Dakota Hills Winery

 Driving on Highway 2 east of Rugby, if you blink you'll miss the Dakota Hills Winery turn-off.

That's it.  Just a faded sign pointing you down a bumpy gravel road at mile marker 222.  

Let's talk about gravel roads for a second.  I tend to fly down gravel roads in my little Japanese car.  As I grow older, I become more and more aware how unsafe this is.  I mean really, you'd think I thought I was invincible or something.  That's so 2003 of me.  

Case in point: cruising down this particular gravel road, I hit a bump.  A big bump.  It smacks the undercarriage hard enough to make me wonder if I'm going to lose some important car parts, like a defibrulator or a car-starter-upper or something like that.  Worse yet, there is high marshy water on both sides of this one-lane gravel road, so that bump pushes my car in a different direction on a very narrow road with uncertain traction underneath.  I barely avoided dunking myself in the watery swamps off the edge of the road. 

Lesson learned. Now we return to our relaxing, regularly scheduled wine discussion.

I eased up on the accelerator a bit for the rest of my journey to Dakota Hills, which included a cruise through a crop field to avoid a lake that decided to take residence in the middle of another road.  If you thought gravel roads were exciting, take your little Jap car through a field. I highly recommend it. 

Dakota Hills Winery is a small farm and visitors are encouraged to bring the kids and pet the farm animals. They grow most of the fruit used in the wines: grapes, apples, plums, rhubarb, crabapples, cherries, currants, strawberries, raspberries, jostaberries, snozberries...

This llama was my greeter, the first being I saw pulling up to the farm.  I think I caught her sleeping on the job. 

The owners are truly happy to receive guests.  Kids run off to explore the barn while adult visitors are welcomed to try wine samples.  Traditionally, wine in North Dakota basically means Mogen David, so I'm sure their broad selection of sweet and semi-sweet wines are made with the local palate in mind. My favorite sweet wine of theirs was Raspberry - they literally pick hundreds of pounds of raspberries to make it.  It's a magical nectar.  

I usually drink a dry wine and sometimes dry wines from regional wineries can come off a bit harsh, but I was surprised to find their drier wines like Prairie Sunset and Northern Lights were really good, too.  The wines are juicy, none of the full, almost chewy body of, say, a deep French Cabernet, so wine snobs beware, but Dakota Hills is doing a great job with what they've got. Buying direct on the farm, a bottle will set you back $15, a steal of a deal in mind.  

I don't know if it was the wine, the sweet country air, or all of those adorable farm animals, but there was something about my visit to Dakota Hills that make me want to slow down. For a moment, I felt reconnected, grounded, and reverent for life and the world I live in.  I headed back down the gravel roads and through the fields at a more leisurely pace this time.