Shawnee Hill Wine Trail

We finished up Christmas shopping at a couple local wineries today. The Shawnee Hills Wine Trail is really neat... all wineries on this trail must have around 90% local grapes in their wines, which, well, is really neat. I don't particularly care for the dry reds around here... chambourcin and chancellor, mostly, but the semi-dry blushes and whites are pretty good. Today we mostly compared rose' and traminette varieties. My favorite wines were at Alto Winery, but my favorite setting was at Von Jacob Winery-- very pastoral. We then found our way to Cobden, Illinois, where Phil knew of a good taco stand and I knew of a good pizza place. The taco stand began it's month-long Christmas break today, so we went to the pizza place, and it was AWESOME. They had several great beers on draught, so I had a Stella, and we had oysters Rockefeller-- HUGE oysters-- and a pizza they called 'Bavarian'... it had sauerkraut and peppers and was supergreat. It was one of those spontaneously fun evenings. When we left the house we planned on just going to one vineyard, but we ended up going to multiple vineyards and a wonderful pizzaria. Oh! And tucked in the middle of all the vineyards we went to Rendleman's Orchards, which was really cool. Locally made sauces and preserves and butters and jams, etc, from locally grown fruit. That was a really fun visit, and the owner lady was so friendly and helpful. In many ways southern Illinois is pretty bleak... it's very economically depressed and the future doesn't look good, but all these local agri-businesses are wonderful, and I want to take full advantage of having this opportunity (until I can move).