Indianapolis is renowned for several things, especially its sporting heritage, from the legendary Indianapolis Motor Speedway and Hall Of Fame Museum where you can tour the famous race track through to the Pacers basketball team and the Colts Football team. Until recently, however, it has not been widely recognized for its many wineries. The opening of the Gaia Wines Contemporary Winery in 1996 has sought to change this state of affairs, bringing the art of the winemaker squarely to the Indiana area.

As Indiana?s 19th winery, Gaia has needed to fit in to its surroundings, whilst creating its own niche in the marketplace. Nestled centrally in the up market historic gallery and theater district on Massachusetts Avenue, just 2 minutes walk from the exclusive luxury Conrad Hotel, the company has needed to quickly gain a high class reputation in order to suitably fit into the area. In the short time since it set up, Indiana’s newest winery has succeeded spectacularly by managing to create 14 new award winning wines, introducing tours, wine tasting, as well as providing meeting rooms and hosting private functions.

Gaia Wines is owned and run by Angee Walberry and Margaret Broderick, making it the only solely woman-owned winery in the United States, and upholds an ideal to provide an enjoyable and educational winery experience within a contemporary, urban environment.

Margaret Broderick believes, ?If we, as a winery, are going to succeed it is vital that we educate and make more Americans aware of the benefits and pleasures of wine.?

With gifts and accessories, wine appreciation classes, and additional entertainment such as Sunday Jazz and comedy shows, as well as monthly specials, this small winery fits nicely into the growing wine tasting scene which has begun to emerge over the past few years.

Other highly recommended wineries worth visiting in Indiana include the Chateau Thomas Winery and the Easley Winery, with both offering free tasting sessions and regular guided tours, as well as meeting rooms, events and activities.

Although often not widely recognised outside the state, the Indiana soil and climate provide great growing wine conditions, especially for the ever popular and dependable Cabernet Sauvignon grape varietal. The strength of these wines has however now gradually started to be noted by the wider vintner community, with the Easley Winery recently receiving a well deserved Gold Medal for their lively Cabernet “packed with fruity overtones and black currant aromas”, although some of their sweet blush wines are also definitely worth a taste to see what the region can truly provide in the way of rich vibrant tastes.

Though it may not currently be as widely regarded as California?s Napa Valley for the consistent quantity, quality and depth of the wines produced, Indiana is certainly an up and coming region with some forward looking producers, who are managing to create some interesting wines which deserve to be taken seriously, and are well worth visiting if you get the chance.

New York is more than America’s largest city: it has been and continues to be the inspiration behind much of the country’s most enduring pieces of art and literature. From Langston Hughes to Jonathan Safran Foer, and Jackson Pollock to Mark Rothko, New York City has been the thriving hub of many an American cultural movement since the beginning of the 1900s. This fact is made even more evident by the city’s wide array of museums and art galleries, the most prominent of which are The Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), The Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum, among a host of others.

Both artistically and architecturally, New York’s Guggenheim Museum (technically called The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum) is one of the city’s most interesting landmarks and artistic forums. The eminent novelist E.B. White once said, “New York is to the nation what the white spire is to the village,” and it might be possible to say that, artistically speaking, the white spire of New York is the Guggenheim. Situated at the corners of 89th Street and 5th Avenue in Manhattan’s Upper East Side, its architect Frank Lloyd Wright set out to make the building look like what has been described as “a white ribbon curled into a cylindrical stack,” and was intent on his avant-garde design making the Metropolitan Museum of Art look like “a Protestant barn”. Though widely condemned at the time, the building is now seen as one of New York’s finest – as is often the case with the best pieces of architecture.

Originally set up in 1937 as “The Museum of Non-Objective Painting”, the Guggenheim was principally established to exhibit work by early modernists, like Piet Mondrian and Wassily Kandinsky. In particular, it continues to exhibit the work of Kandinsky and Jackson Pollock on an ongoing basis. Recent exhibitions have included various showings of Russian and socialist art, Robert Mapplethorpe and the Classical Tradition, David Smith: A Centennial and the images of Baghdad-born artist Zaha Hadid. Its future planned showcases include the work of Lucio Fontana, and Spanish Painting from El Greco to Picasso. This eclectic range of artists and artistic works demonstrates the ongoing commitment of the Guggenheim Museum to its original goal, to showcase the work of new modernism, whilst still embracing new forms of modern art in the twenty-first century. Although “high” modern and postmodern art have been the main artistic lines pursued by the Guggenheim, it has also been host to a variety of commercial art, including seasons exhibiting motorcycles and Giorgio Armani suits.

The Guggenheim Museum in New York is part of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, a non-profit organisation founded in 1937 by eminent philanthropist Solomon R. Guggenheim and artist Hilla von Rebay. Since the establishment of the first Guggenheim in New York, the foundation has gone on to open further museums in Bilbao, Venice, Berlin and Las Vegas, and is in the process of establishing another Guggenheim in Abu Dhabi. For the artistic holiday maker, a perfect vacation idea might be a trip around the world to all the Guggenheim museums. This idea is not even as expensive as it might seem: for example, there are Hilton Hotels in all of these cities, and using the Hilton Honors rewards system, travelling art fans can use their accumulated points to reclaim hotel rewards as well as air miles with a variety of different airlines, to make their worldwide Guggenheim tour a vacation with a difference.