Estimated reading time: 8 minutes
A Word Worth Slowing Down For
Vigneron was one of those words that was easy to skim past, assuming it just meant “French for winemaker, but with better cheese.” Then came Jordan Salcito’s Smart Mouth, and with it the realization that the word carries more weight than that. She points out that there really is not a direct French translation for “winemaker.” The word they use is vigneron—literally “vine grower,” the person who works the land and the vines.
The distinction matters. The vigneron’s job is to let nature do what it does best and give it the best possible chance to produce great grapes, so that “wine is the result of a holistic collaboration with nature.” The English “winemaker,” by contrast, suggests the person shepherding grape juice through every stage of its transformation into wine—guiding, correcting, refining, and, when necessary, rescuing it.
As Scott Eckart of Pilgrimage Wine Company likes to frame it, it is the difference between a musician creating an original song and a musician mastering a cover. Both can be wonderful. But only one begins with something grown from scratch in its own place.
Why the Distinction Stuck
In practice, the difference is not always something worth policing. Salcito herself notes that she uses the terms interchangeably after making the point. Still, there is something useful in pausing over the distinction. It casts the vigneron as something more than a technician in a cellar. A vigneron is a partner with a piece of earth, not just the person standing next to a fermenter with a hydrometer.
A Table Full of Indiana Vignerons
On a perfect late May afternoon, that difference came into focus in real time. There was somehow a seat at a table filled with some of the best vignerons in Indiana, and there was full awareness of being the least qualified person in the room. Around that table: Jim and Andy Butler from Butler Winery; the Leaderbrands—Tony, Cody, and Connor—from Owen Valley Winery; Scott and Emma Eckart from Pilgrimage Wine Company; Kevin Geeting from Country Heritage Winery; Eric Heagy from Heagy Vineyards; and Shane Christ and Kirk Etheridge from Acres Away Winery.
There were no grand expectations going in. There was only the certainty that no reasonable person would turn down a few hours with that group. What makes them special is not simply that they make good wine. It is that they are vignerons first—people who grow grapes, obsess over soils and seasons, and then turn all of that into bottles worth chasing.
Butler Winery
Jim and Andy Butler feel like the elder statesmen of this circle, but in the best “seen a few vintages” kind of way. Jim and his wife Susan started Butler Winery back in 1983, making it the fourth-oldest winery in Indiana, and they have deliberately stayed small and family-run while the rest of the state kept growing. Jim was Oliver Winery’s winemaker in the late 1970s, helped create the Indiana Wine Grape Council, wrote Indiana Wine: A History, and pushed for the Indiana Uplands AVA. When those wines are poured, what shows up in the glass is experience—decades of it—and a family that has quietly helped shoulder Indiana wine forward.
Owen Valley Winery
At Owen Valley Winery, the story runs three generations deep. Tony and Jo Anna Leaderbrand left the corporate world, found a beautiful piece of land near McCormick’s Creek, and built a destination winery from it. Today, Tony’s parents, Bonnie and Preston, and their sons Cody and Connor all help carry the operation forward. Cody leads wine production, Connor is part of the family effort, and every vintage feels personal in a place where the family name is quite literally on the label and on the line.
Pilgrimage Wine Company
Scott and Emma Eckart are the wild-card artists of the group, in the best possible way. Pilgrimage Wine Company, at Treaty Line Vineyards outside Cambridge City, sits on their grandfather’s farm and carries the kind of confidence that comes from knowing exactly what it wants to be. The message is clear: “We make wine the old-fashioned way… we grow it.”
Scott and Emma are not just winegrowers. They are musicians, pilots, academics, and storytellers, as comfortable on a stage or in a cockpit as they are in the vineyard. That is part of what makes Scott’s analogy land so well. For them, estate-grown Indiana wine really is like original music—something composed from their own ground, then offered in their own voice.
Country Heritage Winery
If Indiana has a big-stage vigneron in the best sense, it may be Kevin Geeting at Country Heritage Winery. He leads winemaking for one of the state’s largest producers, working with more than 100 acres of cold-hardy vines and helping owners Jeremy and Jennifer Lutter shape a wine philosophy that starts with fruit quality and works outward from there.
Kevin talks about letting the grape tell him what kind of wine it wants to become, which sounds poetic until it is paired with the reality of a serious production facility and all the decisions that come with it. He manages to hold onto both things at once: scale and site, stainless steel and soil.
Heagy Vineyards
Then there is Eric Heagy, the definition of quietly doing the work. Heagy Vineyards is a working family farm and winery just north of Roann, where the first vines were planted in 2007, and the wines still feel deeply connected to the person who prunes the rows and knows every frost pocket by memory.
By day, Eric is also a school teacher, which somehow feels exactly right. He spends his time growing minds and grapes, then pours both kinds of patience into the glass.
Acres Away Winery
At Acres Away Winery in Ashley, the feeling is less “cute tasting room” and more “Midwestern think-tank with corkscrews.” Owner-winemaker Shane Christ started making wine at 22, spent more than two decades at Satek Winery, studied winemaking in South America and New Zealand, and eventually took the leap to buy Hartland Winery and relaunch it as Acres Away.
Alongside winemaker Kirk Etheridge, he now channels more than 30 years of combined Indiana winemaking experience into wines and ciders that are intentionally approachable without ever feeling generic. It is the kind of place where it is possible to drift from barrel trials into patio conversation and suddenly realize the glass is empty again.
What the Table Sounded Like
The day opened with each winery pouring wines they had questions about—experimental lots, tricky vintages, things they had tried differently, and wanted honest feedback on. Within ten minutes, it was clear that this was gloriously over the head of any casual drinker, and also one of the most enjoyable places to be. As flights moved around the table, what emerged was not just wine but the trail of decisions behind each bottle: the gambles, the pivots, the “we tried this, and it may have been either genius or insanity.” By the time the palate admitted defeat, there had been a full crash course in what it means to live as a vigneron in Indiana.
The Marquette Lesson
One of the clearest lessons came in the glasses of Marquette. Same grape. Same state. Completely different personalities.
The Marquette from the Indiana Uplands AVA showed darker fruit, more generosity, and the sort of structure that seems to come from warmer days and long, humid growing seasons. The Marquette from farther north—from those colder, wind-swept vineyards in northeastern Indiana—leaned into brighter fruit, tighter acidity, and a cooler-climate snap you could almost feel in your teeth. No map was required. The latitude was already in the glass.
What Vignerons Actually Talk About
Terms ricocheted across the table—brix, malo, pH—like this was the most normal conversation in the world. Climate came up again and again: the rolling hills and humidity of the Indiana Uplands AVA, the colder corners of the northeast, and the way one stubborn cold snap can erase a year’s worth of optimism.
Somewhere between the lab numbers, the Marquette comparisons, and the weather war stories, the larger point finally clicked. These people are not just making wine. They are in a long-term relationship with their vines and their sites, and the bottle is simply the part that the rest of us are lucky enough to see.
The Drive Home
Walking back to the car that evening, the notebook was a chaos of numbers, grape names, and half-legible quotes, but the big idea was wonderfully simple: wine is a collaboration between people and the patch of earth they decide to stick with. These Indiana vignerons have made that choice and doubled down on it, vintage after vintage.
So yes, the head may still buzz with brix and pH, but what lingers is the sense of people growing with a place, not just in it. Call them winemakers if you want—they will probably answer, as long as the wine is being enjoyed. But after an afternoon in that room, vigneron feels like the truer fit. The next time those names appear on a label—Butler, Leaderbrand, Eckart, Geeting, Heagy, Christ, Etheridge—think of the experiments, the near-misses, and the weather that almost won. Then pull the cork, pour a glass, and let their corner of Indiana tell its side of the story.
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