Today we’d like to introduce you to Kate
Hi Kate, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
To start way back… I was a nature lover from birth! I always pursued any chance I could to be outside. Growing up my parents were both avid gardeners. My dad had a passion for native perennial plants which were not mainstays for most commercial nurseries, thankfully that is starting to change. Weekends of my youth were often spent with my dad transplanting some native treasure he had found along a random road or abandoned lot somewhere to a new life in our own backyard. Dirty hands and dirty boots were a welcome achievement.
In conjunction with my love for nature I was also a gear-head which led me to focus my college education and career in Engineering. I worked in the Aviation manufacturing for 14 years. Through that time, I had the opportunity to move and travel to some wonderful wine regions and became enthralled with wine and how it truly is a beautiful drink of nature. I ultimately pursued additional education in Enology learning the technical and scientific ropes of winemaking. I started volunteering anywhere I could to get hands on experience before making the leap to pursue winemaking full-time.
After working out west my wine interests became more focused. I found that I personally preferred more food friendly, fresh, lower alcohol wines. I also became aware of Cincinnati’s lost wine legacy and knew the Ohio River Valley had the potential to make wines I was excited to drink. In 2014 The Skeleton Root was born in hopes of revitalizing a beautiful and largely forgotten wine region and to produce refreshing wines from lost American heritage grapes.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
Small business is never easy, and being a business centered on an agricultural product is certainly not for the faint of heart. We have challenges bestowed upon us by mother nature. Frost = no fruit or too little fruit, then other years we may have record rains during critical periods and end up with way too much fruit so quality can come into question, there is also everything in between.
We also have all the usual challenges that come with being a tiny producer in a world centered on volume. Wine all too often is treated as a commodity – particularly in other countries. There are tons of mass-produced wines that are made to be inexpensive and saturate retail shelves with label art literally designed to “sell”! A lot of restaurants and places that champion local products will have wine lists that are anything but due to price/margin. These are sad truths and they are the challenges we and other small producers face.
That being said, we are unique and offer something those mass brands don’t. We are a quality focused true grape to glass producer. We differentiate ourselves by offering something that is not comprised with a laundry list of additives to make it fast and cheap! We make wines that are truly of a place, we do not deviate from that. We have found that people will always pick quality once they taste it. We have found that people do genuinely want better options and to make healthier decisions overall, we need to make great wine more accessible and pull the curtain back a bit.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
We produce dry minimal intervention wines largely made from American heritage grape varieties. In many ways the Ohio River Valley was the birthplace of American wine. The United States first commercial wine hailed from Cincinnati as did the first American bubbly, both made from a beautiful old grape called Catawba.
When I decided to build a winery in Cincinnati (downtown of all places) in 2014 my interests were largely centered on drinking old school Catawba. Noone in the country was making a dry Catawba at the time which I thought was wild being that it was so notable to the United States and to Cincinnati. We literally build a business with the sole goal of reviving this grape variety which has been an amazing journey.
What was your favorite childhood memory?
I loved great adventures in nature, I still do! Any day where I was outside discovering something new in nature was a dream. I loved plants and animals and was always so interested in natural ecosystems – I did not know that is what they were at the time. I remember how our backyard came alive with lighting bugs at night during the summer months, it was an incredible show that I miss seeing.
I also loved a great picnic outing as a kid. I revived this childhood pastime following the pandemic and I highly recommend it. There is something pure about a meal spent without the frills outside and technology. I loved how simple things were on a random Sunday when my family would hit the road for a creek-side picnic. We tend to make life overly complicated as we get older and it’s easy to forget the ease of those slower times; nature is great at restoring balance.
Pricing:
- Wine Bottles range from $16-$38 on
- We offer shareable cafe food ranging from $7-$23
- We offer wine tasting flights that usually range between $13 to $15 per flight
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.theskeletonroot.com
- Instagram: @skeletonroot
- Facebook: @skeletonroot
- Other: Email: info@skeletonroot.com for direct inquiries
