News from Whispering Oaks — and a surprise encounter

Larry Green pours Vignoles at his tasting bar.

Larry and Miriam Green, owners of Whispering Oaks Vineyard and Winery just east of Seymour, let us taste their final formulation of their first Traminette vintage, which they plan to release next year. Traminette is a cross between Seyval and Gewürztraminer. Larry, who likes to experiment with different prototypes before selling a wine, tried different levels of sweetness, he said. First he went all the way dry, then maximally sweet, and settled on a median level with just enough sugar to bring out the fruit and floral essences.

This year’s Catawba represents another chapter in the refinement of the wine over several years — less sugar (4 percent, down from 5-6 percent last year), and less alcohol (10.9 percent from 12.4 percent). Last year’s Catawba was a real breakthrough in smoothing out the strong fruit, achieved by taking the wine off the skins earlier.

As we departed, we chatted with a couple on the deck. The woman said she was from Lake County, Illinois, which is where I grew up — north of Chicago. Her hometown is Round Lake Beach, and she went to Carmel High School, a Catholic institution in Mundelein, which is my hometown. We discussed the suburban and exurban sprawl in that area, once populated with prosperous farms, which we now find unrecognizably tangled in streets, highways, strip malls, apartments, condos, big box stores and McMansions. I hadn’t thought much lately about Lake County, except for the fact that I now get lost whenever I go there. However my newfound homey clearly had urgent thoughts simmering and seeking an outlet.

“They took farmland more fertile that any place other than the Nile River Valley — and paved it,” she said.

“Paved it!”

I reminded her that neither of us lives there anymore.

She swept her arm in the direction of the vines and said, “That’s why we live in the Ozarks.”

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