Big Yellow - A Bubbly Twist on Traminette Indiana's Signature Wine Grape

Introducing the latest to our wine list - Big Yellow. There’s a story behind the name "Big Yellow". A really good one, actually — involving a review, a friend’s perfectly timed joke, a flower field, and three hours of a song on repeat. We’re going to tell you the whole thing in our next post, and we think you’ll appreciate it.

But here’s the short version, it all began with a review. Someone left us a review asking us to pave our parking lot. It was kind of them to share their experience, and we take every piece of feedback seriously, but it did stir something deeper in us. A question about how we communicate the million intentional decisions we make, guided by values, with the people we serve. You see our gravel parking lot wasn't happenstance or an oversight. It was an intentional decision for the environment. You see every detail, no matter how small, we filter through our mission of being stewards of the resources we've been given.

Post 2: The full story behind Big Yellow — the review, the flower field, a biblical whisper, and the lightning bolt that gave us free picnic packages — is coming in our next post. Subscribe to our newsletter to be the first to read it.

Traminette Wine - Why we’re excited about this one

The Traminette grape holds a genuinely special place for us. Not only is it Frances' favorite wine (in general), it’s Indiana’s signature grape. Traminette makes the kind of wine that makes people stop mid-sip and say “wait, what is this?” in the best possible way. It’s highly floral and aromatic without being overwhelming, complex without being intimidating, and versatile enough to pair with an absurdly wide range of food.

It also aligns perfectly with how we think about farming here. Traminette is a hybrid grape bred to be more disease-resistant than most European varieties (like Riesling, Gewürztraminer) which means we can grow it with dramatically fewer pesticides. That matters to us. Just as every gravel stone in our parking lot matters to us. So does every drop of chemistry we don’t put into the ground. For us to farm grapes in Indiana regeneratively the first step is to select varieties that are naturally resistant to diseases.

Big Yellow is a wine we’re excited to share because of it's Indiana heritage and the values it's name speaks too.

 One More Small Detail - The Bottle Itself

Before we dive into the tasting notes and all the beauty of this wine in the glass we want to speak briefly of the glass bottle. We told you no detail is too small. We meant it.

Big Yellow is the first wine we’re releasing in our new bottle and we’re genuinely excited about it, even though it’s the kind of thing most people will open, pour from, and never think about again. That’s fine. We thought about it enough for everyone.

As you may recall (see our article on glass), the glass bottle accounts for a majority of the environmental impact of a wine - that's why we serve from kegs. For those times when a bottle is needed, our new bottle uses 25% less glass than our previous one.

But here’s the part we’re most proud of: the bottle is made in America by a local company called Ardagh Group — a company whose North American glass headquarters is right here in Fishers, Indiana!!! That might not sound dramatic until you learn that a significant portion of the glass used by American wineries is manufactured overseas — often in Asia or Europe — and shipped across an ocean before it ever holds a drop of wine. The carbon cost of that journey is substantial and almost entirely invisible to the consumer.

So what you’re holding is an Indiana wine, made from Indiana’s state grape, in a bottle made by an Indiana-based company. That local loop didn’t happen by accident. It happened because we kept asking the same question we always ask: what’s the right choice here, not just the convenient one?

Ardagh’s own mission is built around infinitely recyclable glass packaging — which means when you’re done with this bottle, it can become a new one without any loss in quality. That’s the circular economy working the way it should. We’re proud to be part of it.

The gravel parking lot. The hybrid grape. The locally made, lighter bottle. None of these details will make headlines. That’s fine. They add up to something we can stand behind — and that’s the only metric that matters to us.

Tasting notes

Big Yellow is a bright, zesty, and floral off-dry bubbly. As with most Indiana grapes it has high acidity, low tannins, and lower alcohol which lends itself perfectly for sparkling wine. We finished this one off with about 14 g/L of organic sugar, a low-level of sweetness that gives it a great balance and is just on the edge of perception.

One of the more fun wines to assess the aromas because it's jam packed with complexity. From a fruit aroma perspective I get notes of apple, pear, citrus peel and strong tropical notes of lychee and passionfruit. On the floral & herbaceous side of things rose petals, white pepper, and honeysuckle. YUM! I could smell this one for hours...maybe we should make a candle out of it?

Visit us this weekend and give it a try for yourself!

Why this wine might stop you mid-sip

There’s one more thing we want to say about Big Yellow before we get nerdy with it — and it connects the wine to the story in a way that still surprises us a little.

Traminette is one of the most intensely aromatic white wines you can pour. The rose petal, the lychee, the white pepper, the hint of apricot — these aren’t subtle. They arrive before the glass even reaches your lips, and they tend to do something to people. Something a little disorienting in the best way. Something that feels, oddly, like remembering.

That’s not poetic license. That’s neuroscience.

Of all five senses, smell is the only one with a direct anatomical shortcut to the brain’s memory and emotion centers. Every other sense — sight, sound, touch, taste — must first route through the thalamus before reaching the amygdala and hippocampus. Smell bypasses all of that. Researchers at Harvard Medical School describe the olfactory system as essentially hardwired to our emotional memory centers — which is why a particular scent can drop you into a memory with a vividness and emotional weight that a photograph or a song simply cannot match. It’s why the smell of cookies baking can put you back in your grandmother’s kitchen more completely than any words could.

The science, briefly: Researchers call this the “LOVER” effect — odor-triggered memories tend to be Limbic (emotionally loaded), Old (often rooted in early life), Vivid (recalled with unusual clarity), Emotional (felt more than remembered), and Rare (which is part of why they hit so hard when they arrive).

The morning the name for this wine clicked into place, we were standing next to a flower field. The air smelled like — well, like a Traminette, actually. Floral and alive and a little overwhelming in the most wonderful way. And something in that moment just settled.

We’ve thought a lot about that since. About how the aromas in this glass are, in a very real neurological sense, a bridge between the present and something older — something felt before it’s understood. That’s what we hope Big Yellow does for you. Not just a wine to drink, but a wine that takes you somewhere. A field, maybe. A memory. A moment you didn’t know you were carrying.

Now. The nerds have been patiently waiting their turn.

🤓 NERD ALERT! ⚠️

Things are about to get delightfully dorky. Side-effects may include (but are not limited to): spontaneous laughter, accidental learning, curiosity cravings, and an uncontrollable urge to share fun facts with friends.

Traminette: Indiana’s grape, and how hybrids saved Hoosier wine

As mentioned, Big Yellow is made from the Traminette grape — Indiana’s official state grape, and honestly one of the coolest varietals you’ve probably know little about. Don’t worry. That’s about to change. Buckle up.

First, a thing that surprises more people than you’d think: Chardonnay is a grape. So is Merlot. And Riesling. And Pinot Noir. They’re not brand names, flavor profiles, or levels on some imaginary wine sophistication ladder — they are actual grape varieties each with their own flavor, aroma, personality, and frankly, opinions about where they want to live. Wine people have just been using these names so casually for so long that the grape part got lost somewhere between the label and the glass.

All of those famous varieties belong to a single species: Vitis vinifera — the wine grape that humans have been cultivating for somewhere between 6,000 and 9,000 years. And here’s a fun fact most wine lists won’t tell you: wine didn’t actually start in France. The earliest evidence of grape cultivation and winemaking points to the South Caucasus — modern-day Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan — and from there it spread through Mesopotamia, ancient Persia, Egypt, and the broader Middle East and Mediterranean long before it ever reached western Europe. The Greeks and Romans get a lot of the credit because they wrote things down and built roads, but they were very much the inheritors of a tradition that had been going strong for millennia in the East. By the time France figured out what Burgundy was, people in the Caucasus had already been at it for roughly the length of recorded history.

Anyway. The point is: Vitis vinifera is ancient, storied, and magnificent — just not designed for Indiana.

The great grape immigration disaster (a tragedy in several acts)

When European settlers brought vinifera vines to the Americas, those Old World grapes stepped off the boat and immediately encountered a rogues’ gallery of threats they had absolutely no defense against: powdery mildew, downy mildew, black rot, phylloxera, and winters that make a Burgundian winter look like a spa day. Native American grapevines had spent millennia evolving alongside all of these challenges and developed natural resistance. European vinifera had not. It was, botanically speaking, like someone who grew up in a hermetically sealed bubble showing up to their first kindergarten classroom in January. The outcome was not great.

Growing vinifera in Indiana isn’t impossible, but it requires serious intervention including frequent fungicide applications, obsessive canopy management, and a willingness to lose crops to winter and frost damage. It’s expensive, exhausting, and leans hard on chemical inputs. For a winery that won’t even pave its parking lot, that’s a bit of a problem.

We checked. “Spray the whole vineyard in fungicide bi-weekly” is not actually consistent with our environmental mission. Weird, right?

Enter the hybrid — nature’s very clever compromise

Grape breeders had an idea: what if you cross pollinated a vinifera grape with a native American Vitis species?

The goal: cross a tough native American vine with an aromatic vinifera and get a grape that is both genuinely delicious and genuinely suited to growing here. The result — the French-American hybrid — thrives naturally in Indiana’s climate, requiring dramatically fewer fungicide applications. Less chemical runoff. Healthier soil. A lighter footprint. Growing hybrid grapes isn’t just practical for us. It’s an ethical choice. Purdue University’s Extension program has done extensive research confirming how well-adapted Traminette is to sustainable growing in the Midwest.

Side note for the GMO conscious consumers. Cross breeding is different than GMO. Nature has been making hybrids since long before we showed up with clipboards. We just learned to pay attention.

So about that Traminette…

In 1965, a horticulturist at the University of Illinois named Herb C. Barrett decided he wanted to breed a large table grape that tasted like Gewürztraminer — that gloriously aromatic, spicy-floral grape famous for smelling like rose petals, lychee, and white pepper all at once. (If you’ve ever smelled a glass of Gewürztraminer and thought “wait, is this wine or did someone leave a flower arrangement in here?” — congratulations, you’ve met terpenes. They’re having a moment.) Barrett crossed Gewürztraminer with a French-American hybrid called Joannes Seyve 23.416, which sounds like a droid from a Star Wars film but is, in fact, a grape.

The seeds were shipped to Cornell University’s grape breeding program in Geneva, New York — which has been quietly releasing world-class varieties for over a century. The vine fruited in 1971, was propagated in 1974 under the designation NY65.533.13, and spent nearly two more decades in evaluation before Cornell officially released it as a named cultivar in 1996. Patient people, those Cornell grape breeders. That patience paid off: Traminette now generates an estimated $40–60 million in annual wine sales.

TRAMINETTE FAMILY TREE

Gewürztraminer  +  Joannes Seyve 23.416  →  Traminette

(Joannes Seyve itself: Bertille Seyve 4825 + Chancellor)

Carries genes from Vitis aestivalis, V. cinerea, V. labrusca, V. lincecumii, V. rupestris, and V. vinifera — it contains multitudes.

What Barrett accidentally engineered — and Cornell patiently refined — is a grape that survives bud-kill temperatures approaching -13°F, laughing in the face of Indiana’s winters, buds out two weeks late to dodge spring frosts, and still delivers the full aromatic fireworks of its Gewürztraminer parent. The Indiana Wine Grape Council — the state body until recently 😭😭😭 supported Indiana’s wine industry — named it Indiana’s official signature grape. It is, essentially, the grape equivalent of someone who is wildly talented, completely unflappable, and annoyingly good at everything. We respect it immensely.

Indiana wine: a history of triumph, catastrophe, and stubborn comeback

Here’s something that tends to stop people mid-sip too: Indiana had America’s first successful commercial wine colony. Not California. Not New York. Indiana. In the early 1800s, Swiss settlers established a wine community along the Ohio River in a town they named Vevay — and it thrived. As James L. Butler (founder of Butler Winery in Bloomington) and John J. Butler document in the essential Indiana Wine: A History (Indiana University Press, 2001), this state was making wine before most of the country even knew wine was something you could make here.

Then the 1820s economic decline hit. Then the industry collapsed in the 1870s. Then Prohibition arrived and erased the whole enterprise. The Small Winery Act of 1971 reopened the door — but rebuilding required grapes that could actually survive here. Hybrids led the way, with Traminette eventually arriving as the crown jewel: vinifera-quality aromatics, hybrid toughness, and a growing profile that earned it a feature in Wine Enthusiast magazine as Indiana’s signature grape. Explore Indiana Wines notes that Traminette is now grown and served at over half of Indiana’s wineries and vineyards.

We named a wine after the song that reminded us why we’re here. The full story is coming. Until then — pour a glass, find a flower field, and listen.

Further reading: Wine Enthusiast — Indiana’s Signature Grape  ·  Cornell AgriTech — Traminette  ·  Purdue Extension  ·  Indiana Wine Grape Council  ·  Explore Indiana Wines  ·  James L. Butler & John J. Butler, Indiana Wine: A History, Indiana University Press, 2001