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Wineries & Distilleries · What Fort Wayne made to drink
Fort Wayne's drinking life is told in the Bars section, and its dry years are policed in the Crime section. This section holds the third part of the story: the making. It is a short and lopsided record. Fort Wayne distilled whiskey early — before it was a city, two stills stood here — and then, so far as the surviving record shows, it essentially stopped. Through the whole of its industrial century the city's liquor trade was a trade in other men's goods: rectifiers who blended and flavored whiskey made elsewhere, wholesale houses whose price lists ran to dozens of imported wines and brandies, bottlers who put Cincinnati and Milwaukee beer into glass. When Prohibition came, production shrank to the household scale — crocks in cellars, stills in barns — and when Repeal came, the breweries returned but no distiller and no vintner did. The making record then lies blank for more than eighty years, until two ventures of the craft era close it: a veterans' distillery on East Wallace Street in 2016, and a winery on the county's north edge in 2023. What follows is every maker the record will support, oldest first, with the gaps and the rival claims printed where they belong — inside the entries.
The first distillery: Squire Rockhill's still
1820s
Whiskey before the town: The earliest making of liquor at the head of the Maumee that any county history records belongs to the village years, before the canal and before the town plat had filled in. An old settler's…
Comparet & Kiser's canal distillery — and a quarrel between the histories
Canal era, after 1835
The fur traders turn distillers: Francis Comparet, a French-Canadian trader who reached Fort Wayne in 1820 and kept his trading house on the south side of Columbia Street between Clinton and Calhoun, was for years the local agent…
The rectifier's city: B. Trentman and the wholesale liquor houses
1861 — 1880s
Making, of a kind: After the canal era, the only liquor "making" the Fort Wayne directories will certify is rectifying — the wholesale trade that bought whiskey distilled elsewhere, blended it, flavored and colored it, and sold…
The industrial city that did not distill
1862 — 1918
A searched negative: From the Civil War onward, legal distilling in the United States ran on federal permits, bonded premises and gaugers, and it concentrated in a handful of whiskey towns — in Indiana, places like Lawrenceburg…
Prohibition's production side: crocks, barns and the Booze Room
1918 — 1933
The making goes indoors: Indiana's own prohibition law closed the legal trade on April 2, 1918, nearly two years before the nation followed; how that law was enforced here is the Crime section's story, told there and not…
The long quiet: 1933–2016
1933 — 2016
Repeal without makers: When national repeal came on December 5, 1933, Fort Wayne's breweries resumed within the year — Centlivre and Berghoff are the Business section's story, told there. In spirits and wine, nothing resumed…
Three Rivers Distilling Company: the distillery returns
2016 — present
Two airmen and a still: Fort Wayne's making record resumes on March 28, 2016, when Three Rivers Distilling Company began operations at 224 East Wallace Street, just south of downtown, in a 7,100-square-foot brick building that…
Vinland Reserve Winery: the county's first winery
2022 — present
A winery at last: The wine half of the making record closes where the county meets its northern farmland. Vinland Reserve Winery stands at 4494 Provision Parkway, on Perry Township ground north of Dupont Road near Union Chapel…
The grape before the winery: Catawba dreams and a wine trade
1806 — 1900
Indiana's first wine country was not here: The grape excitement of the nineteenth century belonged to the Ohio River. John James Dufour's Swiss colony at Vevay, in Switzerland County, was making wine by 1809 and thousands of…
Closing: the famous wineries that are not Fort Wayne's
2001 — present
Jurisdiction, stated plainly: Northeast Indiana's wine country is real, and almost none of it is in Allen County. The two names most often attached to Fort Wayne belong to other counties' ground. Two EE's Winery, on U.S. 24 at…