Ohio's Finest Wines

Ohio has wineries?! Yup, and we tasted many of the wines from Cleveland area vineyards at the Vintage Ohio festival. Our friend from college, Rebekah, works for Cleveland metro parks at the Farmpark where the festival is held every year and invited us up for the day (and got us all a sweet employee discount). We also met up with Emrys and Tristan, also college friends who live in Cleveland.

Getting ready from some wine tasting

Although the majority of the wines were a little too sweet for me, there were some very good wines. The Old Firehouse winery had a very good spumanti and the Grand River winery had solid wines all around. It seemed like every winery had to Ohio classic catawba wine, which is sweet and grown in the Lake Erie area. I enjoy a catawba because it's more like juice than wine, but nice on a hot day.

Garden sculpture

Waiting in lines to taste wine got old and we weren't there to get drunk on 1/2 oz. samples so Rebekah showed us the educational garden center. The Farmpark has solar panels and a broken windmill that generate power, so there was a display showing how much power the solar panels were generating. Since it was a sunny day they were generating a lot of power. Clearly it was more power than the Farmpark needed so did they store this energy in batteries, sell it to the grid, or waste it? There was also an inaccurate display on how siphons work.

Sam's mouth was watering at all the ripe tomatoes in the different project gardens and greenhouse. I was pretty impressed with the hydroponics in the greenhouse. It looked like a really fun project to do in my dream greenhouse (along with all the citrus).

We grabbed some pizza at the local pizzeria, Angelo's. The pizza was really good. I don't know if it was better than Adornettos or Pizza Express, but I'm not the best judge of pizza as evidenced by my love of Pizza Express.

After dinner we went back to the festival and bought glasses of wine and enjoyed the evening in the park. Rebekah showed us the horse barn, where she works mucking stalls and riding horses. We couldn't resist taking pictures like we were seven.

Sam and Emrys barrel riding

Me and Sam being ridiculous

It was a long day and an even longer drive home. We drove by two accidents on the way home; one of them involving about 10 cars. Fortunately, we made it home safely. I don't know if I would go to the wine festival again, but it was a wonderful afternoon with friends.