Native Vines

Yesterday Kathleen and I went to West Bend vineyard. I had been there before with Amanda 1, and so when I saw a fantastic deal on a tasting on Living Social, I bought it. After finishing the tasting, Kathleen and I sat out on the patio while I had a conference call with AirTran (yes, I had just finished a wine tasting, don't judge). It was only around 3 in the afternoon, and we decided rather than head back to W-S that we should visit some more vineyards in the area.

The next winery we went to was Weathervane vineyard. It was nice. They had some awesome fruity wines (of which I bought 4 bottles) and the only issue was we were waiting for their slushy machine to freeze some wine slushies which never happened.

We next looked to go to Native Vines. (If the web page doesn't load, that's part of the Native Vines experience.) We should've realized something was wrong when my Garmin couldn't locate the address, but our winery map had directions that we thought we could follow, so we just wrote it off as GPS's being stupid and went on our way. We got slightly lost...I still really don't know how. We finally saw a nice looking Native Vines sign on the edge of a wooded area and pulled onto a gravel driveway. The first thing we came to was a sketchy looking run down house with furniture on the front porch and stuff. Kathleen and I looked at each other but then saw another Native Vines sign pointing further down the road....whew...We came to another run down house...still not it...though the sketchy looking possibly former cattle barn with the tires stacked beside it and a haggard looking dog staggering around outside was. There were laminated poster board signs to show us where to park.

Kathleen asked if I thought we would get to take our glasses home from this vineyard (as we had from the other locations). I answered maybe plastic ones. We walk in and are greeted by a nice but somewhat sketchy woman who is in need of a good bra. The room is half tasting room and half office/storage area and smells faintly of cigarette smoke. In the tasting area, there is a big screen TV with the news on it, two tables with chairs, and a variety of random Native American art. She put two plastic cups infront of us and filled a paper dish with some crackers. We discovered the tasting was $5, but we got to taste like 15 wines, and actually more than that because after we were done with the list, she offered to let us taste anything again. At some points, she had to dig through boxes to find the wine we were supposed to taste next. We weren't sure how the wines would taste because she gave us the wrong names for some of the wines and there were some weird descriptions: "We did this one in steel, but it sucked, so I put a bunch of oak in it and now it's really oaky." "We kinda forgot about these grapes, and they were really shrively by time we got to them. I didn't know what to do with them, and my husband was like 'just bottle them,' so that's what we did." They were actually really good. There was only one that we dumped out without finishing. I'm pretty sure that if we had been like "you know what would go really well with this wine? Pot." she would've pulled out a baggie and rolled us a joint. At one point some small kids with juice boxes came in and ran around the office area. So if you're looking for a kitschy winery experience in the W-S area, check it out. Not sure what you're going to get, but that's the fun of it.