Meals Between Moments: Gideon Owen Wine Company
Updated: Sep 22
Some of my favorite restaurants were never places I intended to find. They appeared between weddings, hotel rooms and long drives across Ohio, when work happened to put me in exactly the right place. Gideon Owen Wine Company was one of those discoveries. What began with a wedding and a little unexpected time to explore became a wine tasting, an unplanned dinner, one very emotional wife, and a place we have returned to ever since. Welcome to Meals Between Moments—the places I discovered because of the job and returned to because they were worth remembering.
May 10, 2026
There is a part of this job that happens outside the timeline. It exists in the miles between home and the venue, in the hours before the ceremony begins, and in the quiet after the final song when everything has been packed away and there is still a drive, a hotel room, or occasionally another wedding waiting on the other side. Over nearly three decades of traveling Ohio to DJ weddings, those spaces have introduced me to restaurants I probably never would have found otherwise. Most meals on the road are exactly what they need to be: food. I am hungry, I have some time, and something nearby solves the problem. But every now and then, work drops me somewhere that refuses to remain merely convenient. The meal becomes part of the memory of the day, the restaurant becomes a destination of its own, and eventually I find myself returning when there isn’t a bride, groom, speaker, photo booth or timeline anywhere in sight.
Gideon Owen Wine Company on Catawba Island is the perfect place to begin because, in many ways, Gail and I discovered it twice on the same day. We were there to work a wedding—me as the DJ and Gail running the photo booth—and somehow found ourselves completely set up and ready more than two hours before we were actually needed. That doesn’t happen often. Usually, extra time before a wedding means I find somewhere to sit near my equipment, drink some water, check something for the fourth time that was perfectly fine the first three, and wait for somebody to need me. At Gideon Owen, sitting still seemed like a waste. The grounds were beautiful, the weather was hot, and we had nowhere we needed to be for a while, so we started walking. Paths framed by flowers carried us around the property and toward the back, where live music was playing outside. There was a beautiful fountain along the way, too, although after standing near it for a while talking with the bride and groom, the gentle sound of trickling water began having a decidedly less romantic effect on me. Apparently, there are limits to how long a fifty-something man can appreciate a fountain before it becomes a biological threat.
What I didn’t fully understand yet was just how much history we were walking through. The original Catawba Island Wine Company was incorporated by local grape growers in 1868, with construction of the winery beginning in 1870 and completed in 1872. Some of the limestone used in its construction was quarried right on the property, and spaces that remain part of Gideon Owen today—including its cellar vaults—date back to that original nineteenth-century winery. The property has survived changing ownership, changing businesses and changing identities, including its long life as Mon Ami. A devastating fire in 1943 destroyed much of the building above, but the original stone walls and cellar vaults survived. Quintin and Donna Smith purchased the property in 2019 and reopened it as Gideon Owen Wine Company in 2020, taking the name from an early Catawba Island winemaker whose original vineyard and homestead once included part of the land they now owned. In 2022, wine was produced on the property again for the first time in more than forty years. I knew almost none of this while Gail and I were wandering around that afternoon. I just knew I liked where I was.
And then we found Tirage.
Where Everything Slowed to a Pour
Tirage Wine Room feels almost startlingly modern after walking through the historic property outside. Instead of trying to make everything look old simply because the building is old, Gideon Owen allows the room to be something completely different. Temperature-controlled wine stations line the space, offering forty-eight selections in measured pours, which is a particularly dangerous arrangement for someone like me because it removes one of the strongest arguments for restraint. You don’t have to order an entire glass. You can taste something. You can try a little more. You can compare it with something else. You can go back. And once you’ve established that all you’re doing is “tasting,” it becomes remarkably easy to convince yourself that several additional tastes are simply research.
Before I go any further, I should probably establish that Gail is the real wine connoisseur in our marriage. She has the nose and palate to take a sip and start identifying exactly what is happening in the glass with a precision I simply don’t possess. That’s not to say I don’t know wine. I do. Malbec is my favorite varietal, hands down, followed by a good Pinot Noir, and I have a particular weakness for Chianti, Bordeaux and Sangiovese. More often than not, though, I’ll gravitate toward a Merlot or Cabernet because I know what I’m likely to get. Gail has turned me into enough of a wine snob that I can hold my own in the conversation; she’s just operating at another level. Apparently this is a recurring problem in my life. My son turned me into a craft beer snob, too many trips to Kentucky made me a bona fide bourbon snob, and Gail gets the blame for wine. I have spent my adult life surrounded by terrible influences.
Gail started with a Traminette. I began with the Meritage Reserve, and given everything I just told you, that shouldn’t be particularly surprising. A Bordeaux-style blend built around varietals I already enjoy was practically waving me over. I circled the glass and watched the wine coat the inside, clinging there before slowly releasing and sliding back down. The first sip was lush and full in my mouth, almost silky, with noticeable tannins and very little of the acidity that can sometimes interfere with a red for me. Gail could take the description considerably farther than I could: black currant, black cherry and violet. Once she identified them, I could find them. That’s often how wine works between us. She identifies what is happening; I nod thoughtfully as though I might have gotten there eventually.
I didn’t need her help with the larger conclusion.
Oh my God. This is delicious.
I knew immediately that at least one bottle was coming home with me.
From there, we did what Tirage is designed to make dangerously easy: we kept exploring. Gail’s palate became particularly useful. The Traminette gave her honeysuckle, peach and tangerine. We moved into a Cabernet Sauvignon with black cherry, plum and clove, and eventually a red blend that was raspberry-forward with white pepper and mocha. A vineyard blend moved toward apricot and orange blossom, while a Vidal Blanc brought papaya, pineapple, peach and mango. I could taste those things once we talked about them, but I wasn’t standing beside the dispensers announcing tasting notes like I was auditioning for a sommelier documentary. Mostly, I knew what I liked. And I really liked that Meritage. Eventually, I returned to it and discovered that nothing else had knocked it from the top of my list. The “at least one bottle” I had mentally committed to after the first taste eventually became part of six bottles we carried home. We hadn’t even started working the wedding yet.
I was already falling for the place.
Beneath 150 Years of History
Eventually, of course, I had to stop drinking wine and remember why I was there. The ceremony was being held in the historic limestone cellar, and on a day somewhere around ninety degrees, stepping down into that cool underground space felt incredible. The air was damp and slightly musty in exactly the way an old stone wine cellar probably should be. This wasn’t a new event room decorated to look historic. I was standing inside part of a structure built more than 150 years ago, surrounded by stone that had survived nearly everything the property had survived. When fire tore through the winery in 1943, much of what stood above those cellars was destroyed. The stone walls and vaults remained. Decades later, there I was carrying DJ equipment into one of them so two people could get married.
I love stuff like that.
I also quickly discovered that 150-year-old stone doesn’t give a damn how much I love history when I’m trying to make a microphone sound good.
The cellar echoed. Sound bounced. I had to play with the ceremony speaker, listen, adjust, reposition, listen again and figure out how much the room would allow me to do without fighting it. This is one of those parts of DJing nobody notices unless I get it wrong. A gorgeous room can be acoustically miserable, while some completely unremarkable box of a room can sound fantastic. Physics has never cared about wedding photography. Eventually I found the balance I wanted, and when the ceremony began, everything worked. But I remember enjoying the process more than I normally would because every time I stopped listening to my speaker, I found myself looking around the cellar again. I have worked ceremonies in barns, gardens, ballrooms, churches, museums, and just about every other kind of space Ohio can provide. I had never worked in anything quite like this.
That first wedding would eventually move me through other parts of Gideon Owen, and another wedding there later would introduce me to still more. Across those two weddings, I have DJed in the cellar, outside on the grounds, upstairs in the loft, in the dining room and in the hall, sometimes moving locations several times during the same event. That has given me a different relationship with Gideon Owen than I have with most places I discover through this job. I know parts of this property from behind speakers and microphones, from load-ins and cable runs, from figuring out where sound needs to go and where it absolutely should not. I have watched a wedding change character simply because we moved from one part of the property to another. And somewhere along the way, I also saw what may still be the best use of my uplighting I have ever seen at a wedding. After hundreds upon hundreds of events, that is not a statement I make casually. The room simply took the light beautifully. I remember standing there admiring it longer than I normally would, almost wanting to take credit for how good it looked even though I knew perfectly well I had used those same lights hundreds of times before. Gideon Owen was doing most of the work.
But the wedding is only half the reason this place belongs in Meals Between Moments. Because when the work ended that night, Gail and I weren’t quite ready to leave.
When the Menu Changed the Plan
We headed back toward Tirage. Earlier that afternoon, it had been the place where Gideon Owen first stopped feeling like merely another wedding venue, and returning there seemed like the natural way to finish the day. But Tirage had closed. The live music outside had ended. We had a hotel room waiting for us in Sandusky and another wedding the following day in Madison, so the responsible thing would have been to get into the car, drive to the hotel and go to bed.
Instead, we walked into the restaurant.
Our plan was still modest. One more glass of wine. A nightcap. Then hotel.
The restaurant itself was beautiful, upscale without being stuffy, the kind of room where you immediately recognize that some thought went into it without feeling as though you suddenly need to sit differently because of it. There is an indoor fire pit surrounded by deep leather seating that has become one of the visual signatures of the room, although after a day hovering around ninety degrees, fire wasn’t exactly the amenity I was craving. Air conditioning was doing considerably more to impress me. Gail and I took seats at the bar, ordered that last glass of wine, and prepared to let the day end.
Then somebody made the mistake of putting menus in front of us.
We weren’t particularly hungry. We had eaten during the wedding. We didn’t need dinner. We certainly didn’t need appetizers, dinner and dessert. But the menu started undoing our plan almost immediately. Gail looked at something. I looked at something. We looked at each other. I don’t remember some lengthy conversation in which we weighed the wisdom of staying against the need to get to the hotel. We were eating.
The baked brie came first, wrapped in golden puff pastry with apple chutney and salted caramel, and any remaining doubt about whether we should have stayed disappeared with the first bite. The pastry gave way to warm brie, the apple chutney brought sweetness and acidity, and the caramel rounded it out without making the whole thing taste like dessert wearing a cheese costume. Alongside it came pommes frites, which should have been completely ordinary and somehow weren’t. Thin, crisp outside, soft inside, hot enough that I probably should have waited longer before eating the first one, they became even better when dragged through whatever brie and chutney remained on the plate. At some point, the fact that we hadn’t been hungry stopped being relevant.
And then I started watching Gail.
Anyone who knows my wife knows that Gail is a critical eater. She notices everything. If something is overcooked, underseasoned, oversalted, too sweet, too dry or simply not as good as it should have been, she is unlikely to sit there politely pretending otherwise. Our sons know this. I know this. It has become a family routine. Gail takes the first bite, and somewhere in the back of our minds, the rest of us wait for the verdict. Over twenty-six years of marriage and thousands of meals together, I can probably count only a few dozen restaurant meals that have completely broken through that instinct in her, meals so good that the critic simply disappears.
Gideon Owen made her cry.
Not figuratively.
My wife was sitting across from me with tears in her eyes because the food was that good. I didn’t need to ask what was wrong because I knew exactly what was happening. Nothing was wrong. Everything was right. And I will admit to feeling a completely undeserved sense of accomplishment as I watched her. I hadn’t cooked anything. I hadn’t even chosen the restaurant—we had basically wandered into it because Tirage was closed—but after years of trying to find meals capable of silencing Gail’s inner restaurant critic, I felt like somebody on my team had finally won the championship.
YES. They got her.
The braised short rib finished the job. It came with a red wine reduction, garlic mashed potatoes and tri-colored carrots, and it was exactly the kind of dish that makes me slow down while I’m eating. The meat yielded easily without becoming mush, the reduction added depth without drowning everything beneath it, and the potatoes and carrots actually belonged on the plate rather than simply filling empty space beside the protein. I started constructing bites—some meat with potato, then a little carrot, then another combination—because when food gets my attention, I stop eating it automatically. I want to know why it works. I want to see whether the next bite is as good as the one before it. This one just kept working.
So naturally, despite having entered the restaurant because we wanted one more glass of wine, we ordered dessert. At that point, why pretend? The crème brûlée delivered the little crack of caramelized sugar that is half the reason anyone orders crème brûlée in the first place, followed by cool, rich custard underneath. The German chocolate cake went the other direction entirely: rich, substantial and unapologetic about it. By the time we finished, our quick nightcap had become a complete dinner with appetizers and dessert, six bottles of wine were coming home with us, and the hotel room in Sandusky had spent considerably more time waiting for us than we had intended.
We left happy. Very happy. And that should have been the end of the story.
It wasn’t.
Going Back Was the Easy Part
There is always a danger in writing about a meal attached to a memorable day because circumstances can cheat a little. Maybe we loved Gideon Owen because we were coming down from a good wedding. Maybe we were tired. Maybe the wine had helped. Maybe the surprise of stumbling into an unexpectedly great dinner made it seem even better than it really was. A restaurant gets one enormous advantage when you arrive with no expectations whatsoever. So, yes, we went back. But I also don’t want to manufacture some grand story about Gail and me repeatedly making special pilgrimages across Ohio just to determine whether Gideon Owen could live up to that first experience. Going back has actually been pretty easy.
We have season passes to Cedar Point, and those passes completely changed the way we experience that entire part of Ohio. When admission to an amusement park is expensive enough that you feel obligated to extract every possible dollar of entertainment from the ticket, a day at Cedar Point becomes an endurance event. You arrive early. You ride everything you can. You stay until close because leaving while there are still functioning roller coasters feels financially irresponsible. Season passes change the math. When you know you can come back the following week, there is no need to stagger toward the parking lot at closing time having wrung every last inversion out of the day. We can ride coasters until we’ve had enough and leave. And more than once, leaving has meant wandering toward Catawba Island for a glass of wine instead.
That is how Gideon Owen—and nearby Twin Oast Brewing, another place I love—became part of our Cedar Point days. Apparently one perfectly reasonable way to recover from spending an afternoon being hurled upside down on roller coasters is to sit down with a glass of wine. Other times, a craft beer works just as well. The point is that we were already there. Catawba Island was nearby. We had nowhere we particularly needed to be. And because Gideon Owen had made such an impression the first time, returning became an easy choice.
Those visits have allowed us to experience the place differently. Tirage became somewhere we could linger without a wedding timeline running quietly in the back of my mind. We could sit on the outdoor patio because there was nowhere else we needed to be. We could eat in the restaurant without an alarm clock and another wedding waiting for us the following morning. I believe we’ve now managed to visit in every season, not because I set out to accomplish that, but because Gideon Owen became an easy place to wander back to whenever we found ourselves in that corner of the state. And perhaps that says more than a deliberate return trip would. We didn’t keep going back to prove that the first experience wasn’t a fluke. We kept going back because we liked being there.
After six visits, I will admit that some of the memories have begun to overlap. I can tell you what happened that first day because certain things are impossible to forget: the Meritage, the six bottles, the unexpected dinner, Gail crying. But ask me which visit first gave me a particular view of the grounds or exactly when I noticed some small detail on the property, and I may have to think about it. I don’t consider that a weakness in the story anymore. I think it may be the point. Gideon Owen isn’t one afternoon preserved perfectly in my memory. It accumulated. I have experienced it working underground in the cellar and outside on the grounds, upstairs in the loft and inside its event spaces. I have experienced it with a microphone in my hand and with a wine glass in it. I have been there watching a timeline and watching absolutely nothing. I’ve seen it as a wedding venue and returned often enough to stop thinking of it primarily as one.
The food has held up, too. On one return visit, a butternut squash ravioli with ginger and allspice, brown butter, sage, cranberries and candied pecans reminded me that the first dinner wasn’t a fluke. That dish could easily have become one giant pile of autumn, every ingredient screaming FALL! at the same time, but it didn’t. The flavors remained distinct, the brown butter and sage grounding the sweetness while the cranberries and pecans added brightness and texture. Once again, I slowed down. Once again, Gail had very little to complain about. Gideon Owen had passed the more important test: it was still good when there was no wedding-day emotion attached to it.
And every return has given me another opportunity to appreciate the strange collection of lives this property has already lived. It began as a nineteenth-century winery, survived enormous changes and a devastating fire, became Mon Ami, eventually stopped producing wine onsite, and then found its way back to winemaking more than a century after those first local growers built the place. The modern Tirage doesn’t look like the historic cellar beneath it, and it shouldn’t. The restaurant doesn’t feel like the loft. The outdoor grounds don’t feel like the hall. Even after two weddings and four additional visits, I don’t feel as though I’ve experienced Gideon Owen in exactly the same way twice.
Where One Meal Became Something More
When I started Meals Between Moments, I knew I didn’t want this series to become a collection of restaurant reviews built from the same template. That would defeat the purpose. The places themselves will determine the stories. Some may stay with me because they are loud, ridiculous, excessive, quirky and completely unlike anywhere else. Others will work on me more gradually. Gideon Owen did.
Gideon Owen accumulated.
It was walking the flower-lined paths with Gail because, for once, we had two hours to spare. It was that beautiful fountain and the increasingly urgent problem it created. It was stepping out of ninety-degree heat and into a cool, damp limestone cellar built more than 150 years ago, admiring the history for about thirty seconds before remembering that history had also given me an echo I needed to fix. It was seeing my uplighting look better than I had ever seen it look. It was walking into Tirage, swirling the Meritage around the glass, watching it slowly slide back down and thinking, Oh my God. This is delicious. It was one bottle becoming six. It was finishing the wedding, discovering Tirage had closed and walking into the restaurant because we wanted one final glass before the hotel.
It was Gail crying.
And then it was coming back.
The wedding introduced us to Gideon Owen. Cedar Point made returning easy. But neither explains why, when we have an entire peninsula full of places we could go after leaving the park, we keep finding ourselves back there. That part Gideon Owen earned for itself. Sometimes we go for the wine. Sometimes we eat. Sometimes we simply want somewhere beautiful to sit after spending half the day on roller coasters. Somewhere along the way, Gideon Owen stopped being a wedding venue I happened to discover through work and became part of how Gail and I enjoy that corner of Ohio.
And really, that is the entire idea behind Meals Between Moments. The work introduces me to places.
Life gets to decide which ones I keep.
Great food. Genuine people.
Places worth going out of your way to find.
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