If you want to know more about how we make our wine, curious about winter hardy grape growing, looking for something to do as an event with us, or are just looking for a way to entertain your group of friends, tours are a great option!  Usually you will find Joe or Wendy giving the tours, but here we have an inside scoop on some of what you would learn on one of our tours. It is always more in depth in person of course and the question and answer session at the end of the tour will always uncover more information for you.

First, we go out into the vineyard and talk about how we grow the vines. We start with the one year-old vines but it takes three to five years to get the first full crop of grapes from the vines. Every year we begin pruning the vines at the beginning of May and we leave approximately 40 buds per vine. Throughout the spring and summer we “train” the vines to grow in-between the wires. When the vines get to the top we cut the tops off to allow the energy of the plant to be focused more on growing the grapes.  The vines have to be pruned approximately once a week and then in mid-august we thin the vines a bit to give the grapes more sun exposure and more airflow. At the end of August we thin the clusters. Each cluster that is 50% or less ripe we cut off, to allow the energy to go into the ripe grape clusters. Harvest starts at the beginning of September. Everything is hand picked and we don’t do anything else with the vines until the following spring. We get about 20-30 pounds of grapes per vine. It takes approximately 3 pounds of fruit or 600 grapes to make a bottle of wine.  So if you drink a whole bottle of wine you get your 5 servings of fruit for a day!

After the grapes are harvested we put them through our crusher/destemmer, which knocks the grapes off the stems and separates the grapes from the stems. The grapes go through a set of rubber rollers, which pushes the grapes and opens them up so we can get the juice out. For white grapes, we then place grapes in our bladder press and press the juice out of the grapes. For red grapes we let them ferment on the skins for 3-5 days to extract the color. Then we press the juice out.

If we age in oak barrels we use oak chips to get a more consistent flavor year after year. We recycle what we can and compost the rest of the waste and put it back in the vineyard in the spring. We then filter, bottle, label, and cap the bottles. If we are doing a dessert wine we hand dip the neck of the bottle in wax to seal it. Then it is ready for you to enjoy!

We hope to see you taking a tour with us soon!