Music at the Winery

The McGuires.

~story and photos by Jeff Tryon

The Brown County music scene is drawing traffic to its many venues. These days, there are a lot of options for music in and around Nashville—but it hasn’t always been like that.

Bob Smerdel, tasting room manager for the Country Heritage Winery at the south end of town in Coachlight Square, has been booking acts from around the area for over 13 years.

“When I first came here, [live music] was just the Country Heritage Winery (formerly Chateau Thomas Winery), Brown County Inn, and up at the Seasons in the old saloon,” he said. “It’s grown quite a bit from there. On Friday and Saturday, there are probably no less than eight or ten places that are playing music, either within town, or within a short drive,” Smerdel said.

The Country Heritage Winery’s intimate, performer-friendly space just off the horseshoe-bar tasting room is a favorite of local musicians and their admirers. He said that musicians really love the sound, and the closeness of the room.

And, as more and more folks are discovering, the local music is always good.

“The quality is unsurpassed, unless you go down to Nashville, Tennessee and walk down Broadway,” Smerdel said. “But that’s a whole other world.”

It’s not just the venues offering live music that have multiplied, so, too, has the number of talented performers from Brown County or nearby.

“The week doesn’t go by that somebody doesn’t reach out and say, ‘I’m a musician, looking for a place to play.’ So, I think for any music venue in town, there’s plenty of artists in this area or within an hour that are promoting themselves, making those phone calls to try to get their foot in the door.”

In his years of booking acts at the tasting room, Smerdel has built up a database of area musicians. He tries to schedule acts based upon the number of people they can bring in.

“I could name 30 more groups or duos or solos that play here in this town,” he said. “And there’s a lot that haven’t played here. It’s never ending.”

The Friday and Saturday night music crowd is a different crowd from the daytime crowd, which is focused on wine sampling, he said.

“I always try to keep in mind that the Nashville tourist crowd, our customers, they’re coming to a destination town,” Smerdel said. “They’re on vacation, they’re celebrating something, getting away from something. So, they’re coming to enjoy themselves.”

He said there are basically two types of crowds.

The “party crowd” wants to go to a bar and kick it with their friends, make some noise, let loose some steam, and the music is just the background.

But Country Heritage is looking for the crowd that wants to be entertained, to connect to the band or solo artist. So, they tend to book performers that like to talk to the crowd and encourage interaction.

“It’s more of a concert style event here versus a bar style,” Smerdel said. “I’m not saying one is better than the other, both are equally entertaining—a lot of great times in either environment. I just choose to go down the other trail.”

He said people like music they’re familiar with, that they can sing along with or that they can dance to, whether it’s country, rock, folk, Americana, blues, jazz, or swing.

“I’ve booked just about everything that you can in the time that I’ve been here, but probably the sweet spot would be called ‘the classics’—rock/ blues/country,” he said.

He said patrons favor local performers who also include some of their own original songs.

“I try to book singer-songwriters….I encourage them to work their own songs into their set and tell stories, expand on why they wrote a song, and what it means to them and what they hope the audience gets out of it.”

He said that local feel and flavor really attracts customers.

“I think that really sets Nashville apart, the type of musicians that play here,” Smerdel said. “They’re all entertainers and they all want to connect with the crowd.”

The Country Heritage Winery is located at 225 Van Buren St. Nashville, in the Coachlight Square complex.

Hours are from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Thursday, 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Friday and Saturday, and 12 p.m. to 6 p.m. Sunday,

Country Heritage Winery and Vineyard is a family owned and operated winery on a farm in Dekalb County that has been in the same family for over 100 years.