Fruit of the vine

The Southern Hills Winery is located just off Interstate 35 at Osceola. Take the Terrible’s Casino exit (you can’t miss it) and head east rather than west.

I’ve never been a successful consumer of alcoholic beverages. Now don’t get me wrong, some of my best friends have been highly successful consumers --- so I don‘t necessarily disapprove of the stuff; just don‘t much care for it. Beer? Give me a glass of lemonade please. Harder stuff --- well I guess you could gargle with it or clean a wound, but drink it?

Lord knows I’ve tried. There was the graduate school party in Iowa City, shortly after I’d been drafted, when I came home drunk, threw up in the bushes, crawled upstairs and went to bed --- then awoke with a terrible headache as everything in the bedroom vibrated and a few things flew off shelves and other flat surfaces. Thought there for a while it was death rattling the doorknob; came to find out later it was just a mild Midwest earthquake --- one of the few actually felt here in the heartland.

Then that time in Saigon, sent to convince some MP buddies they should join us for a party on the roof, I inadvertently kicked their door in --- and subsequently paid for a new one. Not pretty.

Now they’re telling us that wine is good --- sip a glass now and then and you’ll lower your blood pressure or something. So I’m trying to like the stuff again, now and then, mostly by buying Iowa-produced wine, taking it home, refrigerating it, drinking a glass with supper --- then forgetting it’s there until a month or so later when I pour the remainder down the drain.

Most of my meager purchases during the last year have been at the new Southern Hills Winery at Osceola, parked on the east side of Interstate 35 just across from Terrible’s Casino. Golly. Who’d have thunk there’d ever be (a) a casino at Osceola and (b) a winery just across four lanes of north-south traffic?

Now don’t hold anything I write here against the winery. It’s an interesting place to visit , the wine’s fine (OK, I don’t really know enough about wine to be a judge of that) and it’s full of all sorts of gifty wine-related stuff you can buy to convince your friends you’re becoming a connoisseur in a rattletrap redneck sort of way. Go! Buy something! Lord knows we need the money down here. And the winery might as well get some of whatever you’d otherwise drop at the casino across the way.

So I started out Tuesday morning on one of my long errand-filled loops --- south through Corydon, Allerton and Clio to Lineville, then west to Pleasanton and south to Cainsville, Missouri. Across the Thompson River valley west to Blythedale and Eagleville, then back up I-35 to Osceola and home to Chariton. One of the prettiest southern Iowa/northern Missouri drives you’ll ever take.

Picked up a little information along the route. Found out in Lamoni that Graceland College has acquired the big visitor center (also antique, arts and craft mall plus outlet for Old Order Amish families in the neighborhood who have stuff to sell) previously operated by the city and might even add a restaurant of some sort. When I said to the ladies at the front desk I sure hoped it was a Maid-Rite, they told me sure enough that the license plates on the car that brought the prospective restaurateurs to the visitor center not long before had been emblazoned “Maid-Rite.” Yes! I love Maid-Rite --- still cross about the fact that Chariton’s vanished under concrete when the big new truck stop was built at the west end of Court.

Then up the interstate to Osceola for lunch at, you guessed it, the Maid-Rite, installed by the casino folks at their gas station/convenience store. Then, since I was in Osceola anyway, over to the winery to try again.

Southern Hills, by the way, is Iowa’s only wine cooperative (according to its Web site here), owned by 134 shareholders including other wineries (Summerset, for example) and grape growers, although it bottles under its own label.

Now keep in mind, wine heathen that I am, I know mostly what I don’t like: Dry wine (I’ll gargle with Listerine, thank you very much) and sweet wine (yuk). Give me something in the Iowa middle and I’ll be as wine-content as I get. Don’t care what color; don’t much care what it’s supposed to be consumed with (by the time I sip my way through a bottle over let’s say a month it won’t make any difference anyway).

Southern Hills goes in for cute and meaningless titles --- A Kick and A Pat, for example; Blanket on a Hill. You get the idea. So you pick up a bottle of something and get out your flashlight to read the label (it’s very dim in there): “This sweet wine is our top selling white wine. It is made from Niagara, Brianna, and Diamond grapes. The Niagara is very floral and perfumed reminiscent of fresh crushed grapes. Diamond and Brianna were added to the blend to create a more complex and smooth finish with apricot and peach flavors.” Huh?

Hmmm. Guess it doesn’t sound that bad. Take it over to bar (along with a bottle of Summerset’s Summer Blush, which I’ve had before and know I can tolerate) and the attendant says, “you know, this is very sweet; you’ll need to cut it with club soda.” Club soda? Think I’ll try another.

Anyhow, I made it home; and now there are two bottles of wine in the refrigerator; and when I remember they’re there, I’ll give this wine business another try.

How about that casino? Don’t know that much about it. My aunt and I went over one time when her son-in-law, Randy’s, Aunt Kitty Wells was performing there and toured the joint. Kind of reassuring to see how much initiative southern Iowans have, aided by walkers and attached to oxygen tanks, as they struggled mightily up and down the dizzying ramp to the casino floor to spend their Social Security checks, bless their hearts.