Mui and several other Oliver staffers gave us tons of tips and suggestions of wineries to visit. During one of our tastings, we mentioned that we were from Indiana and the server said someone from an Indiana winery had been in their tasting room recently – then he pulled an Oliver Winery business card out of the cash register.
Dan, Amanda and Ollie- This photo reminds me of the one we snapped of them right after they got engaged!
We try to visit the winery about once a month; if we lived in Bloomington we’d probably be there a lot more often. We love all the wines in the dry section of the menu… and then we typically skip over the middle to end with the dessert wines. As many times as we’ve tried the same wines, the tasters still manage to pull out random facts to teach us something new at every visit. We love everything about Oliver Winery – the wine, the people, the experience.
Oliver Winery holds such a special place in our lives, we even named our dog Ollie!
It’s a cold, gray, soggy mess outside, but baby, I’ve got my plant and seed catalogs to keep me warm. Spread out across the desk in front of me, they conjure visions of summertime in my head. Not only do garden catalogs give me a great mental jump-start in winter, they open up a whole world of cool, unusual, or hard-to-find plant varieties that might not otherwise be available locally. This is so important to me- I really want to give our Oliver Winery visitors the opportunity to see new things and to leave feeling inspired about gardening and the natural world in general. This year I’m focusing heavily on growing unique and attractive herbs, annuals, vegetables and tender plants from seed, as this is such an easy, inexpensive and gratifying way to fill the garden with tasty food, bright color and character.
Making a list is a great way to start
After I’ve thoroughly perused all my catalogs and compiled a big “Mother List” list of potential new plants, I go back through it to decide if I actually have a place for everything. If a plant makes the cut, (not all do), it gets highlighted, ordered, and placed on a new list. My next step is to plan how to combine all the new arrivals, a process to which I give considerable care and thought. Take those purple artichokes I’m planning on growing, for instance. Being big, architectural, thistle-like plants, they will function as a dramatic focal point, and would look sharp with the feathery foliage of bronze fennel (which is already out in the garden and is easily transplanted). The twining, dark stems and lavender flower sprays of purple hyacinth bean ‘Ruby Moon’ would look stellar climbing up bamboo supports, and the burgundy-splashed foliage of Thai basil ‘Holy Red and Green’ could keep the purple theme going. Strawflowers in shades of apricot will add sparks of heat and contrast to the mix, as will the terracotta blooms of Thunbergia ‘Sunrise Surprise’ weaving among the hyacinth beans. And so it goes.
As orders of seeds arrive in the mail, I organize them according to when they will need to be sown.
Packets of seeds ready to be planted in the Oliver Winery Garden
Although it is still January, I have already started several batches of early season, spring bloomers under grow-lights in our service building. Among these are Viola ‘Psychedelic Spring’ (how can anyone not like a name like that?) and sunset-hued, biennial wallflowers, which are completely new to me. And this is only the beginning. With seedlings already on the go, it seems to me that spring is just around the corner. I can hardly wait!
Happy New Year! 2010 will be one of my most exciting years yet. We have some really exciting projects in the works this year not the least is planting more than 15 acres of vines. This will bring our Creekbend Vineyard up to 50 acres. The new planting will consist of some of our favorite varieties like Catawba, Chambourcin and Vignoles. We also will be planting a brand new variety called Crimson Cabernet which was developed by Davis Viticulture Research. This variety promises to give us a great new red wine which will be reminiscent of its main parent, Cabernet Sauvignon, and be an awesome addition to the Creekbend line.
Another challenge for the beginning of 2010 is finding a new Assistant Vineyard Manager. Tim Fulton has gone back to his first love of parks and rec management with the City of Bloomington Parks and Recreation Department. We wish him the best of luck and look forward to seeing him at the skating rink. We started the search this year and are looking for someone who loves wine, working hard and playing hard. If you are that person or know of one check out the job posting.
The vineyard is still busy. Though the vines are sleeping we continue to prepare them for the 2010 season. Pruning started in Dec and will be finished (hopefully) by March. During this time we take the vines from a jungle:
down to the bare bones that starts the season.
Our crew works in all sorts of weather including frigid temps down to 15 degrees and even in the snow, as long as it’s not going sideways. We have also planted a forest of posts around the vineyard for the new trellis’. This will prepare us for planting the new vines in April.
We hope you have a great 2010 and will make time to come out to see our beautiful vineyard and try the great Creekbend wines that Dennis and his crew craft.
Oliver Winery 