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Fat Squirrel. Spotted Cow. Lazy Mutt. Uff-da.
Uff-da? In Wisconsin, say that and you get a great glass of beer. Anywhere else you get . . . a funny look.
Wisconsin may be full of cheeseheads. It may be a party state. But boy, are they drinking a lot of good beer there.
In Chippewa Falls, people owe a debt to two kinds of folks: the bubbas and the geeks.
The first came to harvest the lumber and stayed to drink the beer, or so claims the brewery: "It takes a special beer to attract 2,500 men to a town with no women,'' says Jacob Leinenkugel Brewing, founded in 1867 and now the oldest business in town.
Then came the guys with slide rules. The son of the city engineer spent his childhood in Chippewa Falls tinkering with radios, then went off to war and college. Seymour Cray co-founded Control Data in the Twin Cities but in 1962 returned to Chippewa Falls, where he opened a lab, putting the locals to work on the world's first supercomputer.
For some people, “Wisconsin wine” is a puzzling concept, like “New York nice.’’
But grapes do grow in Wisconsin, primarily on the high ridges of the Wisconsin River, near its confluence with the Mississippi. There, vines bask in sunlight and frosts sink into valleys. What vintners can’t grow they truck in from other states, adding a Wisconsin je ne sais quoi to the grapes during blending, fermentation and aging.
Wisconsinites now are enthusiastic supporters of their local vineyards, thanks largely to the late Bob Wollersheim, who
resurrected the state’s first vineyard in 1972. He made good wines, but more importantly, he made wine-buying fun,
holding tasting events and festivals at his oak-framed hillside vineyard.
During harvest time in a vineyard, turning purple has nothing to do with the Minnesota Vikings.
Purple is what you'll be if you get into a wooden tub of grapes and try to turn them into juice with your bare feet. Vineyards don't get their juice that way anymore, but many still offer a grape stomp, and there's nothing goofier to do on an autumn day.
There are prizes for those who extract the most juice and those who show the most "style,'' so wearing a creative costume helps. And many grape stomps feature an "I Love Lucy'' look-alike contest, in tribute to the famous 1956 episode in which the comedienne takes a job in an Italian vineyard and, of course, makes a mess of things.