Hidden Legend Winery - Victor, Montana Pt. 3

Welcome to The Best Five Minute Wine Podcast. I'm your host, Forrest Kelly. From the seed to the glass, wine has a past. Our aim at The Best Five Minute Wine Podcast is to look for adventure at wineries around the globe. After all, the grape minds think alike. Let's start the adventure.

Our featured winery is as we conclude our interview with Ken Schultz of Hidden Legend Winery. We learn where that personality first started that would eventually make award winning Mead.I set out to see things in life a very, very early age. I blame my fifth grade teacher introducing us to National Geographic and I just could not stand it. I was like just fidgeting until I got out of high school and took off. I started as a merchant marine on the Great Lakes and then TWA started offering cheap tickets to Europe back in 69, 70, whenever that was. And I got one. And when I got there, I tore up the return trip and I was just gone four years. I'm not sure how many crowned heads I visited, but I got thirty three countries under my belt.

Reading on your website, it says that you were across from Pioneer Log Homes in the Sheafman Plaza in Victor Montana. Tell me about your location. Well, it's a little tiny strip plaza. There's like five businesses in it on the corner. We're actually five miles south. We're right on the border between Victor and Hamilton, but we're five miles south of Main Street, Victor itself, pretty much in the middle of nowhere. So you're not getting a lot of foot traffic. Well, being in a small plaza and having a beverage like a wine like beverage, it's not something that people come in and have three or four glasses of. I keep threatening to put in one of those banks of drawers that the Japanese used for their executive power naps. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So that, you know, after three or four glasses of Mead, I can just put you in there and set the timer. We don't have a lot of tasting room traffic. What we do have is wide distribution and Internet sales. We ship to thirty seven states in this pandemic world. It doubled it literally, literally from the middle of March on. If you would look at our warehouse room, our inventory, you would think all kind of Winery insists there's nothing. I'm making it. I'm not making it quite as fast as it's going out the door right now. We have a term for that. We call it full COVID. No, we don't have time to do much other than just try and keep up with the bottling and packaging.

And we've recently been out of our two top sellers and just got those back online. And we've got other flavors that we're trying to get back online. We're I think we're down about four flavors right now. Seriously, that four o'clock glass of wine became more than just kicking back. Tell me about your Mead award winners. Well, we most of them have won top awards at one time or another since ninety since the 90s. And we've got some bottles on the top shelf of a display cabinet that pretty much you can't even see the bottles anymore. They're so laden with artwork. We pick on like the Finger Lakes in New York, Tasters Guild in Michigan, The Indie international at Purdue. Out here in Washington, we have the Tri Cities Wine Society and of course, the Mazer Cup International Mead Competition in Broomfield, Colorado. Every year we try and spread it out and get a good overview from reputable judges. It basically keeps me on track. And except for this year, there are usually a dozen shows that I like to go to, anything from Art shows to Highland Games to Renaissance festivals to Pirate festivals. And of course, I don't get to see much of the festivals I'm staying or serving Mead for eight hours a day. But it's fun to dress like a pirate and see everybody happy with my product. All right, Ken, thank you very much. And as we close out, go ahead and give us your Web address on how we can reach out to you. Hiddenlegendwinery.com Well, we do have a Facebook presence. I was in Ireland and I was talking to a barman outside of Dublin that we were talking about what I did. And it was he was just all over it. He was like, wow, I wish I could get some of that on tap here. I said, well, you know, we've got a good presence. Maybe we can pursue this. And I said, go ahead, take out your phone and hit “buy mead.” And sure enough, there we are. We dominate the first page of a Google search for me and the next four. My boys were optimizing before anybody was optimizing. Cool.

Thank you for listening. I'm Forrest Kelly. This episode of The Best Five Minute Wine Podcast was produced by IHYSM. If you like the show, please tell your friends and pets and subscribe until next time pour the wine and ponder your next adventure.

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