Field Trip, Sweetgrass

Now part of the fun of vacation is field trips.  Grown up vacation field trips are much more fun than the third grade kind.  You are not required to take a buddy to the bathroom with you, and you do not have to ride a bus.  You also get to visit distilleries, which don’t tend to feature prominently on the school field trip list.

On the Wednesday after Rhinebeck, we headed out to Sweetgrass Farm Winery & Distillery.  We’d visited them on our first trip to Maine way back in 2009 (when I was a very bad blogger and didn’t really bother to post about these things), and knew we wanted to renew the acquaintance.  When we arrived, we were greeted by the resident Fearsome Guard Kitten.  He only allows admittance to those who provide adequate belly scritches.  He is in no way shy about demanding his due.

Though His Fuzzy Highness was quite distracting, technically we were there for the drinks, so I suppose I should say something about them too.  I’ll keep it short.  The gin is fantastic and if you like gin at all, go order some now.  The blueberry smash is really a blueberry port and is the best damn thing I drank on the whole trip.  You owe it to yourself to seek it out immediately and lay in a large supply.  I’ll be expecting your thank you notes once your bottles reach you.  All their other things are delicious too, but those two are my personal favorites.

But there was one more surprise to be had.  We knew about the beverages.  The kitten, while not expected, was not hugely shocking (it is a farm after all).  The knitting proved more of a surprise!

Piles and piles of beautiful hand knit goodies for sale at ridiculously low prices (really beautiful workmanship, my picture in no way does it justice).  Now, perhaps I should have been expecting it (there are sheep after all, and the first time we visited I actually bought a bit of fiber from one of them), but it still took me by surprise.  It turns out it’s all made by Margit who works there in the distillery and helped us when we visited.  We chatted about knitting (much to the dismay of the random film crew that was there to do something or the other and didn’t appreciate us talking in the background) and yarn and patterns and had a grand time.

I’m taking it as further proof that Maine really is an exceptionally knitterly sort of place.  Anywhere that has knitting at the distillery (oh, and at the fishing museum, but I haven’t gotten to that part of the trip yet) is my kind of place.  Might just give Nova Scotia a run for it’s money!