ABOUT THE PLACE

Grafted Wine Bar&Lounge is located at 310 E. Washington Street in Belleville, Illinois. This beautiful Italianate style mansion was originally built in the 1850s and is one of the oldest buildings in the St. Clair County. It was expanded  in the 1870s, to include the amazing tower, and was a home of Belleville's oldest dentist, Dr. Moses W. Carter. 

In the early 1900s the house belonged to Arthur Eidman, a founder of the St. Clair National Bank. During the Second World War, John A Johnson, a real estate agent, converted the building into 10 apartments, and lived here with his family until the 1960s when it was bought and turned into law offices by an attorney, Paul Storment.

The building received the St. Clair County Historical Society Landmark and Historic Site Award in 1965.

As the building's new owners, we are happy to become the custodians of such a unique piece of Belleville's history. We have been putting much effort to create a comfortable, welcoming and fun indoor and outdoor space for our guests while preserving building's historical character and details.  

In my wine travels I have always enjoyed the places where you can not only  sip on amazing glass of wine, but also learn something new about it. 

Wine is fun but it's also an extremely deep and wide subject. World's history, geography, and social relations have been revolving around wine since the beginning of time. The variety of  wines out there is incredible; thousands of different grapes, so many styles to explore. 

At Grafted Wine Bar & Lounge, we would like to introduce our guests to that variety. Don't worry, we do have a buttery Chardonnay and fruity Cab if you  want to stick to what you already know you like, but if you would like to try something different, we are able to offer plenty of choices as well. 

You may find some new favorites here!

Almost none of the vines in the world that give us great Chardonnays, Cabernets, Pinots, and many, many more delicious wines,  grow on their own roots. The vines are European in origin but have to be 'grafted' or tied to the rootstock of American vine species. 

The growers have been grafting their vines since the late 1800s when a root louse called phylloxera attacked and destroyed most of the worlds' vineyards, and subsequently ruined thousands of farmers.

All the remedies to try to get rid of phylloxera so far have been more or less futile and the most effective solution remains in grafting the vines to the rootstock resistant to the louse. 

I chose the name 'GRAFTED'  not only because it invites a conversation about one of the most important and certainly most devastating events in the world's  history of wine.  But also  it is a good metaphor of the last decade of my life, since I left my European home and settled here, in the United States. 

I'm a wine lover who turned her passion into a job. What  I enjoy the most is sharing my appreciation for wine with people around me. Sommelier isn't my first or even second profession. But traveling through my previous careers there was always something missing. It pushed me to look for new, more exciting adventures. I settled on working with wine because it is never boring, never static. There are always new and exciting things to learn, places to go, and people to meet.

Cheers!

Magda Gilpin

Advanced Sommelier

(aka. The Green Pin ;-)