News From the Gala Premier
Vintage Kentucky is a documentary about the Kentucky wine industry produced for a couple of different reasons.
It is, first of all, a promotion designed to shine a light on the seriousness of Kentucky’s wineries and winemakers. They’re working hard, the narrative goes, to make better wine, provide better tourist experiences, and modernize Kentucky’s economy.
The half-hour film premiered at The Kentucky Center Wednesday night in front of an audience made up largely of people vested in the local wine business: grape farmers, winery owners, winemakers, and the government support apparatus that is pushing wine grapes as part of the commonwealth’s effort to replace tobacco as a cash crop. That’s the second thing that the film does: it provides affirmation to a group of entrepreneurs in a business that under the best of circumstances is capital-intensive and slow to produce profits.
The documentary is a good promo and — as was obvious from the audience reaction — an effective attaboy. It’s beautifully photographed and the script is structured around interviews with farmers, winery operators and winemakers who clearly know their stuff and take their business seriously. When the interview subjects aren’t answering questions in the golden light of the vineyard, they’re working hard in the b-roll: pruning, picking, crushing, punching down and bottling their wines. They’re serving healthful meals to family and friends. People who look like they might be your neighbors describe the social experience of visiting the winery with the distinctly Protestant term “fellowship.”
Therein lies the unacknowledged subtext of the film.
One of the challenges that Kentucky’s wineries face is Kentucky’s deep antipathy toward alcoholic beverages. As dedicated as Agriculture Commissioner Richie Farmer may be to helping farmers develop new revenue streams, in half the state Prohibition remains in effect. You don’t see a lot of politicians showing up at wineries for photo ops because a good chunk of the electorate considers all alcoholic beverages to be Satan’s work. Vintage Kentucky counters the fundamentalist argument by showing that Kentucky’s wine business is made up of likable folks just like you. It does a good job of that.
Vintage Kentucky is on KET Thursday, November 5, at 10:30 PM, and will rerun several more times over the next few weeks. It’s well worth watching.
Now that I’ve said all of that nice stuff, I want to vent. At the reception before the screening, four Kentucky wines were served. The wines were sold only by the glass; they should have been offered in a tasting flight so it would be possible to sample all of them.
Even worse, the wines were served in plastic cups. Why anyone trying to showcase wine would serve the wine in plastic cups utterly mystifies me, but you see it all the time.
There were maybe 100 people at the event. It would have cost about a dollar a person to outfit everyone in the joint with big, bulbous, rented wineglasses. That would have showed the wine better and reinforced the idea that Kentucky wines deserve to be taken seriously. Instead: plastic cups that showcased the wine about as well as a brown paper bag.
One might imagine that the promoters of Kentucky wines would have thought about that. Maybe next time.
The souvenir corkscrews were nice, though.
