TOURS & TASTINGS Both tipplers and teetotallers will learn fascinating and fun facts during tours of breweries, distilleries, wineries and vineyards. Some beverage producers charge for tours or tastings. Others are free. Check their websites or call ahead to see if the tours are at fixed hours or if you need to make an appointment. On Lanzarote, in the Canary Islands 130 kilometres west of Africa, we were surprised to learn that excellent wines could be produced from vines grown in black volcanic soil that resembles the moon’s surface. To combat the desert climate, vintners build semicircular lava rock wind shelters around pits filled with up to two metres of black volcanic ash, which attract dew to feed the vines. Each one – the size of a child’s wading pool – contains a single grapevine. In the Bodegas Rubicón wine shop, we viewed dust-covered bottles of wine aging on racks. A sommelier poured us samples of wines produced from the Malvasia Volcánica varietal. Dry, crisp and fresh, the wines exhibited citrus, tropical and floral notes. The most entertaining beverage-production tour that we’ve experienced was at the Jack Daniel Distillery in Lynchburg, Tennessee. Jack Daniel put Lynchburg on the map in 1866, when he bought a small distillery and began producing Tennessee sour mash whiskey. (It’s not bourbon and they get mighty upset if you call it that!) We toured the oldest registered distillery in the U.S. with our guide, Junior. He warned us that the tour involved 350 steps and about a mile of walking. “But they’re payin’ me by the hour, so I walk really slow,” he said. In one of the barrelhouses, we examined handcrafted white oak barrels, stacked in neat rows. Junior explained that each wooden barrel weighs 120 pounds. “If one of them rolls over you, you’ll get (ahem) smashed!” He noted that the biggest costs in making whiskey are taxes and aging. “Several people in the hills out there have eliminated both of these costs – but they don’t give tours.” At the distillery, we viewed 4,000-gallon fermentation tanks filled with mash (made from corn, rye and barley malt) and large stills from which the whiskey emerges at 140-proof. Farther on, a blazing fire drew our eyes to stacks of sugar maple boards being burned into charcoal. “The charcoal is ground into pellets and packed into mellowing vats 10 feet deep,” explained Junior. “This drop-by-drop filtering gives Jack Daniel’s its smoothness, by removing chemicals that give you headaches and make whiskey burn your throat.” After workers change the charcoal, every 14 to 16 weeks, the charcoal isn’t wasted. “It’s made into briquettes and sold at the Lynchburg Hardware,” said Junior. “And it burns really good.” Adults can sample whiskey in Jack Daniel Distillery after their tours, but they can’t legally buy a bottle in Lynchburg. That’s because Moore County has been completely dry since Prohibition. 18 | www.snowbirds.org Travel
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