all right once again my name is jon wright with taylor farm and this is farmer's talk and today we are in new haven vermont with chris granstrom of lincoln peak vineyard can you tell me just a little brief background of the history of lincoln peak sure yeah so i'll sort of work backwards if that's all right right now we have about twelve acres of producing vineyard oh a little less because we we're in the process of replacing some well for the last few years we've claimed to be the largest grape producer in vermont we may lose that title here in the next year or two but we have been and i think the main thing that sets our business apart from a lot of the other wineries in this state is that we do grow all the grapes right here on our own property we're not importing grapes which is great in the sense that we have complete control of the quality all the decisions that have to be made in terms of growing and harvesting the grapes but of course it's limiting in then we can't decide to expand and bring in more product and so it works both ways but i think it lends a certain amount of credibility authenticity to what we're doing cause it's really a local product it's all grown right here it's not imported from someplace else and i think our customers respond to that we started planting about two thousand and two in terms of any size i think we've put in about half an acre in two thousand and two before that we had a strawberry farm here for about twenty four years so my daughter sarah who we'll meet grew up in the strawberry business and then the early on was out dealing with the public in a pretty intensive way and we actually started the strawberry farm way back in one thousand nine hundred and eighty one when my wife and i first moved to this property and built a house and got going so we've been here we've been growing things and for a long time so why strawberries or grapes i'm sure that that was gonna be my next question yeah was gonna be your next question i'm sure it is well it was a combination of things i mean we've been doing the strawberries for a lot of years our production wasn't quite as good we had very generous crop rotations but even so we are replanting back into the same field even though in most cases you would have two two and a half years of cover crops and green manure crops between strawberry plantings and still the vigor was starting to go down a little bit and i think personally it was time for kind of a new challenge in life and also we had just heard about them really the most important reason is we just heard about these new grape varieties had been developed mostly from university of minnesota and also from a private grape breeder out in wisconsin a fellow named elmer swenson and we thought well this is going to take off in the north there's never been the possibility of growing good wine grapes in the north before and now there is and let's get it on the ground floor so we actually started as a nursery propagating and supplying vines to other vineyards and you continued to do that as part of the business we did we're not doing it any longer but we did it for about six or seven years of course to get the cuttings for the nursery we had to have at least a small vineyard to go out and get through the wood to propagate and so we were growing grapes almost in spite of ourselves and then selling grapes to other wineries and finally we just couldn't stand to see ourselves putting all this effort into this beautiful crop and then loading it in the back of a truck and seeing it go up the road so we started making wine and then gradually not of course but then gradually the wine took over and we realized we couldn't do both and let the nursery part of the business go now i'm completely out of my element here tell me a little bit about vineyards how many vineyards are there currently in vermont yeah well that changes and of course it depends on where you draw the line between kind of a hobby and a commercial vineyard i think the answer is probably around eighteen to twenty a lot of them are sort of in the half acre to two acre range which is sort of commercial but just borderline it's certainly a supplemental thing so i mean grapes have this kind of romantic image around them people love to think of the idea of growing grapes and making wine so a lot of people have kind of gotten bit by the bug and decided to put in a half an acre an acre and see what happens and like anything else some realize it's not romantic at all it's mostly just hard repetitive manual work and they say it's not for me and some others love it and do a great job now what made this all possible fifteen years ago vermont wasn't considered a great growing region so what's changed is really the genetics of the grapevines this fellow elmer swenson i mentioned a great story grew up on a little tiny dairy farm in osceola wisconsin i don't think he went past eighth grade i don't think he was ever interested in farming or dairy farming or cows but he was one of these people that was put on earth with a purpose and his purpose was to work with grapes and he spent a lifetime and for the first thirty years of his grapegrowing career and really in complete isolation hybridizing the old fashioned way with gathering pollen with a little paint brush and painting it on the flower of the other vine and marking it saving the seeds planting out the seeds watching what develops choosing the best of those doing it over and over again and finally into his middle age people started to realize what this guy was doing and people realized that he was creating this whole collection of grape varieties that were adapted to the wisconsin climate and not to get too technical on you but people that had previously tried to breed grapes for more northern climates were using as kind of their base material a species called vitis vitis is the grape genus species called vitis labrusca which is kind of the concord grape family and the trouble with concord grapes is they taste like grape juice grape jelly everybody knows what that tastes like but they don't make very good wine and what elmer realized was for the most part avoid that vitis labrusca and use vitis riparia which is the wild grape that grows in vermont and grows all across the northern tier states as kind of his genetic source of cold hardiness and vitis riparia has its own challenges it tends to be high in acid but it doesn't have those kind of off flavors that the vitis labrusca brought to the wine grapes when it was in the genetic background and so elmer in his own way had sort of taken grape breeding for northern climates down a new road so to speak did you ever have the opportunity to meet him i did i went out and spent a day with him he was in his early 90's at the time and it was fascinating he was just a great guy and then as elmer got he passed away a few years ago well in his 90s as his work got better known the university of minnesota picked up on it picked up on what he had done and then with vastly more resources of course and a more scientific rigor and not just following what he did bringing in their own ideas of course have continued a really active grape breeding program and have developed some wonderful variety so what we're growing here now includes some of elmer swensen's grapes and some of the university of minnesota grapes but what changed to get back to your original question fifteen years ago was the availability of these new grape varieties that are adapted to this climate yeah and are they well adapted are there still challenges here with this climate as far as winter hardiness at least in the champlain valley they're perfectly welladapted there's really no issue with winter damage here something like spring frost is still an issue but that's an issue in any place if you're in california or you're in france italy they have trouble with spring frost so that's just part of grapegrowing so what are some of the challenges with grape growing expand on that a little bit for me we had an extremely challenging wet summer was that a problem for you sure that's a tough question to answer you've just gotta get your first i think the grower has to get their mind wrapped around what's involved in growing grapes there's just a lot of little details a lot of small decisions along the way there's no one big secret to success like most things in life it's just a lot of very small steps correcting little mistakes along the way correcting your mistakes and finally you've made more good choices than bad choices and you say yeah it's working you know i'm still working on that piece yeah right so as far as the growing goes like anything else just getting this all prepared and weed control in the early years there's pests and diseases i'm sure we'll talk about that understanding the training and how to train them how to prune them those are the challenges and then dealing with the weather and you do what you can now sarah mentioned a little before the interview that we've now had a fairly nice warm relatively dry period which has been perfect for you yeah indeed so i said well you know grapes you'd think of california or the mediterranean they typically grow in a place with dry summers and so we're kind of pushing a little bit because we don't always have the dry summers in fact it seems like the last ten years we've had more trouble with wet weather than we have with dry weather so yeah we put up with all the rain in the early summer as best we could we had to do more disease control we had to deal with weeds but once the kind of the weather turned around there it's really been a nice summer for us and it's dry describe the season's from spring through harvest what are your jobs what are you okay so we'd probably start in winter because we prune in the winter time and it's a very skilled job and it's tens of thousands of individual cuts as we go up and down the rows how many people do you typically have helping you well it changes from year to year last year i had a key employee who's now gone on to start his own vineyard but he did the bulk of it himself i would jump in occasionally and it took him four or five months to get through the whole thing we start in december and finished probably in april so we get them pruned clear the brush out of the vineyards burn the brush and piles just to eliminate the disease source next step is what we call a tie up and if there's loose arms on the canes we go through tie them up to the trellis wires and then the weather warms up and we keep an eye on the buds that start to develop at that point we're looking at frost there's not a lot we can do about frost danger and then we're of course from then on throughout the season we're looking at insects and diseases they have to be controlled it's impossible to grow grapes without controlling them so you can't be in any way shape or fashion considered organic well there are people that have tried organic grape growing in vermont i admire what they do i don't think any of them have continued with it they've tried it and after a number of years realize that just can't do it the organic materials that are available to this you certainly can't do it without spraying anything and the organic materials that are available the spray are just not effective enough to maintain a healthy vineyard and so but it's possible to pick and choose the least toxic the smallest intervention and still keep the vineyard healthy so that's the route we go down and so we have to do it so in a year like this where it rained a lot in the early summer we have to spray a little more because the fungus diseases have the perfect conditions to keep spreading once it dries out like this we can cut way back because it's not wet don't have to spray is fungus one of the biggest problems fungus is the biggest problem there's really only one serious insect that we have to keep an eye on but we monitor that closely and only spray when we absolutely have to so you have to have some horticulture some entomology some chemistry all those things so midsummer is fairly so midsummer there is a pretty intensive workload because the key to growing good grapes to put it in a nutshell is getting the sunshine to shine on the grape clusters while they're ripening and of course the grapes the shoots tend to grow in any direction and a lot of them will grow right along the wire where in that position they're shading the grape clusters and then the sun's not getting to them you're not going to make good wine so we go through with the crew and this is just handson work we grab those shoots and pull them from here where they're shading the grape clusters and we pull them down so they're out of the way and then we often rip a few leaves off as we go so the sun hits right around the grape cluster area we call it the fruit zone and then a year like this year when we had so much rain that the vegetative vigor is just ongoing and so we've had to go through a second time and do that again it's really laborintensive but in the long run here it really makes a huge difference in the quality of the wine how is your crop looking this year right now the crop looks beautiful i'm surprised at how good it does look after the rain in the beginning of the summer but we got through that we've had a couple of nice hot spells that have brought the ripening development along and we've put in the time and effort and as the business owner the money to do all that shoot positioning and leaf pulling and right now they're gorgeous and we could be picking as soon as a week from now which would be the first week of september which is really on the early side for us but we like it we like to have it early because then if we need to wait we have a little bit of good weather on the other end if we're pushed right to the end of the season then sometimes you're forced to do a situation where you have to pick them runnin out of warmth because we running out of warmth and there's no point in waiting any longer so the harvest time you've got to try to gather up some competent and enthusiastic harvesters you bet how many people do you well we on a good day we have do you go to middlebury and drag some students out for the afternoon no that doesn't work we do have the one plant biology class comes out as one of their labs and picks grapes for an afternoon and which is kind of fun the kids are enthusiastic we ended up putting an ad on craigslist and on just things like the front porch forum and things like that and year after year we pull together a good crew how many people do you so we usually end up hiring about six more people plus we have our regular employees who are here and sorta change gears into harvest mode so we might have eight or nine people working on a given day and of course it's busy with the tourists are here for the fall foliage so it's busy in the shop as well take in the double whammy gotta keep all that going at the same time but we've been lucky in terms of being able to pull a local crew together every year i think it helps that it's grapes people think grape picking is more exciting than whatever potato picking or something give them a little wine and keep them happy yeah we can each drink a little wine now and then now how does the harvesting actually work you snip the grape clusters we have a little pair of lightweight shears yellow plastic totes that hold about twenty eight pounds and you just go along the row clip clip and you'll get two or three clusters in your hand put them in the basket do you have to treat them i've harvested apples we treat them gently even though you're going to be crushing them exactly we don't want them to be crushed too soon yeah yeah so we treat them gently and the totes we use will stack on top of each other so they don't crush the ones below so we pick them line up a bunch under the vines we drive through with a tractor and we just have a little homemade wagon built just to fit two bins wide so a little bit like apple harvesting yeah a little bit like that a mini scale sure and then of course we come down here and as soon as we back the wagon into a processing area that we called or like every winery calls the crush pad because we crush the grapes there we unload them into the crusher destemmer they go into the press or into the tank we hose out the bins and put them right back on the wagon the crew is out there we try not to make them wait for empty bins so it's instantaneous you don't store the fruit oh no no it's instantaneous it's ongoing all the time and we're paying the crew a piece rate so much per pound so when the wagon comes in there are all the bins and marks so we run it over a scale mark how many pounds it is into the crusher goes and then right back out and so they'll pick until about three o'clock or so and then we'll have our final pickups we'll usually have a big load of grapes at the end of the day and we'll process those and hope to get out in time to get some sleep yeah so you can be going late into the night yeah you can you can be going into the night for sure and how long does the harvest take is this a month yeah a month or a little less if the weather is all good three and a half weeks something like that and can you go through the vineyard in a clean sweep or do you have to come back as fruit ripens no it's a onetime through yeah yeah it's a onetime through we try to just as the grapes change colors which is usually early august we go through the crew that's been doing the shoot positioning and leaf falling we go through one more time looking for any clusters that are lagging that are still green after the other ones have turned color and cut those off just drop them on the ground because they will eventually turn color but there'll be way behind the other ones and there'll be underripe at harvest time but there's no way to distinguish them so we try to get rid of those we're not bringing underripe fruit in with the good ones would that alter the flavor of the wine so as grapes ripen the sugar levels are going up the acid levels are going down and the flavors are developing so if you get ones that are underripe in there i mean the main issue i think would be that the acid it would keep pushing the acid low because we're always fighting kind of borderline high acid levels so we want to do whatever we can to keep that under any kind of threshold sweeten it up a little bit what's this i'm curious about this mechanism that can destem the grapes how does that work is it a tumbler yeah yeah so you dump it into a hopper it's got an auger that brings it down to one end and inside it's covered so you don't see it but there's a cylinder with holes in it and the holes are big enough for grapes to go through but not for the grape stems to go through and it's rolling one way and there's a shaft down the middle with little paddles off of it and that's turning the other way and those are angled so it kind of pushes it from one end to the other it kind of moves it along slowly and is there washing in that no there's no washing so those paddles are knocking the grapes off the stems and kind of flinging them through those little holes the stems can't get through and they slowly work their way down the cylinder and then just dump out onto the ground at the end and then our vineyard actually does another thing beneath that there is a pair of matched rubber rollers that you can set the distance on as to how much you want to crush them and they'll go through that and get crushed and then they come through and at that point it's just what you call a must it's mass of crushed grapes and we have a big three inch hose we can pump that out how did you i mean we've just talked about the grape growing now tell me a little bit about the wine making part or first of all how many pounds of grapes what's your yield how many pounds can you talk about that sure it varies of course from year to year i would say we're not necessarily shooting for the highest possible yield because with grapes when you get to a really high yield it tends to dilute the flavors and the sugars to some extent and the wine quality wouldn't be as good so we're shooting for kind of that perfect balance point where we have a good solid yield but we haven't overshot it to the point where we're compromising the wine quality so for our twelve acres kind of a yield number that we would be shooting for would probably be about eighty five thousand pounds of grapes forty some tons and so what does that turn into in terms of wine we make about a little over two thousand cases of wine and a case is twelve bottles there's three quarters of a liter in a bottle so that's nine liters in a case of wine once you get into the wine world you get out of gallons you talk in liters you talk in liters everything in terms of grams and liters when i go home we're back in the ounces and pounds but over here everything is grams and liters just because that's the way it all works so yeah and so the red grapes bring them in on the wagon put them through the crusher goes through that must pump into the hose into the tank we add the yeast the entire grape ferments together because for about the first week during that week the wine as it's developing is extracting flavors and colors from the skins that are in there with it then after that week roughly we'll press it then we have just the pure wine and the skins and the seeds we'll separate just take out and compost so i'm still confused during this process you're continually adding more from the harvest no no yeah good question we'll fill up one tank at a time within a day whatever we pick that day we'll fill up a tank so that tank is a unit and that goes through the winemaking that ferments together so during that week twice a day we pump the wine off the bottom of the tank and up over the top of the tank because as soon as it starts to ferment all those little carbon dioxide bubbles grab a hold of the grape skins and push them up to the top so you get what we call the cap at the top and then the juice becoming wine in the middle and then the seeds settle to the bottom but we want to have contacts for the reasons i said between the wine and the skins so we pump it over and wet down that cap and let the wine and juice and wine trickle down through those skins at least twice a day yeah yeah so then at the end of the week we pump off what we call the free wine the wine that separates itself in that middle section and then we shovel the skins into a press and press those to get out any residual get out whatever and then that press wine we call it is different from the free wine usually the flavors aren't as delicate it's a little rougher tasting but it tends to have more tannins which is a nice component to wine so we're sort of tasting that we might keep it separate just for a minute separately then blend it back in later or we may be tasting it as it's pressing and the harder you press it it changes continuously as you're pressing we may kind of cut it off at a certain point and say okay anything that comes out from now we'll put into a same tank you must be drinking wine every night somebody gotta do it man it's tough i think it's great yes we go from here that's be great there you go linda picks up each of the cases of empty bottles and slaps them down on the table and then two at a time she put some of those little valves actually give a small squirt of nitrogen in each bottle which blows out the cardboard dust and actually replaces all the oxygen in the bottle with nitrogen and when we then go to put them on the filler that just means that the wine doesn't have any oxygen exposure and the nitrogen does not matter at all so then the next person grabs each bottle pops em on the filler it's a gravity filler that same person takes it off puts it to the one side and the corker eric today grabs the whole bottle puts it on the corker the corker actually pulls a vacuum in the little two inch space in the neck of the bottle sucks out all of the air and then pumps the cork in and puts it back in the case so every bottle has been handled at least four times before it goes to sale you always a wine drinker or is this something that you've no people ask me that and i enjoyed wine but i was not really serious or fanatical about it or really that knowledgeable about it i've pretty much came to this from the farming side rather than the wine side but of course as i've gotten into it i've learned a tremendous amount about wine and it's a wonderful thing it's a wonderful thing to know about it's a whole world of experience to enjoy yeah and it's been one of the more satisfying parts about it i'm sure it's very rewarding it's very rewarding learning all about it and it's not some great mystery that you have to have some specialized knowledge about it the main thing is just to taste a lot of different kinds of wines and take the time to pay attention to what you're tasting and all of a sudden you start to see patterns and recognize certain flavors and then it all clicks into place so this is a look at our range of wines we make ten different wines there are two grapes with the biggest production our marquette and la crescent marquette is our dry red wine this is overall our biggest selling wine we also make a ros from the marquette grape which is same grape different winemaking technique we call that hartwood that's a new wine for us that's been really popular the le crescent is a white wine grape and we actually make three different wines from that we make why don't we call it just the crescent which is on the it's not completely dry but it's on the dry side with just a small amount of residual sugar then we also make a sweeter version which we call ragtime white and it's not only sweeter but it's got a little different flavor profile as well and it's got a little spiciness to go along with the sweetness then we make one we call late harvest which is sweeter still and this is more of just a pure fruit flavor with a nice mouth feel to it and really delicious it's a kind of a dessert wine or something with an aged cheese and a nice aged gouda cheese yeah there you go would be perfect with this but we have we have ideal conditions for making ice wine here right now can you talk about that little bit ice wine is the grapes are actually frozen so right now the world's center of ice wine production is ontario canada but it's really the conditions here are better we have better grape varieties we have more consistent cold weather in the early winter so ice wine is a dessert wine it's made by leaving the grapes on the vines into the early winter you pick em the first time it reaches eighteen degrees fahrenheit at that temperature they're about three quarters frozen but what freezes is pure water and the one quarter that's not frozen is concentrated of everything else all the flavors sugars are in that one quarter that's not frozen so you press the grapes while they're still frozen you leave the water behind as ice crystals and you get this super concentrated juice and it's just a fabulous product and that is something that you're working on oh we make it we make it now but what i'm saying is i think vermont has the potential but we sell it all here we sell it all right here it's not a big production item for us it sells at a very high price because it takes so many more grapes and there's a lot more risk involved and you're cold when you're harvesting you're cold right i just want to backup a minute thinking about regions of production are people doing this over in new york state across the pond there are some i'm not as familiar with what's going on over there there are a few starting in the champlain valley and then actually there's a little cluster getting started over in the st lawrence valley kind of north of watertown in that area anything in the connecticut river valley or not quite yeah there's some vineyards going over there i think the champlain valley tends to be a little drier a little less foggy in the fall and so the conditions are a little bit better here but we're still an emerging grape region goes through a transition and you can tell when you're sort of starting to be serious and that goes and that's from when people plant grapes on the land they happen to own already but when people start looking for good land that's suited to grapes and that really hasn't happened in vermont yet and but sarah's coming along yeah that could happen i mean we obviously planted grapes on the land we happened to have it's pretty good for grapes it's not perfect i would say that our biggest problem here is the soil is just too rich and fertile which causes all that vegetative growth i was talking about that we have to deal with in the early summer what a problem to have well it is it is a problem the ideal grape regions are on this kind of poorer gravelly bony soil and really there's no magic to that it's just that they don't grow so much yeah grapes are so the grapes get a lot more sun it's all about getting the sun on those grapes so i think there are good sites in vermont i think i know what they are but i'm not going to be the one to go develop them develop them but maybe somebody will but as you're driving down the road you think ah boy that would be a good spot i think if i had to spell it out in this kind of the southern champlain valley kind of from shoreham all the way down to like west haven that on the hilltops there's this shaley soil i think it's called farmington for the most part and i think those shaley hilltops in the southern champlain valley i think that that is just the perfect environment for vermont grapes so there you go that's the tip of the day you just spilled the beans there you go so people ask me sometimes how has climate change affected grape growing here well actually people say well the reason that we're growing grapes in vermont is because the climate is warming up no it's not yeah development it's because of the new genetics we have these new varieties i don't know what climate changes can do all i can say is looking over the last eight ten years what it seems like is that it's getting more rain more and more rain particularly early in the season particularly early in the season yeah i mean so which is not good for us the winters are milder but that's not really it seems but that's not really a big issue for us because these grapes are adapted to a cold winter anyway frost if we start getting like early heat waves and then turns back to cold that could be an issue but that's kind of always happened i guess so it's hard to know if the successive rainfall is kind of our local version of climate change that's not good for us but that seems to be kind of the only consistent change that i've seen recently yeah our lifespan is relatively short to be talking i feel clearly we are seeing some changes and some pretty dramatic changes it concerns me that those changes are going to accelerate with time but just have to do what we can marketing you wholesale wine around the state yeah we have a distributor who picks up our wine takes it to stores and restaurants around the state just within vermont just within vermont yeah then we also have our little shop here and in terms of volume i think we sell probably two thirds of the wine right here out of our shop and the other third is going through the distributor obviously like every farmer we like to get the full retail dollar if possible so we like to sell it here but it also is great to have our product spread around where people see it and become aware of us and maybe even come visit us someday and do you get a nice flow of visitors we do yeah do you get a lot during the harvest season people curious about yeah we do it's definitely i mean we have our local kind of our local customers and our tourists and the tourists are important and we can't do without them and our local people are our repeat customers and we want to treat them right too so we build in some incentives for people to come price incentives for people to come back and give us a repeat business which is good for them and helps us build loyalty with people and then we do events we have every other friday we have a band here and it's free people can come and bring a picnic and we get on a nice day we can get fabulous crowds here it's a lot of fun two dollars in the jukebox a dime at a time play the same old song about a love gone wrong til closing time two dollars oughta do me if you'll buy the wine and i'll feed that jukebox one dime at a time and i have to say that the response we've gotten people just love it they just think it's a fabulous thing it feels like kind of a community gathering more than a commercial event and of course we're selling wine by the glass so that's a little more profit margin for us because we're selling it that way and admission is free the only money we're taking in is the sale of our own agricultural product and so it's still and we're allowed to sell our own product on our farm even though it's not a commercial zone so we're still within the letter of the zoning laws that way are there liability challenges with that or does it go oh we have all kinds of insurance we pay a lot of money for insurance for sure now what are your hopes and aspirations for the business you have twelve acres would you like to expand that or no i think we're at capacity where we want to be and there's a pretty good balance between the grapes we can produce the size of our facility and kind of what we can do in terms of marketing now plus i'm sixty so i'm not really out to conquer the world anymore it was a lot of years to get this up to where it was operating in the black and i just want to see it work as far as challenges go i mean our main challenge is just to keep making the wine quality better and better you know what i mean and we feel good about where it is but it can always be better you know what i mean and so we're always working both on the grape growing techniques and the winemaking techniques to see how we can get a better product so chris i really want to thank you for taking the time to talk with us today it's been a wonderful educational opportunity for me beautiful facility you have and it was a pleasure to have a little walk out in the vineyard you bet well thank you it's fun to stop for a minute and be forced to step back and look at the big picture cause a lot of times like most farmers we just have our heads down and are worried about the next hour and so it's kind of fun just to stop and talk about it with another farmer and so i've enjoyed the conversation well good we'll be up for one of your wine tasting music nights for sure sounds great very good thanks