We drive to Bar Harbor and Acadia National Park a couple of times every year as a day trip, and typically again for an overnight every other year. Over the years we have explored just about every mile of Maine's rocky, scenic coast. We always take Coastal Route 1 because we find it much more interesting than the interstate, and not much slower, and the eating is a whole lot better!

Along the way we pass through Brunswick and Rockland, Camden and Belfast, Bucksport and Ellsworth and many smaller towns along the way. But somehow we never managed to explore Verona Island, on the downeast side of this new cable-stayed bridge at Penobscot Bay, just before Bucksport.

So we did. We always like to stop and smell the flowers, as they say, and we've found many treasures that way.

But Verona wasn't one of them. I don't doubt that it's a fine place to summer, but just about the entire shoreline is blocked from view by private properties. The road is too far inland to get much sightseeing opportunity, and the terrain is too flat to provide those flashes of gorgeous scenery you see so often in other places along the hilly, rocky Maine coast.

So, disappointed, we turned back. We planned to follow Route 1 as usual, until we saw a sign for the  Winterport Winery just a little way up the road toward Bangor. 

Winterport is a scenic little town, but the sun was getting low in the late autumn sky, and a mass of dark clouds had formed over the inland areas, so we felt a little dubious about heading inland.

I'm glad we did! The winery-brewery was easy to find, with ample parking and friendly people. There's a good-sized gift shop and you can get tastings of both the wines and the beers, including some that are seldom seen outside the immediate area (with the notable exceptions of locavore heroes Global Beverage Warehouse in Ellsworth, Bootleggers in Topsham, and Damon's Beverage Mart in Augusta.

The Winterport Winery makes a range of fruit wines that are intended to be enjoyed in the moment. They make one cabernet sauvignon and all the rest are made from apple, pear, blackberry, and other local fruits and blends of local fruits. It's fun tasting a fruit wine and pairing it in your mind with a dinner, then seeing how it works out. For example, I tasted the dry pear wine and immediately thought of turkey with sage, and the apple wine called to mind that wonderful Cheddar Cheese Pie that I like to make in the fall.

Penobscot Bay Brewery makes a full range of ales and a few lagers. I have long been a fan of their Meadow Road hefeweizen (which pairs winningly with a zippy chicken curry!). On this expedition I got one of those for myself and a Wildfire Rauchbier to share that little-known smokey style with the beerhounds at work.

We were lucky that the scenery on Verona was such a bust! We can spend hours poking into odd corners of the coast, pointing out particularly grand or peculiar houses, and stopping in at farmstands. Verona had grand homes, but nothing else to hold out attention, so we moved on - right into another local artisan!