Somewhere in a county economic development office right now, someone is putting together a slide deck about a distillery.
I want to be precise about the objection, because the reflexive version of this column is snobbery and I am not interested in writing it. The distilleries are mostly fine. Some of them are making genuinely good spirits and a few of them are the largest private employer within thirty miles. In a county that lost its plant, that is not nothing.
The objection is to the tour, and to what the tour has become. The format is now so standardized you can predict it from the parking lot. A room with copper. A talk about the grain bill. A word about the limestone water, always the limestone water. A tasting. A gift shop positioned so you cannot leave without walking through it.
This worked because the process was unfamiliar. That is a one-time asset and it has been spent. A visitor who has done three has done all of them, and the fourth is competing on nothing except being closer to the interstate.
Here is the part that bothers me most. Tourism dollars in these counties are finite and they are being spent on a category that is now saturated, at the same moment that the things actually distinguishing these places, the music, the water, the food, the history that is harder to package, go unfunded. Tennessee’s own tourism figures have shown for years that the highest-yield visitors are the ones who came for something they could not get elsewhere.
A distillery tour is available in forty states. What is on the plateau is not.
If the deck is already made, present it. But somebody in that room should be made to say out loud what the fifth one adds.