Ted Cruz is holding a rally in the Plantation Hall. That's about right (wing).

But when you talk about destruction ... don't you know that you can count me out?

I WOULDN'T EVEN DO THIS DRUNK

NABC and Starlight Distilling: "Put a Hoosier spin on Thanksgiving."

It's an honor having NABC's Hoosier Daddy and Black & Blue Grass on the table with these many other fine Indiana food and drink products, made right here in Indiana -- including vodka from our friends at Starlight Distillery. Thanks to Luanne Mattson and the Southern Indiana Tourism Coalition for helping to make it happen.

Indiana’s holiday bounty: Put a Hoosier spin on Thanksgiving (video from Fox59)

The Hoosier State has plenty to offer when it comes to unique holiday treats.

Mark Newman from Visit Indiana stopped by FOX59 Morning News to let viewers know how to put a signature Hoosier spin on Thanksgiving dinner.

Specifically, a wine dinner. Generally, about local and regional wines.

Over at my Potable Curmudgeon blog, I've posted a review by Shane Campbell of last week's wine dinner at Bank Street Brewhouse, which we staged along with our friends at the Huber Winery.

Shane Campbell reviews the Huber Winery/Bank Street Brewhouse dinner on November 13.

Yes, I'm the beer guy around here, and yet in recent years, I've become re-acquainted with the joys of the fermented grape -- not by means of vineyards in California, Chile or France, but through visiting Starlight, Bloomington, Madison and downtown New Albany, and asking questions, listening and sampling. Our regional wineries are crafting wines for all tastes, and stereotypical sweet fruit wines no longer are the norm (they're still available if that's your gig).

Maybe it's ironic to use the craft brewhouse to make this point, although if so, the conclusion is no less valid. There are a couple dozen wineries or more within an easy drive of New Albany and environs. They're fun places. Visit with open minds and palates, and enjoy. End of sermon.

Thanksgiving Deconstructed: A Huber wine dinner at NABC's Bank Street Brewhouse on Tuesday, November 13.

And now for something completely different, at least by our standards: We're doing our first-ever wine dinner at Bank Street Brewhouse with our friends at Huber's Orchard, Winery, & Vineyards. Chef Matt Weirich and the kitchen crew will be "deconstructing" traditional Thanksgiving dishes and pairing them with Huber wines, which we stock every day at BSB.

It's good to mix things up, so check out the Facebook event page and consider dining and drinking with us on November 13th. The dinner begins at 6:30 p.m., and for reservations, you can call 812-725-9585. You can drink NABC beers before and after, if you like ... no rules, and all that.

Here's the menu card:

Five Course Dinner Paired With Huber's Wines ... $65, gratuity included

Amuse Bouche
“Green Bean Casserole” & “Deviled Eggs”
Applejack Cocktail

“Sweet Potato”
Sweet Potato, Fennel, Pistachio
2011 Traminette

“Carrot & Peas”
Carrot, Pea, Granola
2011 Seyval Blanc

“Venison”
Venison Loin, Celery Root, Potato
2009 Cabernet Sauvignon

“Turkey & Stuffing”
Turkey Confit, Stuffing, Cranberry Sauce
2008 Heritage HSR

“Apple Pie”
Apple & Caramel Powder
2011 Pinot Gris

ON THE AVENUES: The triumph of the scofflaws.

ON THE AVENUES: The triumph of the scofflaws.

A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.

The journalist, writer and social commentator H. L. Mencken celebrated the repeal of Prohibition by drinking a glass of cold water.

“My first in 13 years,” he explained.

Mencken’s witticism is repeated near the end of “Prohibition”, Ken Burns’ cautionary and instructive 2011 documentary film. It chronicles the single most ridiculous “great” experiment in American history that did not involve war, segregation, genocide, eugenics, Miller Lite or Bud Selig, because at least Prohibition killed no one, right?

Wrong, although the very same religious zealots, health fascists and bubble-headed family activists whose decades of admittedly effective lobbying brought about the country’s bizarre hypocritically wet/dry hiatus never ceases insisting, against all evidence to the contrary, that eliminating alcoholic beverages would reduce various abuses and deaths – particularly on the part of those working men cruelly subject to the destructive forces of Demon Rum … or was the real problem related to unfettered Robber Baron capitalism and the human degradation it brought to the shop floor, more so than the stupor coming on its heels?

At any rate, the anticipated utopian panacea did not come into being at the stroke of an amendment to the Constitution. People continued to be injured and to die, but for intriguing new reasons.

Fatalities, dismemberments and other injuries stemming from the explosion of organized crime, which predictably followed in the wake of Prohibition, were considerable in number. Also, havoc was unleashed when unregulated bootleg poisons were unwittingly ingested by normal, ordinary folks.

Of course, to be crippled, blinded or killed outright by drinking a simple cocktail was to expose yourself to vilification by the Prohibition era’s proliferation of nutcase moralizers: As a God-denying, law-breaking agent of perversity, you deserved to suffer.

Don’t believe it? Just ask modern-day fundamentalist quacks like Pat Robertson, forever conjuring the sophistry necessary to blame tornado victims for not praying hard enough for deliverance, or AIDS patients for being promiscuous devils who’ve made an otherwise “loving” God all irate, with dire consequences.

Pfui. By 1933, with Prohibition finally tossed into Trotsky’s historical dustbin – thanks to the terminal arrogance of its proponents, a creeping national exhaustion from the daily strain of quenching illicit thirsts, the gut-wrenching economic dislocations of the Great Depression (capitalism again), and a pressing need to steady our collective nerves before commissioning the Greatest Generation to slay Nips and Nazis – only then may we fast-forward 70-odd years to early 2012, when I sat listening, spellbound and disgusted, to a nattily attired trucking company owner from Northern Indiana, who unfortunately also serves in the House of Representatives. He was explaining his views on booze to the Brewers of Indiana Guild board.

Not only is he diametrically opposed to ruining the lives of innocent children by countenancing beer and wine sales at the state fairgrounds during the State Fair (libations to be consumed by adults, mind you – not the children themselves), but he strongly favors a return to the halcyon days of the aforementioned Prohibition era, and the re-outlawing of all forms of beverage alcohol, presumably so drinkers might join dope smokers, serial sodomites, Democrats and even readers of French literature inside a spanking new, for-profit Gulag on the Indiana prairie, its construction naturally outsourced to foreign investors, so that the half-dozen or so right-thinking and sober patriots remaining on the Outside might enjoy the state all by themselves.

His Heaven is my Hell, not unlike the rampant hypocrisies that so often comprise the American myth.

---

Watching the Ken Burns documentary about Prohibition last week proved to be an excellent preparatory strategy for me, because it rendered me appropriately militant as I eagerly awaited the start of the 9th American Distilling Institute conference. The conference was held from April 1 through the 4th, with most events taking place just a few miles away from New Albany at Huber’s Winery and Starlight Distillery, itself a showplace of family business, small business, agribusiness and the tourism business.

They do it all, and Huber’s is like a textbook illustrating these connections: Kinfolk, farming, visitors and commerce. The trucker/legislator needs to read this book – any book, for that matter. Of all the voluminous absurdities he utters (trust me, it was a Candid Camera moment), the one making the least sense is his attitude of skepticism that beverage alcohol has any useful connection to agriculture.

Of course, even the most cursory examinations of world culture and human history over the millennia indicate otherwise, and yet these facts like cannot survive ideological motivations like his. It remains that fermentation is a natural process, one harnessed by mankind from times immemorial to create pleasing and at times sustaining beverages from the agricultural yield.

In the absence of refrigeration, grape juice and wort (barley liquid ready for boiling) are highly perishable. Alcoholic content helps to preserve them, thus preserving the value of the crop, because the value of wine and beer as finished products are higher than as raw materials.

Distillation takes the process a step further by concentrating the alcoholic content of the fermentables. It is a man-made process, to be sure, and one widely used for applications other than the production of beverage alcohol, but the analogy holds. There’s nothing unnatural about any of it, and all of it begins somewhere in a field, where plants are growing.

One thing I’ve noticed is that craft-oriented makers of beer, wine and spirits share an interest in restoring a sense of place and connectivity when it comes to their ingredients. This interest parallels other contemporary movements pertaining to locality and sustainability – perhaps imperfectly, but in the sense of gradual shift. As noted so often in this space, shift happens … if you want it. America’s dreadful experiment with Prohibition proved eloquently that a shift running counter to nature and human proclivities was not a good idea.

Perhaps all of Indiana’s legislators should be compelled to watch the documentary series.

I'm at the American Distilling Institute's annual conference.

The American Distilling Institute's annual conference kicks off in earnest today up in the Knobs at Huber's Orchard, Winery, Vineyards and Starlight Distillery.

Sticking a toe in the (distilled) water at the ADI annual conference.

I'm a beer kind of guy, and actually sip spirits quite seldom, but my curiosity has gotten the better of me. Currently craft distilling is going through a rapid expansion phase, one with similarities and differences to various junctures in the history of American craft brewing. Today and tomorrow, I'm hoping to learn something about our brethren with the pot stills. Having viewed the "Prohibition" documentary series over the weekend, I'm primed to celebrate the availability of these options.

2012 American Distilling Institute Conference begins, with Huber/Starlight hosting.

The American Distilling Institute's "9th Annual Craft Distilling Conference" runs from April 1 (today) to April 4, with its hotel base at the Brown Hotel in Louisville, but most of the meat of the program on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday morning at Huber Winery and Starlight Distillery right here in Indiana.

NABC will be providing non-distilled refreshments for the conference at various junctures, and I'm going to try and offer some insights into what happens at such a gathering assuming time permits. An upsurge in craft distilling would seem to be hovering just over the horizon. Starlight's been flying under the radar for a while, and there may be others coming. It's fascinating, and I'm looking forward to learning about it (and perhaps reporting some of it) these next few days.

It all depends on the number of distractions, if you know what I mean.