Sherry Chandler

Back in my home territory for the wedding on Saturday, the talk was about the success of the wine vote. In Lusby’s Mill – from which haled my grandmother Elizabeth Shupert – the initiative for local wine sales passed handily. According to the Owen County News-Herald, the vote was 183 to 122 with 50% turnout. The same vote had failed last fall in the Hesler precinct by 2 votes, but my mother, who has Lusbys in her blood line, had predicted that it would pass in Lusby’s Mill by a good margin.

Locally produced wine and a sort of wine tasting culture has been popular in Central Kentucky for several years. The last copy of Central Kentucky Lifestyle, a magazine that has mysteriously begun to appear in our mailbox (we neither have a lifestyle nor aspire to one), ran a feature, “Reds and Whites in the Bluegrass,” on three vinyards: Chrisman Mill in Nicholasville, Equus Run in Midway, and Talon in Lexington.

What I had not realized, until I began wending my way leisurely through Thomas D. Clark’s venerable volume The Kentucky (University Press of Kentucky, 1942), was that viniculture is an old idea in Kentucky. As early as 1796, Jean Jacques DuFour, a Swiss immigrant from Vevay, came to the confluence of the Kentucky River and Hickman Creek, near what is now Camp Nelson in Jessamine County, to establish a new world version of the European wine culture.

Cutting back to its normal course, the river is met by proud little Hickman Creek which flows in swiftly through the fertile Bluegrass lands all the way from Lexington. This creek for centuries has born a rich burden of Bluegrass soil in its current. Just before it loses itself in the larger stream it drops most of the rich soil it has snatched up in its mad race through the rolling green meadowlands along its course. At the same place, the Kentucky, weary from carrying such a heavy load of mountain soil, likewise drops much of it. This sprawling shelf where Bluegrass and mountain alluvium are fused is a rich garden plot of bottom land. …a glorious piece of land for a man to have to experiment with a new type of agriculture. A homesick Swiss immigrant could settle down underneath the sheer cliffs of the palisades and feel perfectly at home.

DuFour was well backed by Kentuckians as prominent as the Kentucky Gazatte editor John Bradford and Henry Clay, but he was doomed to failure.

What had been a grand vision of success was rapidly becoming a heartbreaking nightmare of failure. Many of the beautiful green vines were barren. They had put on a heavy crop of young grapes, but as these reached maturity they shriveled and dropped to the ground. Where the fruit remained on the vine it was of poor qulity. Another surprising handicap faced the Swiss dreamer. Out of the Kentucky woods came swarms of birds to devour his precious grapes. Here was a difficulty which no amount of map study could have revealed. These birds, like a plague of grasshoppers, were sealing DuFour’s doom.

Those of us from northern Kentucky recognize that name Vevay and know that DuFour, who had found one hardy variety of grape, the Cape of Good Hope, moved on to a place in Indiana on the Ohio River where he did succeed in establishing a vineyard and an American wine. That place is Vevay, in Switzerland County, where once you could ride a ferry across to Carrollton.

Who could have predicted that wine would return to Kentucky not only in the verdant Bluegrass but also on the washed-out hills of Owen and Henry Counties? And with a bit of a poetic connection, since the Smith-Berry Winery and Art Gallery is run in New Castle by Wendell Berry’s daughter. Owen County has been dry for as long as I can remember, bleeding revenue to neighboring counties and bootleggers. [In my towheaded childhood, I knew where to find a fair number of bootleggers long before I knew what a bootlegger was.] Read that bleeding literally, since travel was hazardous up and down the once notorious Sparta hill after a night spent in the tavern. Now little Sparta is ghost-towned by a major NASCAR speedway and where my Daddy and his buddies once hid homebrew under cane shocks, there are vines all over and, at the Elk Creek Hunt Club, they’ll be “selling wine by Christmas.”

Addendum: Our wedding reception, which took place at the Elk Creek Hunt Club, featured sparkling grape juice.