bardstown kentucky tourism, georgetown scott county tourism, bowling green kentucky tourism, visit frankfort, and four roses bourbon.

thank you for your support did you know kentucky has more e miles of water than any other state in the u.s except alaska is alaska still a state includes 90 000 miles of streams and dozens of rivers it's also quite famous for some other liquids those which flow from a barrel that being beers bourbons and wine many of the world's best known distilleries can be found right here in the bluegrass state and interestingly enough pretty darn close to many of our lakes rivers and streams we're here to take you on an expedition of the secrets and histories of our intricate waterways while visiting kentucky's distilleries breweries and wineries i'm carrie and i'm kyle and we are two kentuckians who are pretty proud of our state we want to share a sip of what the commonwealth has to offer hey kyle carrie what in the world are we doing out here what's going on what is this we are going downstream today downstream with all this yes on a zip line how about that ride that was pretty sweet huh that was amazing well you want something that's going to make your day even better we got another riddle uh a riddle how they find us out here where'd you where it's here you found a riddle out here what's it say a favorite of the queen you can't cut it but this winchester combo is the spice of any kentucky party queen and cutting it i don't have any idea what that means so we're going to winchester right we are today we're going to explore clark county where are you going i'm going to take my little yellow boat exploring today fantastic on the kentucky river and i'm going to stop and talk to some folks a little learn a little bit about the area well while you're out there in your little yellow boat sweating and paddling around the river i am going to check out downtown winchester where i have heard there is a farm to table distillery craft bourbon maybe even hitting a winery in clark county check those out and also i've heard that tonight they're having a rock the block festival downtown music fun drinks games all that good stuff i will save you a beer i will meet you there if you don't drown and i will work on this silly riddle in the meantime well maybe you ought to stay clipped in today big boy you just better be careful i'll see you there bye that was incredible got a little bit of adrenaline going still but now we're finally on the ground at the lowest point on your property oh yeah so we're about 400 feet below our welcome center here down in the boone creek gorge it is beautiful down here very relaxing i think after that exhilarating ride i just maybe want to park it over here by the fire pit and just listen to the water oh yeah you kick back down here relax for a little while enjoy the views these limestone cliffs the dense foliage is truly remarkable and you said you're about a mile up boone creek from the kentucky river oh yeah we're about a mile from the kentucky river as the crow flies we've got boone creek here it's the clark county line is beautiful down here well now i can't paddle up here i have to walk my boat up this way right from the river oh yeah it's not not too deep for a good majority of it wonderful well tell me how many guests you usually put through in a day and what are all the different things we can do so we can do up to 10 person per group on the zip line we do three or four of those a day depending on the day and uh you know we've got six zip lines three bridges spiral staircase floating staircase and a repel up there uh it's like a sequential course through the trees once you step onto that first platform you do not touch the ground again until you're done oh wow so you really get to fly uh over the border to clark county oh yeah so you know we've got the palisades region here which is a pretty unique region here in kentucky we've got these limestone cliff faces that you get to fly over and you don't get to see those very often you know we're just 20 minutes from downtown you wouldn't believe that this was just hiding right around the corner and they do kind of hide uh you know they pop out of the trees here this is just a beautiful cliff right here oh yes you were telling me that you're kind of a well-kept secret here um that you have a lot of folks who don't even know you're here that you'd like to have come in and visit you oh yeah all the time i hear people from lexington they walk through our door and they go i've driven past you 100 times and never realized what this was adam that was super fun i'm thrilled to be back on the ground though that was a lot of fun it's a good time wonderful hey kyle nini how are you i am doing great now that i'm out here what a place thank you behind us there's a big peach house so where what how big of a place is this the entire farm is 300 acres and we have cattle we have horses and obviously we have vineyards tell me about this house like this has to be something that was an original farmhouse it was history it was built in 1890 by the joneses it was one of the first in clark county to have running water and electricity so which was a big to do back in the day they owned it from 1890 to 1980 just kept turning generations just the thing really almost 100 years in that family that's right so now how did that become harkness edward tell me about harkness edwards that name well harkness edwards is my dad okay so his name is harkness edwards the third but he goes but he goes by harkey harkey yeah yeah you had to kind of figure out how not to get teased in school so he had to shorten it a little bit i like going out to harkey's to drink some wine let's go you know what i want to do i see some vineyards around can we go check out some of the grapes that you got of course all right yeah let's go i'll follow you okay all right so we are walking amongst some of these tiny little green friends here and there's a lot of them out here what what specific variety do we have right now well this is crimson cabernet crimson cabernet this is a red wine they're green right now because they're young so they'll mature to be red grapes okay and um we do a lot of hybrid grapes so crimson cabernet is no exception so we have a cabernet dore but that one's a white wine cabernet i always you know freak people out when i serve the cabernet dore they're expecting a red wine but they get a white wine and then we have vidal blanc which is a wonderful white wine probably a lot of people have heard of vidal blanc in kentucky it grows so well and we have our norton grapes so and the norton is another tried and true we grow around here that is a red wine and we grow a lot of norton so what how many how many vines do we have acreage and what do you produce coming in when you drive into this place you're going to see a lot of beautiful vineyards and how much volume do you have gosh you know of course that always depends on the year mother nature lets us tells us how much we're going to make that year but um we have 17 acres of grapes as it is right now we are prepared for 20 so we can do 20. you know we are very experimental here there's not a lot of research in kentucky still with vines and so we are pushing the limits and trying new varieties that aren't very well known here because we want to progress the vineyard industry in kentucky and we want to figure out what does grow well here so what you're saying nini is there's science i am you know so we have a lot of fun experimenting and just seeing what's out there there's no rules is what i always say which makes it lots of fun because who wants a rule i mean you know and i think it's really interesting what you all are doing with the science part of this to experiment for these other vineyards because kentucky does have as we've learned in previous shows a very old history of wine making so i think that that experimenting is really interesting you know and you may come across something that's just mind-blowing and i've had some wonderful wines here in kentucky speaking of which i do think we probably need to test what these little guys are making i think you're right yeah and it's hot let's go do it here we are in a nice air-conditioned tasting room in an absolutely beautiful home this is really neat walking through i mean the rafters this is hand-built original they don't make them like this they definitely don't and we have six wonderful friends in front of us and you make these here this is all bottled we saw the grapes you guys are processing you're aging all right here correct all styling these are all hand labeled we do everything on the farm so right here starting off this is fling and this is an unoaked chardonnay semi-sweet not too sweet not too dry it is a very popular one we love fling the next one right next next to it is big red and this is a vidal blanc in concord also a big favorite uh one of the first ones we ever created then next one is cynthiana oh nice and that is 100 percent cynthiana grapes 2019 so that's a newer cynthiana all right and then this last one we have here is danger also one of our newer packages and we have a lot of fun with this one it is niagara and concord and it says sweet blush just really fun super easy to drink and yeah becoming popular as well this one right here is night heron and uh this is norton grapes and then we have taste the sun this one also was one of our first packages we ever created and it is a vidal blanc 100 percent vidal blanc is a soft sweet wine and um we can't keep this one on the shelves it is it is so great you know this we've have a quote on the back of taste of sun saying wine is sunlight held together by water which is a nice little yeah wine is sunlight held together by water so it's a little more of um that's what we go for not so much burning your lips my lips are fine yeah this is very nice it's really it's very nice it's a very nice light it's got a little sweet but it also has some nice i mean it's this is really nice yeah glad you like it but this is two different years we blended together so one year we aged in tanks and one year we aged in barrels and blended them together so there's a lot of flavor profile happening with this one you'll get some fruitiness but you'll also get some smokiness and some oakiness of course it's so good and this is an older wine so this is norton ages beautifully in the bottle so anybody who ever buys a norton i highly recommend to buy an older norton and you do something kind of fun that i think i came across which is reminds me of my childhood yes not so much drinking but the packaging these are our adult capri suns that i created last year and this is sangria and we have they come in these cute little pouches and then of course we marinate it with fruit and we garnish it with fruit this is our strawberry mango which is probably one of our most popular and it comes with a cute little straw and you just put the straw in it and pinch around it and you have your adult capri sun you guys are right out in the rural part of clark county less than two miles from the kentucky river come out here take a break have a refreshing beverage uh walk around the grounds uh what a what a fun time thank you so glad you can come by absolutely so we've got this riddle you can't cut it but this winchester combo is a spicy treat at parties i don't know do you have any i think i know what the answer is but i don't want to give you a hint to give it too easy i think it would be more fun if i sent you somewhere where you could have a tangible clue i think i'm going to send you over to my friends at wildcat willy's they might be able to help you out all right but you could just tell me i could but you know i want to make it more fun all right i guess we're gonna go to wildcat willy's let's do it well i've been paddling on the kentucky river today and just exploring the great little side tributaries here and i decided to stop in at the waterfront grill and gathering place and talk with deb garrison a little bit about the history of this incredible waterway and the location here in southern clark county well tell me where are we we're in the southwest part of clark county right next to neighboring madison county and really close to fort boonesboro state park this there's been some uh semblance of a building on this property since the late 1700s really this building here or this property here has had some sort of either a boat dock or marina a restaurant or grocery store for several years we're right next to where the first ferry in kentucky started back in the late 1700s the kidnapping of the boone calloway girls happened right here in this stretch of water it just so happens that richard callaway which was one of the first founders of boonesboro he had made petition to the virginia legislature which kentucky was not a commonwealth at the time we were still in virginia back in the late 1700s he made a petition to the virginia legislature to start the first ferry whoa and they granted it first sparring kentucky and so they granted him permission to do that but sadly after about another i don't know how many months it was he started working on the ferry and he got ambushed by indians and killed and so richard henderson who heard that name associated with boonsboro took over and then um the ferry operated up until the 1930s when the first bridge was built here at boonesboro across the kentucky river and you've got a bridge just down the way from here we have yeah this is our second bridge in the area or you know since the 30s so i'm guessing you get a lot of paddlers through here so you've been doing a tourism study recently yes tell me what are some of the things that you talked to folks about and what are what are your plans over the last several years especially when the locks and dams system shut down here in kentucky the commercial boat traffic ceased here in this in this stretch of the water all the way from ohio river down to here and there wasn't really an economic development plan in place at the time to deal with the businesses that were here that had been operating for many years so they all went out of business over the last several years specifically we've seen an insurgence of canoers and kayakers and we in over a course of may through november we interviewed people that would come down here to paddle our fishermen just recreational paddlers and we just talked to them about what they would what kinds of things they would like to see if they came to the area today we kind of just we didn't really plan in this he was just like you want to go kayaking i like the fishing so yeah i like the fish so if there's if there's fish out here i'll definitely be back with a fishing pole that's how it goes we always catch something out here it's a great river today i'm catching some uh crappie and some bluegills and um hoping to get a muskie up in here a little bit later yeah it's close and i love it um this pool is wonderful for fishing i can go all up and down but up you know below the dam where the water's falling and the fish congregate that's a good spot we just kayaked and stopped and had lunch and we did we went up a creek which was pretty interesting yeah the water is very clear up there versus it's so muddy down here yeah i was surprised how quiet it was yeah there wasn't as many coming in you saw a bunch of kayakers but out on the water you didn't see hardly any kayakers at all so and a couple boats went by but nothing crazy so so that you like that oh yeah yeah the water's very smooth it was interesting yeah it's beautiful i love coming down here good spot to hang out meet good people i'm looking for a place for our neighborhood to gather hence the grill and gathering and so i really want to make this a location where the community feels comfortable coming here having meetings doing whatever they you know just getting together it's a great place to stop off and take a rest absolutely deb thank you so much for sharing all the history with me i'm sure we could sit and chat all day yes we could it's been a pleasure thank you zach we're here in a special place yes sir it's special to you i know absolutely and i think it may be special to me we've got some copper behind us that seems to be full what's going on here at wildcat willy's so we do multiple things we uh we do our own moonshines we do fruit brandies and of course we have our bourbon every distillery has to have a bourbon we have our 1833 real kentucky craft small batch four-grain four-year-old bourbon four-grain four-year-old bourbon small batch tell me about your batch small i'm looking behind us yes so it seems like it may be kind of small so we've got these things here tell take me through these and tell me what to expect but what we really focus on is the sweet potato moonshine and fruit brandies yes this is unique stuff here yeah so sweet potatoes at the beginning was our part of saving east kentucky farmers east kentucky farmers didn't have anything to do with their sweet potatoes they didn't know what to do with them this is what you do with sweet potatoes yes uh so this is healthy you can say that i mean there's a lot of vitamins in sweet potatoes so i just want you all to know drink this beta carotene you know the whole nine yards it's it's there right this is good so oh yeah sweet i mean it's very sweet it's a sweet you get the sweet you're about to have a smooth finish sweet potato so what exactly is a bramble berry bramble berry is our fruit brandy it's black raspberries that was um occurred procured locally and we also do strawberries in it it is to me it's grape kool-aid it's clear it's like it's clear and it tastes like kool-aid this is the bramble yep bramble of berries you'll get get a couple notes on it you'll get the blackberry note a little bit but like i said that finish is going to be a smooth cool and this is a moonshine this is not this is the moonshine it's not aged that this is just straight up this is pretty much a white dog with the brambleberry flavoring in there cheers subtle subtle with the fruit but it's got just enough there to give you kind of something going on with it i like it that's great so tell me a little bit about 1833 okay the significance of 1833 is the history of the building so that's the first year the building was in commerce okay so the building actually uh take it back to the 1820s so if you want to do a little building history on it uh it was an old brick factory this is the four grain four-year farm out on the farm in a barrel legit made right behind us nice four grain got corn wheat barley and rye 95 proof to willy yes sir you could pair this with just about anything oatmeal steak pizza great stuff 1833. so that's the 1833 and then wildcat willy's so tell me about this name so wildcat willy is uh bill kingsbury he's one of our owners he's a special forces vietnam veteran purple heart decorated one heck of a man and that is our uh payback to him of we're gonna name the building after him in beginning construction phases it was a distillery small little bread panini press that was kind of the deal and then miss laura with her ideas she was spinning she goes we're going to a restaurant and we're going to a farm to table restaurant and this is going to be exclusive it's going to be a you can't find it anywhere else and farm to bottle farm to table we're a one-off i mean you can't find it anywhere farm to bottle right here let's go learn about farm to table i'm gonna follow you we're gonna find some food perfect let's do it it's time for the food part and this looks amazing tell me a little bit about i guess what's here on this plate like this looks like a great burger i think absolutely so this is the restaurant portion of wildcat willy's distillery and farm to table restaurant so of this we have my personal favorite which is a bacon jam burger this is obviously the biggest keystone of this is the burger portion that is raised by us and is processed only one county away so this burger is special because it was pasture raised no antibiotics no growth hormones and is absolutely one of the best cuts of meat that you can get this is a healthy burger people i mean this is healthy it's like just like the sweet potato bourbon you're gonna be good if you eat this so and you've got a bacon jam you guys make this here yeah bacon takes everything to that next level apparently holy cow this looks great potatoes the whole deal and this is along tell me about this farm you're growing a lot of the product it's coming here and gonna end up on this plate that see and that what that equates to is fresh and local how far away is the farm from this restaurant the farm is eight miles away so the farm is mount folly farm it was founded and is ran by laura freeman who is the founder of laura's lean beef and so now she leads that effort on mount folly farm to do organic row crops to do cattle and then for the vegetable portion that's probably been the hardest thing that we've had to overcome organically is we've done weekly rotations so that we can have fresh vegetables every week on a delivery tell me about this i know we've got one of the specialties back there that we had talked about previously in yes so this is a romp in the woods or our take on sex on the beach uh it uses our bramble berry brandy as the the base in it and it's a great summer refreshing lots of fruit and a lot of different people really like it this is this is the bramble berry romp there's not many beaches in kentucky people i mean seriously oh that is refreshing oh yeah right downtown winchester kentucky the gateway to the gorge yes right people come here they they check this out they go out they hike they do their thing i mean it really is neat so let the last thing i got i gotta i gotta do because carrie will be upset with me you know what i don't care she's upset i'm gonna win this riddle this time okay so the riddle is the queen it's liked by the queen you can't cut it but it's a winchester combo that's a spicy treat at every party what these riddles are just they drive me nuts spicy combo winchester kentucky it's different i don't know do you have any ideas no what's this so that is uh beer cheese that is winchester is absolutely known for beer cheese beer and cheese beer and cheese this is the combo and it is spicy it is absolutely wonderful you all make this here yes we do absolutely and there there's dozens and dozens of places all around winchester that make their own special concoction of beer cheese and then we have the beer cheese festival and everybody promotes it and uh you know everybody travels to winchester just to try to try this spicy concoction this is great thank you so much thank you sir hey kyle carrie how's it going you survived your boat ride i did but you've got an empty hand i don't see a beer well it's not empty yeah in fact i have solved the riddle oh that's impressive yeah i have something even better maybe then beer beer cheese this stuff came from winchester somebody got the great idea of combining beer and cheese and some spices and it has been a party favorite since then well those are my two favorite foods beer and cheese kyle so i can't wait to try some well you know you know just fire it up how was your how was your day by the way you know i winchester has a lot of things going on a distillery a distillery where they have bourbon made from sweet potatoes nice top that what did you do well after our exhilarating entrance into clark county today wasn't that exhilarating those guys were top-notch safety first beautiful wonderful i just slowed down took a nice little paddle on the kentucky river talked to some local folks learned a little history and now i'm eating some beer cheese yeah you know if you're coming to central kentucky you want something to do you need to check out winchester you can paddle you can zipline you can hike you can do all kinds of things and you gotta include beer cheese and part of that yeah it's pretty good it is fantastic you know carrie until next time i think we'll see you downstream