A documentary on Kentucky wineries will make a gala premier November 4 at the Kentucky Center. The screening is at 7 PM after a reception beginning at 5:30. The documentary will be broadcast on KET November 5 at 10:30 PM.
The film is a collaboration between the Kentucky Department of Agriculture, PR-firm New West, and the PPS Group, a Covington production company. It documents -- you know, being a documentary -- the beginnings of Kentucky's wine industry in the late 18th Century, and tracks the life and death of Kentucky winemaking all the way to its current renaissance as a stylish and healthful alternative to tobacco farming.
Lest you look down your nose at local and regional wines, consider this: the first American wine to make an international splash was produced along both sides of the Ohio River upstream from Cincinnati. In the mid-1800s, when Napa Valley was open-range cow country, Sparkling Catawba from "America's Rhine" became all the rage among European aristocrats, an exotic taste from a place as remote and uncharted then as Jupiter's moons are today. That nascent wine industry was wiped out by disease about the time of the Civil War, and the few wineries that survived were killed by Prohibition.
There are currently about 50 wineries in Kentucky, farming 500 acres of grapes.
Tom Johnson writes the wineblog Louisville Juice and is working on a book about the amazing and sometimes horrifying things people have done out of a love of wine.
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Tom Johnson