Prairie Storm, Strawbale Winery

A couple of weeks ago, my mother in law & I decided to take a tour of eastern South Dakota wineries. Rocky had picked up a flyer from a rest stop on our trip to Montana with a map of the SE Winery Trail. Last Sunday, we headed south on I-29 and of course, I forgot the map! So, we decided to play it by ear and go to the ones we could find easily off the interstate. The first one we came to was the Strawbale Winery in Renner SD. Despite having grown up in South Dakota, I don't believe I'd ever heard of Renner.

The winery is set a couple of miles off of the interstate and was a very beautiful drive. We really picked a good day to go. It was slightly breezy, warm. Sunny with large fluffy clouds. Strawbale [called Strawbale because they use bales of straw to insulate their buildings] was having a Sangria Sunday with live music. There were quite a few people there, but it wasn't crowded. I had actually thought it was too bad we didn't bring the girls because they would have loved running around and chasing the cats and chickens.

We walked into the tasting room and looked around at the wide variety of wines. Pretty much every fruit available is made into wine here. A tasting is $5 for 5 tastes and you get to keep the glass. We decided to share our tastings and tried to not double up on the wines! We attempted to keep track of the wines we tasted, but I have misplaced my list. I did have 3 favorites:

Black Raspberry Wine. It is a semi-sweet fruit wine. It wasn't overly sweet as I typically expect in these fruit wines, but had the tart-raspberry aroma. I think this would be a great deck wine, served chilled on a hot summer day.

Brown Cow. This is a blended red table wine fortified with brandy and flavors of chocolate, coffee and orange zest. Tasted like an orange Tootsie Pop. In a good way. This is a sipping wine -- I think this might be really good mulled with some additional orange zest -- perhaps after Thanksgiving dinner.

And now my favorite: Prairie Storm. Strawbale uses cold-climate grapes such as Frontenac, Kay Gray, Frontenac Gris, La Cresent and Valiant. Some are grown in their vineyard and others they purchase locally, which means fresher grapes! Prairie Storm is 75% dry red wine and 25% Black Currant. The tart black currant was a great finish to the dry red wine (which I assume is mostly Frontenac).

I purchased a bottle of Prairie Storm and Brown Cow. Bonnie and I decided we would definitely return to Strawbale and I'd love to take a tour.

We didn't make it to any other wineries. As we had left the map at home, we decided to try Schade winery outside of Volga, but they had already started their fall hours and are closed on Sundays [we missed the wine stomp this year]. So, when we got home, we opened the bottle of Prairie Storm and enjoyed a final glass of the day!