Task force focuses on winery visitors behind the wheel

AUGUSTA, Mo. -- St. Charles County's growing wine business offers visitors beautiful scenery and a chance to sample fresh vintages in pleasant, small wineries.

It also offers those who aren't careful a chance to go to jail if they sample too much of the wine and then try to drive home on the county's highways.

The county sheriff's department has an eight-member, specially funded DWI enforcement unit that sees plenty of business in October, generally considered peak wine season.

The unit's commander, Lt. Terry Martchink, said the unit arrested nearly 30 drivers suspected of being drunk last year during the height of wine season along an 18-mile winding stretch of Missouri 94 between Missouri 40-61 and Augusta. The Missouri State Highway Patrol reported 20 DWI arrests along the entire stretch of Missouri 94 in the county last year.

Martchink said most drivers don't understand how a few glasses of wine can put them over the state's 0.08 legal limit for alcohol consumption.

"A lot of people don't really know their limit," Martchink said.

Some wine lovers say they have chosen to avoid weekend visits to the wineries because of the drunken drivers on the road. One of them is Beth Niehoff of Clayton, who said she goes to the wineries on weekdays.

"It's scary," she said. "With the motorcyclists and the trucks and all those people on a two-lane highway whose judgment is totally gone, it's not a good time."

More than 1 million people visit Missouri's wineries each year, said Jim Anderson, program coordinator for the Missouri Department of Agriculture's Missouri Grape and Wine Program. Many of them will visit Augusta's six wineries this month, giving small vineyards a chance to win customers and sales.

"This is our big-time season for a lot of our wineries that are very, very small," Anderson said. "They don't wholesale their products and rely heavily on visitors."

Last year, a growing $35-million-a-year Missouri wine industry earned 7 percent of the nation's wine market.

"We really like to have people who come here to buy wine for taking home so they can sit down later at their table to a nice meal," said Chuck Dressel, owner of Mount Pleasant Winery in Augusta. "We don't want people to view the winery as a place to come and get drunk."

In most wineries, servers are trained to deny wine to obviously intoxicated people and remind visitors to eat something while they drink. Larger wineries often have private security. But ultimately, patrons need to know their limits, Dressel said.

"Down on the patio, people have to exercise personal responsibility," he said.

St. Charles County's wineries used to hire off-duty sheriff's officers to provide security and arrest drunken drivers in the parking lots. But Sheriff Tom Neer barred that practice last spring, saying it was a conflict of interest and a liability.

"You run the risk of mistakenly letting an intoxicated person drive away in a car. That's a huge liability on the department if an accident occurs," Neer said.

Some wineries have other methods to restrict alcohol consumption. Stone Hill Winery in Hermann, one of the region's largest vineyards, has a one-bottle-of-chilled-wine per customer rule, owner Patty Held-Uthlaut said.

"We want our visitors to enjoy the beautiful countryside, but we want them to drink responsibly," Held-Uthlaut said.

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Information from: St. Louis Post-Dispatch, http://www.stltoday.com