When your daughter told you that she wanted an outdoor winter wedding, you were a little caught off guard. From several of the social media sites that she follows, of course, she had beautiful pictures of brides and their wedding parties surrounded by radiantly white snow. If the idea of an outdoor winter wedding in the midwest caught you off guard, that surprise paled in comparison to the idea of having a wedding at one of the are wineries.
In your day weddings were held indoors, in a church, not a snowflake to be found. And certainly no wine, unless, of course, it was a Catholic wedding and they were serving communion.
As you summoned up all of the patience that is required of the mother of the bride, however, you visited a couple of wineries your daughter was considering. Turns out, these places are often built on beautiful hills with a restaurant or lounge looking out over the valley. Two of them, in fact, had an entire wall made of windows that looked over scenery that looked far too idyllic to be found in the midwest. That view, of course, would be your daughter’s back up plan if the weather did not cooperate. The ceremony could be help inside, but the bride, groom, and the wedding party would have the outdoors as their backdrop. Preferably the outdoors covered in snow. If the temperatures cooperated as well as the snowfall, the ceremony would be outdoors with the same beautiful view, just from a little different angle.
Today’s Wineries Serve a Number of Purposes
From wedding venues to hosting the traditional tasting parties, today’s wineries are versatile spots. For a gathering of friends from high school to college sorority sisters to family reunions, these beautiful and peaceful settings are increasingly popular. In fact, the stairs to storage cellars and the vineyards themselves make for a perfectly beautiful portrait area when it comes time for capturing those still and quiet moments before the ceremony begins.
With the number growing every year after, there were 6,941 wineries in the U.S. in 2010. That number grows each year. In fact, a half a decade later, 949 million gallons of wine were consumed in the U.S. in 2016. And while wineries in the U.S. may be a little more recently built there has long been a tradition of tourists traveling around the world to taste the wines from vineyards that are centuries old.
Interestingly enough, Millennials seem to be one of the driving forces in the popularity of this ancient drink of the gods:
- Millennials drank 42% of all of the wine in the U.S. in 2015, according to USA Today.
- Millennials consumed 159.6 million cases of wine in 2015, according to USA Today.
- Of those millennials who drank multiple times each week, an average of 3.1 glasses were consumed during each sitting.
- 17% of millennials indicated that they spend more than $20 on a bottle of wine in January 2016.
Whether you are the mother of a bride checking out a wedding venue or you are simply looking for a romantic evening with a date, a visit to a local winery might be the perfect solution.
