Enjoy the best of summer at Vintage Ohio wine festival

By CYNTHIA SCHUSTER EAKIN

Introduce yourself to some of the finest wines Ohio has to offer while enjoying a picture-perfect summer outing.

Sip a little. Relax a little. Find some great food.

Vintage Ohio, the state’s original wine festival, is the place to discover new wines and wineries, and a place to find something that matches every palate. Held at the beautiful Lake Metroparks Farmpark in Kirtland, OH, on Aug. 4 and 5, the festival offers viniferas, hybrids, natives, reds, whites, roses, ciders, “fun” wines, “serious” wines, sweet and dry wines and everything in between.

To celebrate Ohio’s fine wines, the two “All that Glitters is Gold” tents in the center of the festival field will showcase one gold wine from each of the 15 gold and double gold wines awarded in the 2023 Ohio Wine Competition. Coordinated by Kent State University’s Ashtabula campus wine program with supervision by the Ohio State extension enologist and funded in part by the Ohio Grape Industries Committee, a subset of the Ohio Department of Agriculture, the annual competition is judged by a dozen of the most respected wine judges from around the country.

Other specialty tents include the wine mixology tent, featuring cocktails created with festival wines, a hot new trend in wine appreciation. Tom Baker will be on hand in the Schott Zwiesel tent to talk about the difference great glasses make when serving wine. Regional wine authority and home winemaker with a mountain of amateur wine medals to his credit, Joe Hoover will be at the festival to help you launch your own home winemaking projects.

The cooking demonstration tent returns to Vintage Ohio. Led by Chef Lisa Pucci Delgado, now in her ninth year with the festival, the 2023 team of chefs includes Fred Stoldt, of Cleveland’s own hot sauce Fred Hot, Mark and Selene Gomez, celebrity chefs from Texas, and Mike McCourt, Blackstone Griddle ambassador. Each chef will present a unique menu item paired with wine from the festival field.

Delgado, a brand ambassador to a dozen companies, will be using products like Traeger grills, B and B charcoal, Tuxton China, Gunter Wilhelm Knives and Duck Fat Spray as part of her presentations. One of the region’s premier personal chefs and a barbecue pitmaster, she has appeared on Celebrity Chef, Food Network’s Chopped and on FOX News.

Stoldt, known as “Fred Hot,” will add humor to his presentation while featuring his own blended hot sauces and spice blends.

McCourt served in the army as a helicopter crew chief before becoming a student of all styles of cuisine. That passion led him to become a part of the Blackstone Griddle crew. He shares information about outdoor cooking on Mile’s Mess Hall social platforms.

Chefs Mark and Selene Gomez appear often on Univision, the Spanish television network. Mark Gomez has cooked for more than 70 well-known celebrities as well as two presidents.

“In addition to organizing the culinary demonstration pavilion and bringing in chefs from around the country, I arrange for top-of-the-line and big-name companies to sponsor our pavilion by featuring so many wonderful giveaways between each demonstration for the audience to take home,” Delgado noted. “We have given away Blackstone griddles, Big Green Egg grills, and many other beautiful prizes along with many smaller prizes that will enhance your culinary kitchen.” This year’s pavilion sponsors are Gunther Williams premium cutlery, Drouins woodworking cutting boards and trivets, Russell’s BBQ rubs and spices, Duck Fat Spray Company, MarDonaSpecialty Imports olive oils and vinegars, Snowville Creamery and Trices Spices. The cooking demonstration menu will be listed on Chef Delgado’s website, www.cheflisapuccidelgado.com, and on social media platforms prior to Vintage Ohio.

Many Ohio wineries have added ciders and craft brews to their beverage list. Vintage Ohio has recognized the interest among connoisseurs of craft beverages of every type by adding beers brewed by area wineries to the festival field. For an additional purchase price, brews from three wineries will be available. Ohio law does not allow beer and wine in the same designated area under the festival permit. Featured wineries include: Double Wing Brewing Company, housed adjacent to Debonne Vineyards in Madison, OH; Maize Valley Craft Brewery at Maize Valley Winery in Hartville, OH; and The Pine Lake Brewing Company in Columbiana, OH, the home of the Pine Lake Winery, restaurant and event center. Go to www.visitvintageohio.com/breweries for a list of craft beers to be offered.

Vintage Ohio will also feature dozens of gourmet food vendors and unique crafters. Live music can be heard all throughout the day at the festival. Attendees who want to make Vintage Ohio a wine getaway weekend can find lodging at the Lodge at Geneva on the Lake or at one of several nearby Lake County inns. There are more than 50 wineries to explore within an hour’s drive of Vintage Ohio.

Tickets to the Vintage Ohio festival are $37 in advance for adult samplers or $42 at the gate. Admission for non-drinkers, or for those under age, is $10. Tickets for children ages four to 17 are $4. Children three and under get in free. Groups of 10 or more can get discounted tickets by calling 440-466-4417. Go to www. visitvintageohio.com for additional festival information.

“Our mom would get home from work about the same time we’d get home from school,” Margaret recalls. “Allison and I would grab the comics page from that morning’s “Plain Dealer” and flop down on the floor with it. Meanwhile, our mother would be sitting at the dining room table reading Erma Bombeck’s column and laughing so hard she could barely speak. After she was finished, we’d take a look and be engulfed in laughter, too.”

The Engels aren’t alone in their appreciation for the Dayton, Ohio, humorist. During a career that spanned more than 30 years, her thrice-weekly musings on the universal idiosyncrasies of family life were published in 900 newspapers across the country, garnering a legion of 30 million faithful readers. Bombeck’s flair for the funny explored eclectic subjects ranging from socks that disappear in the washing machine, leftovers that refuse to die, the newfound wonders of disposable diapers and the hodgepodge of items buried in the household junk drawer.

July 29 through August 20, Cleveland Play House is presenting “Erma Bombeck: At Wit’s End,” a onewoman show celebrating the humorist’s abundant brilliance. Written by the Engel sisters and starring Pam Sherman, the play chronicles Bombeck’s experiences as a stay-at-home mother of three, along with her stratospheric renown as a journalist, the staunch support she lent to the Equal Rights Amendment, and her unfailing ability to find comedy even as she battled breast cancer and the kidney disease that ultimately claimed her life in 1996.

“Erma’s humor is timeless,” Allison says. “So much of it is about relationships and the push and pull women feel while trying to balance career and family that’s still valid today. Erma never pretended she had the perfect life and wrote about experiences we can all relate to. Readers loved her because they could say, ‘I thought it was just me. Now, I know it’s everyone.’ ”

In addition to her column, titled “At Wit’s End,” Bombeck wrote for “Good Housekeeping,” “Reader’s Digest,” “Redbook” and “McCall’s”; and authored a dozen best-selling books including “The Grass is Always Greener Over the Septic Tank”; “If Life is a Bowl of Cherries, What Am I Doing in the Pits?”; and “Family: The Ties that Bind ... and Gag!”

For more than a decade, she was a regular commentator on “Good Morning America” and a frequent guest on “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.” Bombeck created, wrote and produced the ABC tele- vision series “Maggie” and saw “The Grass is Always Greener Over the Septic Tank” turned into a CBS madefor-television movie starring Carol Burnett and Charles Grodin.

Born in 1927, Erma Louise Fiste started showing signs of her burgeoning talent while writing a humor column for her junior high school newspaper. Upon graduating from high school in 1944, she worked as a copygirl at the “Dayton Journal-Herald,” saving for tuition money to attend the University of Dayton. After earning a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1949, she was hired as a full-time writer at the newspaper and married college sweetheart Bill Bombeck. The couple moved to the Dayton suburb of Centerville in 1955.

“As much as she enjoyed being married and raising children, Erma was burning to be a writer, had gone to college to be a writer and had not expressed that part of her,” Margaret says. “Activist Betty Friedan’s claim that housewives in America weren’t living up to their full potential really hit a chord with her. So as soon as her youngest went to kindergarten, she started writing at age 37.”

Bombeck earned $3 a week for her early discourses, published in the “Kettering-Oakwood Times” in 1964. It didn’t take long for newspapers across the United States to take notice. They began publishing her columns a year later.

Fame quickly followed.

“The kids, not her career, always remained the center of Erma and Bill’s lives,” Margaret says. “By the time her children returned home from school, she would be finished writing for the day, the office door would be shut, and she’d be a mom again.

“Erma,” the playwright adds, “wouldn’t have it any other way.”

Chagrin Falls High School Hall of Fame inductees Allison and Margaret Engel are no strangers to the frenzied world of journalism. A former reporter for the “San Jose Mercury News” now living in Pasadena, California, Allison received her Master of Arts in screenwriting from the University of Southern California. Margaret’s

When eminent newspaper columnist Molly Ivins died in 2007 from breast cancer, the pair chose to eulogize her on stage by writing “Red Hot Patriot: The Kick-Ass Wit of Molly Ivins,” which premiered at the Philadelphia Theatre Company in 2010.

Bringing Bombeck’s story to the stage, Allison explains, was a natural next step.

“[Margaret] and I believe both of these women need to be remembered,” she says. “We also liked the idea of writing a show for an actress over 50 because there are very few one-woman plays out there starring a female over 50 as a protagonist portraying a complicated, interesting, funny person.”

As the Engel siblings do, Pam Sherman admires Bombeck’s iconic humor.

“Erma was known for saying things that needed to be heard, and served as a voice for women who didn’t have a voice. She’s my idol,” says the Rochester, New York-based attorney-turned-leadership coach-turned actress whose syndicated column, “The Suburban Outlaw,” was published on the USA Today Network for 15 years. Like Bombeck’s missives, her words served as loving homages to irreverent, honest women and men willing to fully live their lives for their families and for themselves.

Sherman, 61, received her J.D. from New York’s Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in 1987, specializing in litigation.

“I thought it would be like playing a lawyer on TV – but it wasn’t at all,” Sherman recalls. “There were no smoking guns and no big reveals in the courtroom. I found the job to be soul-suckingly boring.”

When the law firm she worked for dissolved in 1993, Sherman knew the time had come to fulfill her dream of treading the boards.

“When I was a child growing up on Staten Island, I used to play piano with the door wide open, hoping a wandering talent agent would pass by and hear me,” she recalls with a laugh.

Sherman honed her budding craft at the British American Drama Academy at Oxford University and Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre, which led to full-time acting work. She’s best known for TV and film appearances in “Homicide,” “Unsolved Mysteries” and “The Replacements.”

But portraying Erma Bombeck is a role the actress relishes. So far, Sherman has played to sold-out audiences at Rochester’s Geva Theatre, Denver Center for the Performing Arts and Shea’s 710 in Buffalo New York.

“The Engels did a beautiful job of taking Erma’s writing and incorporating it into a dramatic journey with a poignant finish,” she says. “No matter their age or stage of life, audiences always admire Erma’s courage of following your dreams and, as she said, ‘not hiding them in the back of your mind.’ It’s a message that’s timeless, genderless — and human.”

Cleveland Ballet “A Celebration and Roast of Richard W. Pogue”

A celebration and roast of 95-year-old Dick Pogue, also known as Mr. Cleveland, took place May 18 at the Mimi Ohio Theatre to benefit the newly established Richard W. and Patricia R. Pogue Cleveland Ballet Endowment Fund. VIP guests enjoyed a reception at Cibreo Privato prior to the event, then walked a block over to Playhouse Square for the main event. Nearly 300 attendees raised $600,000 for the endowment.

Pogue is known for his distinguished law career with Jones Day, but also for his lifelong civic leadership and philanthropic contributions to the city of Cleveland. His wife, Patricia Pogue, died February 25, at the age of 91. Pat grew up in Bowling Green and graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Michigan, where she met law student Dick Pogue. They married in 1954, and after living in the Washington, DC area for three years, moved to Cleveland in 1957. She devoted the rest of her life to her family and to civic, cultural, and educational causes in Cleveland.

As current chair of the Cleveland Ballet, Dick has played a pivotal role in helping to reestablish this premier dance company, Playhouse Square’s resident ballet company. Dick’s impressive fundraising prowess has helped to raise more than $300 million for key organizations dedicated to various causes, helping them meet or exceed fundraising goals.

Dennis Lansdowne, Chair of the event’s Steering Committee, served as Master of Ceremonies. According to the committee, “Dick’s interest in, and commitment to, the city of Cleveland are unmatched, and we are pleased to be honoring him and his tremendous legacy.”

The “roasters” were a “Who’s Who” of Cleveland notables from the legal, business, development, and political worlds: Paul Carleton, former Ohio lieutenant governor Lee Fisher, Michael Horvitz, Susan Stevens Jaros, Hugh McKay, Randy McShepard, Ginger Mlakar, John Mulligan, Dick’s son CBS News Sunday Morning correspondent David Pogue, P. Michael Pohl, Jan L. Roller, Cuyahoga County Executive Chris Ronayne, John Strauch, William B. Summers, Jr., and the Honorable Joan Synenberg. Albert Ratner gave his roast via a previously recorded video, as did Senator Sherrod Brown and former Senator Rob Portman.

“The No Name Band,” consisting of attorneys Peter Brodhead, Doug McWilliams, and Kris Treu, entertained the crowd with humorous musical selections with lyrics such as, “He’s no rogue, he’s in vogue, he’s Dick Pogue.” “Outstanding arts organizations like Cleveland Ballet are built on creativity, passion, and generosity — as well as sound finances,” Pogue stated. “An endowment provides vital resources and stability for Cleveland Ballet to maintain its operation and delight audiences for generations to come.”

His support of organizations and campaigns over the years includes The City Club of Cleveland, Cleveland Leadership Center, Kent State University, United Way, Cleveland Institute of Music, Gordon Square Arts District, Cleveland Legal Aid Society, Great Lakes Science Center, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland State University’s College of Law, University Hospitals Health System, and more. STORY AND PHOTOGRAPHS BY ANDREA C. TURNER