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Uncork adventure: Sip your way through northern Illinois wineries

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Uncork adventure: Sip your way through northern Illinois wineries


Forget Napa Valley, there’s a thriving wine scene maturing right here in our own backyard.

Nestled amidst rolling hills and charming towns, northern Illinois wineries offer a delightful escape for wine lovers and casual sippers alike. From award-winning varietals to scenic vineyards and welcoming tasting rooms, these wineries promise a relaxing and flavorful experience.

This guide will unveil some of the region’s finest wineries, highlighting their unique offerings and helping you plan your perfect wine weekend.

August Hill Winery

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You can enjoy August Hill Winery wines at its tasting room in Utica, or visit its Peru vineyard, which hosts the Wine on the Hill and Cave Tasting events. The family-owned winery, which opened in 2002, serves a variety of crisp white wines, hearty reds and refreshing blush wines, as well as dessert wines and bubblies from its Illinois Sparkling Co. Some of the August Hill offerings include chardonel, vignoles, chambourcin, blackberry, caramel apple and more. Small bites are available at the tasting room, as are nonalcoholic drinks. Relax in their lounge area or on the patio. The tasting room is at 106 Mill St., Utica, and the vineyard is located at 21N 2551st Road, Peru. augusthillwinery.com

Bishops Hill Winery

Bishops Hill Winery, 310 Bridge St. in Joliet

You’ll feel like royalty when you step inside Bishops Hill Winery’s gorgeous castle building in Joliet. The property, which overlooks the Des Plaines River, was once the home of the Joliet Catholic Diocese. The castle-like structure that now holds the tasting room was built by a German brewmaster, and has been completely restored. Wine tastings are available on Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays. Pizza and charcuterie trays are available for purchase. Bishops Hill offers a monthly wine-tasting class, as well as outdoor yoga classes. Some of Bishops Hill’s wines include reds like cabernet sauvignon, petit verdot and petite syrah; whites include chardonnay, sauvignon blanc and pinot grigio. 310 Bridge St., Joliet. bishopshill.com

Prairie State Winery

Opened in 1998 by two former teachers, Prairie State Winery in Genoa takes pride in its high-quality wines and friendly service. The winery produces more than 35 wines, including unique varietals not found elsewhere with Illinois-grown grapes. Some of the red wines available include Bacio Di Sole and Recovery Noir; white wines include Edelweiss and Honey Orange Blossom; and fruit and dessert wines include Prairie Fire, Cranberry and Honey Apple Crisp. The tasting room also offers craft cocktails, as well as paninis, flatbread, shareable snacks and more. Music in the Garden events are held in the wine garden on the second and fourth weekends of the warmer months. Prairie State Winery is located at 222 W. Main St., Genoa. prairiestatewinery.com

Fox Valley Winery

Fox Valley Winery will host a Halloween party from 5 to 8 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 28, 2023.

Fox Valley Winery specializes in small-batch handcrafted wines, available in its Oswego tasting room that’s filled with artwork from local artists. Relax on a couch in the warm and inviting tasting room, or sip outside on the spacious patio. Fox Valley Winery offers traditional varietals such as merlot and syrah, as well as fruit wines like cranberry and apple, dessert wines and sweet wines. Live bands perform there. 59 Main St., Oswego. foxvalleywinery.com

Galena Cellars

Galena is always a popular spot for a weekend getaway, and while you’re there, stop by Galena Cellars’ downtown tasting room or countryside vineyard. The family-owned winery opened in a restored 1840s granary building in Galena in 1985, and the Lawlor family purchased a farm outside the city in 1990 to begin growing their own grapes. Wines include dry reds like cabernet sauvignon, Eric the Red and petite syrah; white wines include Seyval White and moscato, along with fruit wines like Caramel Apple, Cherry and Honey Rhubarb. Sparkling, holiday and dessert wines are also available. The vineyard hosts live music on weekends, where you also can enjoy the view of the Galena countryside while sipping a glass of wine. The downtown Galena tasting room offers live music, as well as signature cocktails, shareable plates, sandwiches, flatbreads, salads and more. The downtown tasting room is at 111 N. Main St., Galena, and the vineyard is located at 4746 N. Ford Road, Galena. galenacellars.com

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Waterman Winery

Waterman Winery and Vineyards, located in southern DeKalb County, has a 12-acre vineyard with 40 varieties of red and white grapes from which they produce their award-winning wines. The winery produces 20 varieties of unique, hand-crafted regional wines, including Royal Red, DeKalb Red, Waterman Red and several other sweet and dry reds. White wines include Wine Dog White, DeKalb County Niagara and Reflection. Waterman Winery also produces seasonal fruit wines like Harvest Pumpkin and Cherrylicious. Self-guided vineyard tours and wine tastings are available on Saturdays and Sundays. The winery is located at 11582 Waterman Road, Waterman. watermanwinery.com

Acquaviva Winery

Located in the western Kane County village of Maple Park, Acquaviva is a family-owned winery located on an 85-acre vineyard. The 20,000-square-foot facility includes their wine production area, which is visible to the public, a tasting bar and pizza bistro with foods paired to accompany the wines. Acquaviva produces a wide variety of red, white and specialty wines. Some of the varieties include reds like Don Giuseppe 2019, Piacere 2020 and Marquette 2020, and whites such as Fiora Della Vigna 2018, Donna Mia 2019 and Bianco Bello 2019. 47W614 Illinois Route 38, Maple Park. acquavivawinery.com

Additional wineries in northern Illinois include Fergedaboutit Vineyard & Winery, located in the small Jo Daviess County village of Hanover; Rocky Waters Winery, also located in Hanover; Massbach Ridge Winery in Elizabeth, Illinois, about 30 minutes from Galena; Vigneto del Bino Winery in north suburban Antioch; Sable Creek Winery with its new location in Romeoville and Lynfred Winery in suburban Roselle.



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Illinois

Tomislav Ivisic scores 20 points and Illinois overcomes 18 turnovers to beat Oakland

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Tomislav Ivisic scores 20 points and Illinois overcomes 18 turnovers to beat Oakland



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CHAMPAIGN, Ill. (AP) — Tomislav Ivisic scored 20 points, Ben Humrichous added 10 and Illinois overcame 18 turnovers to beat Oakland 66-54 on Wednesday night.

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Illinois has started a season 3-0 for the fourth time under Brad Underwood, and the second time in three seasons after starting the 2022-23 season 4-0.

Illinois had its lead trimmed to 38-36 early in the second half before going on a 17-4 run for a 55-40 lead. Ivisic started the run, that included 11 straight points, with three made field goals. Oakland was just 2 of 10 from the field during the run.

Ivisic was 9 of 14 from the field, while the rest of his teammates combined to go 14 of 41.

Jayson Woodrich scored 11 points and DQ Cole added 10 for Oakland (1-2). The Grizzlies shot just 38% from the field, including 4 of 25 from 3-point range.

Oakland also turned it over 18 times.

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Both teams play a top-five team in their next game. Oakland plays at top-ranked Kansas on Saturday. Illinois has a week off before playing at No. 2 Alabama on Nov. 20 in the C.M. Newton Classic.



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UI Health nurses go on 2nd strike of year, demand new contract

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UI Health nurses go on 2nd strike of year, demand new contract


CHICAGO (WLS) — Nurses at UI Health wrapped up day one of their strike Wednesday afternoon.

It was a day filled with chanting and marching as they try to send a message to administration.

ABC7 Chicago is now streaming 24/7. Click here to watch

This is the second strike the union has gone on this year. Leaders among the group met at least twice with the hospital on Wednesday.

They said they’ve been fighting for a new contract for months, and while there has been some progress made, they believe the proposed 2% wage increase is just not enough for the nurses.

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The Illinois Nurses Association could be seen in action Wednesday on the Near West Side as dozens of workers with signs asked for a new contract.

Prior to the first INA strike in August, UI Health secured a temporary restraining order to prevent certain registered nurses in critical care units from striking in order to keep the hospital running.

READ MORE | UI Health nurses to go on week-long strike Monday as DNC starts

Those people are still working while more than 1,700 of their colleagues are on strike.

There have been nearly 50 negotiation meetings between both sides over the last six months. ABC7 was told the latest one started at 3 p.m. Wednesday, and the workers said they’ll wait it out at as long as it takes to meet their demands.

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‘This is the way things are done in Illinois’: Defense attorneys begin cross-examining star witness | Capitol News Illinois

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‘This is the way things are done in Illinois’: Defense attorneys begin cross-examining star witness | Capitol News Illinois


CHICAGO – The former chief lobbyist for electric utility Commonwealth Edison has spent the last week telling a federal jury how he bent over backward to accommodate hiring requests from former Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan.

Led by the prosecutor questioning him, ComEd exec-turned-cooperating witness Fidel Marquez repeatedly said he and other utility leaders agreed to hire or contract with the powerful speaker’s allies in order for Madigan “to be more positively disposed toward ComEd’s legislative agenda.”

Read more: ‘They were being paid as a favor to Mike Madigan’: Feds’ star witness takes stand

But on Tuesday, an attorney for Madigan co-defendant Mike McClain, ComEd’s longest-serving contract lobbyist, began his cross-examination of Marquez by drilling down on his previous testimony – and his guilty plea in 2020 for bribery conspiracy.

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“Are you not saying and are you not testifying at this trial that in your mind, the purpose of this conspiracy was to trade jobs at ComEd for Mike Madigan taking action?” Cotter asked, referring to action Madigan is alleged to have taken on legislation ComEd pushed in Springfield.

“I said it was to consider ComEd’s agenda favorably,” Marquez said.

“Right,” Cotter replied. “Not to trade jobs for action”

“Looking at it favorably, to my mind, is an action,” Marquez said.

Cotter’s line of questioning points to a U.S. Supreme Court decision this summer that narrowed federal bribery law to exclude “gratuities” – rewards given after an official action – and stipulated that bribery requires an agreement of an exchange prior to the action.

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Prosecutors, however, say their case isn’t affected by the ruling, as they’re pursuing a “stream of benefits” legal theory, wherein a pattern of corrupt exchanges over a long period of time is proof enough of a quid pro quo, even if there’s no smoking gun evidence of a handshake deal. The feds say that “stream of benefits” is more than covered by the 7 ½ years at issue in the case, which included dozens of job recommendations from Madigan and several large pieces of legislation ComEd pushed for, and in one case killed.

Read more: SCOTUS ruling could upend federal corruption cases for Madigan, allies | 4 decades after rising to power and nearly 4 years since his fall, former Speaker Madigan goes to trial

But Cotter on Tuesday was barred from asking Marquez whether he believed he’d done anything illegal – something he’d been allowed to ask Marquez during cross-examination in last year’s “ComEd Four” trial. That trial ended with unanimous convictions for McClain and three other former ComEd lobbyists and executives charged with bribing Madigan.

In his cross-examination of Marquez last March, Cotter noted that for more than a year after FBI agents approached him in January 2019, even after he agreed to become a cooperating witness, Marquez still insisted he hadn’t done anything criminal. His eventual guilty plea to a single conspiracy bribery charge in September 2020 was a purely opportunistic move to avoid prison time, Cotter alleged.

Read more: ‘You had a choice to make’: Defense paints cooperating witness in ComEd trial as opportunistic

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With the jury out of the courtroom, parties argued the contours of what Cotter could elicit during cross-examination, and Assistant U.S. Attorney Amarjeet Bhachu quoted from a report FBI agents prepared after an early interview with Marquez shortly after he agreed to become a government mole.

“The CHS (cooperating human source) does not believe this is right, but this is the way things are done in Illinois,” Bhachu read from the report.

But U.S. District Judge John Blakey blocked Cotter from referencing a claim made by Marquez during a January 2019 meeting with FBI agents that he hadn’t done anything illegal.

Before Cotter began questioning Marquez on Tuesday, Bhachu finished out four days of direct examination with several more examples of McClain pushing job recommendations from Madigan to Marquez.

In an August 2018 wiretapped phone call between McClain and Madigan, the speaker floated getting Jeffrey Rush, the son of then-U.S. Rep. Bobby Rush, a consulting contract with the Illinois Department of Corrections in the assumed future administration of Gov. JB Pritzker, who hadn’t yet won the governor’s mansion. Rush, Madigan acknowledged, “got himself jammed up” having a sexual relationship with a woman in a halfway house run by IDOC while he worked for the agency.

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“This is a guy that I’m gonna wanna help somewhere along the road,” Madigan said.

It wasn’t until six months later that McClain and Rush had a conversation about how McClain could help him find a job, and then another two months until McClain asked Marquez if ComEd could help. Marquez happened to be secretly videotaping the ask over lunch at the now-defunct Sangamo Club in Springfield, a hangout for many lawmakers and lobbyists. But Marquez declined, saying it would be “hard for me to place him in good conscience within the company” after McClain had outlined Rush’s indiscretion.

Madigan also tried to place Vanessa Berrios, the daughter of former Cook County Assessor and county Democratic Party chair Joe Berrios and sister of former Democratic state Rep. Toni Berrios, in a job at ComEd in late 2018.

“My thought was that there might be a place for her at ComEd,” Madigan said in a December 2018 wiretapped call with McClain.

The jury already saw emails last week showing ComEd’s parent company Exelon was ready to terminate Toni Berrios from its contract lobbying team at the end of 2016 but renewed her contract for 2017 after a McClain relayed a request from Madigan.

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Emails shown to the jury indicate McClain’s continued involvement with getting Vanessa Berrios a job, including one telling Marquez that Madigan asked about her weekly. But Marquez testified that she ultimately declined an interview.

In his 15 hours on the witness stand with Bhachu questioning him, Marquez testified about dozens of instances in which McClain passed along job recommendations from Madigan, from political allies to residents in his 13th Ward power base on Chicago’s Southwest Side.

Read more: Jury sees relentless ComEd job placement requests from Madigan co-defendant | ComEd lobbyist warned FBI mole to ‘keep Madigan happy’ and not mess with no-work contracts

But McClain had made himself indispensable both as Madigan’s self-described “agent,” and as ComEd’s chief lobbyist, so much so that even after his official retirement from lobbying in late 2016, Marquez found himself calling McClain enough for advice that he convinced his boss to create a consulting contract for him.

Before McClain officially became a ComEd consultant, he wrote an email to Marquez in early April 2017 asking if he wouldn’t mind if McClain continued his previous work of acting as the go-between for intern recommendations from the 13th Ward for ComEd’s summer internship program.

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“I am not asking for any money,” McClain wrote. “It just seems to be that maybe by next summer we may have someone employed that will have the trust of the 13th ward and you (ComEd). You and I have a system and so why have someone take it over when we will have to train from square one just to have someone else work with you next spring?”

The jury has previously heard that McClain was hoping longtime Madigan staffer Will Cousineau would take his place as ComEd’s lead contract lobbyist when Cousineau left the speaker’s office in the summer of 2017. Cousineau testified earlier in trial that after interviewing and a back-and-forth on salary, he ultimately took a full-time job at a lobbying firm, though he’d pick up ComEd as a client in 2018 and 2019.

By early 2019, however, there was still no one to replace McClain, and it was getting to be a burden on both McClain and the speaker. In a lengthy call Bhachu played toward the end of his direct examination, McClain and Marquez discussed the issue with former ComEd CEO Anne Pramaggiore, who’d been promoted to CEO of Exelon Utilities the year before.

“We’re in a conundrum,” McClain said, explaining that Madigan had called him and expressed mild frustration that he didn’t know who to turn to about issues related to ComEd or Exelon since McClain was no longer around as much in retirement.


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At the time, ComEd was advocating for an extension of a “sunset” the speaker’s team had insisted on including in an earlier law that gave electric utilities more predictable outcomes when asking state regulators to approve increases to electricity rates. Other energy and environmental interests were launching their own legislative efforts in hopes they could be tacked onto ComEd’s bill.

“The point person has to have his (Madigan’s) trust and also have the company’s trust … And that person’s gotta be very discreet,” McClain said, referring to a “code” the point person would implicitly understand. “So like, when all of a sudden I come to you and say, ‘Would you take a look at this resume?’ I mean, that’s like, ‘Will you drop and do and try to get this done as fast as possible?’”

McClain again floated Cousineau for the go-between role, and in a follow-up email said he’d sit down with Cousineau to talk about it, saying he “has our Friend’s confidence,” using a euphemism he often employed for Madigan.

“It is not an easy position,” he wrote. “Our friend is very, very cautious about letting people know and do what he needs done.”

Cotter spent his hours cross-examining Marquez Tuesday establishing McClain’s value to ComEd. Marquez acknowledged that McClain had done a lot of work to repair the relationship between ComEd and the speaker, which had been damaged around 2007 but had never been strong, as Madigan had long been a skeptic of utilities.

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He also acknowledged that ComEd received job recommendations from many sources, including then-Senate President John Cullerton and then-House GOP Leader Jim Durkin, in addition to other elected officials, ComEd contractors and employees. And as the lobbyist, and later consultant, McClain was assigned to maintaining the relationship between the utility and Madigan.

“So when Mike McClain communicated to you job recommendations from Mr. Madigan, that was part of his job?” Cotter asked.

“Yes,” Marquez replied.

Cotter also went through various lobbying efforts to show how McClain built coalitions in order to pass bills – and didn’t just place a call to the speaker. For example, when ComEd was trying to kill a 2018 effort by then-Attorney General Lisa Madigan, McClain got the speaker’s permission to kill his daughter’s bill, but McClain and other executives still had to put in massive work to get it done.

Cotter played a call between McClain, Marquez and Pramaggiore discussing the strategy to defeat the bill, which included calling on all stakeholders from faith leaders to ComEd’s large customers and vendors to organized labor, the constituency Madigan valued most.

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“At no point does Mr. McClain ever say, ‘Well why don’t I go talk to the speaker and see if I he can assist us in killing this bill?’” Cotter asked Marquez.

“He does not,” Marquez agreed.

Cotter is expected to finish his cross-examination Wednesday and pass the baton to Madigan’s attorneys.

 

Capitol News Illinois is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service that distributes state government coverage to hundreds of news outlets statewide. It is funded primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.

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