Midwest Wineries

I'm currently working on a new web page for my blog with a map of each and every winery that I can find in the Midwest along with links to each winery (of those that I can find). While I'm still tweaking everything, by viewing each of the websites, I had a general impression of the wines in the Midwest.

Of the wineries, there are three distinct groups: the highly professional wineries that push their wines on a large scale to compete with other mainstream wineries for retail space in grocery stores, the professional yet local wineries which do not have the retail muscle of other wineries but which have a professional retail space, and then there's the niche wineries, the wineries that appeal to a certain subset of the wine market, such as Gravity Wines in Michigan which appears to have a bit of a geek vibe going on with its Dinosaur and Star Trek inspired bottles.

Of the wineries, I get the impression that more than half fall into the middle category: they're not large enough to warrant an extensive distribution network, but not niche enough to appeal to a small segment of the population. (Though I suppose, in a way they do, as one has to go out of there way to find bottles from these wineries.) The rest are about evenly split between large scale operations and niche wineries.

But by my brief survey of the Midwest Winery websites, the wine options appear endless: old world style, new world style, sparkling, fruit wines, and even ice wines. All said, there's a large variety available in the Midwest's roughly 630 wineries!