All the wine comments in the last thread, I just have to toss this in. Do not forget fly-over country you damn uppity coastal people.

Lake Erie region and even other parts of Ohio have been making good wines for some time.

There is even the native Catawba grape.

By the way, I’m not much of a wine lover…but those I know say Ohio wines are pretty damn good.

vinepair.com - AMERICA’S FIRST FAMOUS WINE WAS MADE IN OHIO. IN THE 1840S

Among things you didn’t know about Ohio: it’s the first city in the states to have police cars. It has an alley dedicated to Dave Grohl. And it’s the birthplace of Teri Garr, Stephen Spielberg, and Charles Manson.

It’s also America’s first successful wine-making region. California may dominate these days, and they may have won the 1976 Judgment of Paris (basically slapping the beret right off France’s very regal-looking face), but Ohio was the first American state to gain international wine street cred—in a typically unlikely American fashion.

…

So next time you veer right to the California section of your wine store, just remember, the Father of the American Wine Industry was a kid from Newark, living the dream in Ohio.

“There grows no vine
By the haunted Rhine,
By Danube or Guadalquivir,
Nor on island or cape,
That bears such a grape
As grows by the Beautiful River.”

- from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Ode to Catawba Wine”