The first thing you notice inside Vintner’s Row is not the wine. It is the floor — original maple, worn into shallow valleys where a century of passengers queued for the 7:40 to Chicago.
When Priya and Daniel Okafor bought the depot in 2021, the roof had been open to the weather for six years. The limestone walls were sound. Everything else was a negotiation with the county, the historical commission, and a family of raccoons.
Keep the bones
The restoration took nineteen months and cost more than the vineyard. The Okafors kept the ticket window as the tasting bar, rebuilt the platform as a patio, and refused to paint a single wall. The result feels less like a tasting room than a place where people happen to be drinking.
“We did not want a barn with Edison bulbs,” Priya says. “We wanted the building to still be the building.”
The wine list follows the same logic: estate whites, a skin-contact Riesling, and one red that changes every year depending on what the season allows. Nothing is flown in. Nothing is called a journey.
On a Saturday in October the room holds 60 people and sounds like a dinner party. The train no longer stops. The building, somehow, still does.