It's not you, it's me.

So I went to another local winery to see how other local places do things and I just left very disappointed.

I like really good food and think that eating and drinking should be a holistic experience. I like when people are passionate about cooking or wine making or beer brewing. It seems like if you start a place such as a winery, you are passionate about wine, which would make you want to talk to other people about it and share your passion and excitement about it.

I walked into this place and there was only two other customers there. I wanted to do a full tasting, to get their whole menu of wines and see what they were all about. The descriptions were amazing so I couldn't wait to get started.
I got a halfway greeting and then the woman behind the counter turned her back to me. It took a half an hour from the time I walked in until the time I was served. And then once my tasting was all poured, she rushed to cash me out. Um, wait, that's one way to make sure that I don't purchase a bottle to take home or a glass to enjoy while there.
The food was not really appetizing looking at all, but I ordered something anyway. They didn't even open it out of the package, but plopped it on a paper plate and asked me if I would go sit down away from the bar with my wines to taste. I felt like a kid snubbed at the lunch table who was asked to sit somewhere else.
I wanted someone to tell me about the wine, what they grow, what they love, how they age their Chardonnay or what wines they are most excited about. All I got was another request to step away from the counter. For what? The other two people that were there sitting in the corner? To make room for the crowd that was coming through soon? This was the second place that I went where the server wasn't engaging, which made me think that maybe it's not the places I'm going, but maybe it's me?

The winemaker came out and I was excited to ask him about his wine. I asked him about one of his wines and I got a hurried answer that was just him rephrasing my question.

A lot on their wine list was from California, which is always a bit of a let down.
We are Ohio. Our winters are cold. Our springs and summers are unpredictable and sometimes brutal. We are not the Bordeaux region of France or the beautiful wine country of Italy. But then again, neither was California a few decades ago. They built up to being the wine heavyweight that they are today.
While I'm in Ohio, I don't aspire to make Merlot because in short, we can't grow Merlot grapes. Why would I pay for something to get shipped from so many miles away? Wouldn't shipping just sour the grapes?
I want to care for my crop, watch it grow, make sure that I raise it right to the highest quality, and be able to press right as soon as I cut them from the vine.

I also can't wrap my head around the serving styles of Ohio. I think this all kinda falls back a little bit to my first winery experience in Virginia. Jason and I walked in to Keswick Vineyards after playing in the ocean in the morning and then driving all day so I'm sure we didn't look fresh as a daisy. We were surrounded by people in golf shorts and loafers and we stuck out like a sore thumb, but the lady behind the counter did an amazing job of explaining all the wines to us as we did a tasting. She explained the different techniques they were trying and where the grapes came from. It was amazing and informative and I loved the way I felt when I was leaving.

My goal for BRX is to go never make people feel alienated when they're there and for my menu and wine list to be as local as possible. I want our menu to reflect the amazing local people making delicious and fresh products with locally produced ingredients.
I'm happy that most of our wines come straight out of the vineyard on the grounds and our ciders are made from Ohio apples as well. Our vines are hardy and exhausting vigorous (especially if you're the one pruning them.) The reds are so red that light barely can shine through because the skins are so thick. And I like that. It feels very "Ohio" to me.

So I guess what I'm saying is that I hope I never turn my back on someone who is interested in learning about how the wine is made or the grapes are grown. I don't want anyone to feel snubbed or that they don't know anything about wine, but rather to come in with an open palate and open mind and just taste what we have to offer. I'm pretty sure that between the sweet blush wines, the sparkling hard ciders, and the rich red wines, we'll have something most everyone will like. And if not, the goat cheese from Ravenna or the smoked sausage from Medina might please your fancy while you're here.
But if that fails, maybe eventually we'll work up to some Great Lakes beer on tap. Mmmm.... that would be so amazing.

Anyway, opening in about a month. Only a few more finishing touches......

What really matters

I had a total revelation this weekend. It was a nice realization like the Grinch in the end of the movie, where it finally hit me -the true meaning of a winery.

It started with a whole bunch of stress. Stress over this process taking a long time and worrying over furniture or glasses or where to put the wine racks. Worrying over having the right floor, the right paint, the perfect sized tables and chairs and how the front walkway looks.
There's so many things to think about when opening up a new place and hundreds of decisions along the way. I started over thinking every little detail.

So Janice and I stopped moving furniture from one side of the tasting room to the other and went to another local winery to figure out how they did it.
We walked around the retail area and studied their shelves. We looked at their chair orientation and how many chairs per table, and the table top material. We studied every picture on the wall, looked at their fireplace, checked out the ceiling and the lighting, and the outdoor patio area. The bar was scrutinized, behind the bar was analyzed, and the fake light up grapes were giggled at. And then we went through the tasting....
The first woman behind the bar was soooo pleasant and fun to talk to. She offered what few bits of information she knew about the wine and chatted us up, keeping the tasting going at a fine pace. She smiled and made us feel happy we came out and not judged at all when we liked or didn't like a wine. She was great, but then there was a shift change and she smiled and said goodbye.
Her replacement was TERRIBLE!!!! Oh man, she didn't even say hello to us, but turned her back and separated out her tips instead of engaging us in conversation. When I asked about what blend on particular wine was, she answered me so fast and walked away like I wouldn't understand what she was saying and she was annoyed at the question. She didn't pour for us for another 15 minutes. When I asked her what grapes they grew there, she sighed at me and then rambled them so fast I couldn't even hear her. Really, I couldn't believe she SIGHED at me! Wow.
So we grabbed a few of the bottles the previous girl had smiled about earlier and ran away from the evil tasting room staff person. The saving grace of the day was the guy that rang us out was incredibly friendly and obviously loved the wine. He was happy and chatty and made us smile again.

So, I guess the point is, no matter how good your wine is, it doesn't matter if your service is terrible. They could have had the coolest hand carved chairs made out of mahogany and driftwood, I would have never gone back if the sighing girl was the only one that served me. If you don't like your job or are annoyed with questions, you should probably quit.

This got me thinking, what are the real priorities behind starting any new place, be it a restaurant, brewery, coffee house, winery, whatever. I think it's a combination of the three top things: excellent product, engaging staff, and good prices.
Overall, if I couldn't have afforded any bottles they were selling, I would have bought maybe a glass of wine there. If the wine wasn't good, I might have bought the obligatory one bottle and probably not gone back. If the sighing girl was the only one serving me though, I would have never gone back and probably told all my friends never to go there either.

There is a little diner in Massillon that I go to every week called the Coffee Cup, Massillon's oldest restaurant. It's a tiny little greasy spoon type diner with amazing gravy and a grill cook that really knows what he's doing and the price is just perfect. As I sat there yesterday with my plate full of deliciousness topped with the perfect gravy, all for under $5, my coffee cup constantly full with quite decent coffee, this really cemented my conclusion. The little boom box on the counter buzzed out some old Neil Diamond as the waitress laughed and danced along with a kid bouncing in his booster seat. The bathrooms have this dizzying floral wallpaper, the walls are kinda plain with a shrine to Massillon football, Ohio State, and some Nascar memorabilia from the glory days of one of their regular patrons. The booths, tables, color of the walls or counter or the lighting.... it all really didn't matter. That place makes me happy. It makes me feel comfortable. I can afford it, my coffee cup is always full, and the food is consistently good. If you're ever in Massillon for breakfast, I highly recommend it. It's on 3rd St. :)

So now all I really want to do is get this place open. I have amazing 2009 wines to sell and some nice, light sweet 2010 wines in the bottle and ready. I've got my vineyard helpers, Nick, and myself ready to work behind the bar with a ban on all sighing and I'm always happy to talk about the grapevines, varieties, wine making, and wine drinking and the cider too. I have a collection of amazing local breads, cheeses, and meats ready to pair with the wines all at affordable prices. The weather is warm, the time is right, we've just got a couple lose ends to tie up and then we'll be open....

...soon.

Pruning has begun!

The timeline has been set and the pruning schedule for 2011 has been put into motion. It's me and my lightweight Japanese pruners against the thousands of cuts to be made to the thousands of vines. My callouses are growing back, my hand is starting to automatically mold into the shape of my pruners, and I see grapevines on high cordon wire systems every time I close my eyes now.

It's a race against the clock. It's a gamble with the weather and a whistle and a prayer that what I've learned over the past few years of pruning pays off this year. The vines are tied up just right, which is a good start to the pruning season. Now all I have to do is start at one end of the 10 or so acres in productive, hardy vines and prune until I get to the other side and then race back over and do it all again.

Step one - prune fruiting wood back into what buds I'd like to produce.
Step two - as the little blossoms emerge, prune back clusters to make sure each plant can support a good crop
Step three - arrange the fruiting crop for maximum sunlight, airflow, and productivity to get the finest quality grapes and avoid diseases and pests with healthy plants.

And that's just the spring training system. Summer is a whole different set of steps.

I'm about halfway through step one. It's probably the most taxing to do as wrestling old grapevines out that have knotted themselves together means making many cuts and pulling and then cutting again and pulling until the vine looks manageable again and ready for a productive season. Move to next grapevine and repeat.
I'm quite addicted to listening to Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros while tackling this task for it's upbeat nature and there's nothing like a good singalong and a slight dance in your step to keep things rolling.

These few beautiful March days have really catapulted my mood into a soaring hopefulness. It's just warm enough to enjoy the sun and the smell of the mud. The grass is just starting to blush a bit of green, very cautiously as it slowly emerges, not too quick as the threat of a few more winter storms still lingers in the air.

Still not open yet. Still working on the renovation. The wine is shaping up very beautifully. The cider is doing something amazing. I hope we're open in the next few months. Until then, I'll be outside happily pruning.

vineyard horses, gorilla suits, and menu plans

The snow flying puts this white haze over a sleepy vineyard and it's about this time in the winter when I really start daydreaming. It's a combination of hiding from the cold and trying to find inventive ways to get my tasks done that has my mind really wandering.
On my list of things to do is count all the replacement vines so we can put an order in. This means walking the entire vineyard, actually all three vineyards, row by row and counting how many poor little vines didn't make it. So I'm daydreaming of doing this task on horseback because really, if you have a horse, how often is it that you can use it to do something useful like walk around the vineyards to count vines. And I don't really have to get down on the ground to see that a vine didn't survive, so I'd save myself many steps and my feet would be at least a bit warmer than walking in the snow. Do you think that horses get cold feet in winter? I guess maybe I should daydream about a 4 wheeler, but those are loud and smell like gas and are not nearly as romantic of a scenario as a snow covered vineyard as seen from horseback.

And yes, I am making up ridiculous scenarios. It's winter. This is what I do.

It's about this time that I realistically start putting together my game plan for the vines. I'm calculating man hours and how long it will take me and x amount of people to go through each pruning step in order for everything to be done on time. I'm looking at last years spray schedule and thinking - how can I make this better, more perfectly timed and effective. How can I make each pass over the vineyard with my pruners yield the best grapes possible with the most effective and efficient cuts.
So of course naturally, I daydream about all the possibilities of vineyard helpers and pruning techniques and a little voice in the back of my head, Karl's voice, says that maybe pruning in a gorilla costume really would be nice and warm and make you work faster.

Ah winter. How much longer?

Anyway, I wish I had a time frame to tell you all that the tasting room would be open. I wish I could put my finger on a date and say "yes, certainly it will be --/--/2011," but I can't. It's contingent on so many pieces and parts and the stars being just in line for everything to work out perfectly. And as much as I'd love to plow forward and get open so I can talk about wine and growing grapes, everything is going at it's own pace and that's ok for now.

But, in the meantime, I'm working on a killer menu of local foods. I found the perfect bread baker and I'm so excited to pair her delicious olive and onion loaf with a nice rich Frontenac red wine or a glass of our cherry cider. Jason is perfecting his pepperoni roll recipe, herb crusted and to be filled with our home grown tomatoes. I tracked down the best smoked sausage and some delicious local cheeses too.
For me, I think that a nice winter soup would lend well to a crusty roll and a bottle of red wine. Now I'm daydreaming about a wild rice and mushroom creamy soup or a delicious winter squash and sausage soup.

Menu suggestions, by all means let me know. I still have a couple of months to perfect them before we open our doors for wine tasting. Until then, I'll daydream and wait.

oh winter

It's that dead part of winter - post football, or at least post Browns season, where time just hovers and stands still like the cold swirls of breath in the freezing air. I walked around the vineyard today after the encouragement of a few days of unseasonably warm weather and started thinking about getting back to my vines. Soon, but not today.

This is an incredibly exciting time. It feels like it's all pent up in my throat, where we're about ready to open and I'm sitting in a room filled with boxes of engraved wine glasses and paint samples and wine racks. I'm like a kid before Christmas just waiting for the tasting room floor to be finished, the walls to be up and painted the perfect hue that just embraces you in the warm fuzzy feeling that's so conducive to drinking wine in.

I'm plotting and planning for this next year, building on the beauty of the vineyard and the deliciousness of our finished wine. I'm thinking about growing a couple rows of basil so that we'd have fresh, organic herbs for our home baked bread we'll serve in the tasting room. I'm thinking about getting a couple of pigs so that we could sell our own smoked sausage that we raised ourselves with locally made cheese plates. I'm planning the warm soups and the simple menu, imagining chatting over a beautiful wooden bar with open bottles and smiling people on the other side, just tasting the fruit of Ohio vines in the peak of their glory for the first time.

Ah yes, I'm probably getting ahead of myself. One step at a time, Janeé. It's a couple of months before we're open still.

Anyway, we're going through the filtering process for our 2010 sweet wines and some of our dry reds now. They're getting chilled to perfection to make the sediment drop to the bottom of the tanks. Then they go through our new plate frame filter, many, many times. Then they go back into tanks to sit and think about it for a bit, then they get filtered by a different filter. Then they're bottled.
It looks like another couple of months before we are going to do another round of bottling. We've got plenty to do to get ready in the mean time and our 2009 wines are all in bottles and getting labeled with great care right now.

I'm happily standing in a relatively warm building, staring out the window at the vines, just waiting for a break in the weather to start tying them up again. But man, when the snow starts flying, it sure is nice to hibernate in the production room, surrounded by cases of wine and looking forward to opening day...

When I was in high school, I loved science. So I took chemistry. I lasted 2 days. I didn't see the point of memorizing the periodic table and I zoned out for the first 4 minutes of class and the rest of the class totally didn't make sense then, kinda like a Seinfield episode. I dropped it and promptly picked up earth science. Rocks seemed a bit less confusing to me and more tangible than elements.

I think application of knowledge is very important. I used to be one of those kids that would say 'why do I need to learn -blank- I'm never going to use that.' Now I know why.
I use all those facts I glossed over in geometry for area and volume and everything I learned science classes I halfway slept through.
I use the difference between acids and bases and how to neutralize them when I grow things. The most basic things in life, planting seeds and growing food still relies on soil chemistry and at the very least, elemental math. I calculate the ratio of organic matter if I add how many pounds of compost and the amount of sulfur and pine needles I need to decrease the pH for my blueberries. Even grapevine pruning has calculations such as weight of cut off prunings in relation to how many grape clusters that plant will consequently support. And now the chemistry of wine making peers at me through wine samples and fining agents. Oh frustrated teachers of my past, I thank you.

So now as I sit with a mini-chemistry lab in front of me, trying to stretch my brain in ways I haven't stretched it since that 8am neuroscience lab I tackled in '04, I'm wondering how I would be different if I would have just buckled down in that chemistry class.

Right now, we're working through what's called fining. I had no idea how many steps were in wine making!

So after a wine is pressed, it goes through primary fermentation where the sugars become alcohol. That's done. Check.
Then the whites stay in stainless steel (or sometimes a Chardonnay will be oak aged) and the reds go into oak barrels. The settle out their sediment and need racked a few times, which means getting pumped out into a new tank or barrel, leaving the sediment in the bottom which I then clean out and get rid of, leaving only the good wine behind. This improves the flavor and clarifies the wine naturally.

Sometimes the wine needs a little bit of extra help to settle out some of the off flavors or just to aid in clarifying through what's called fining. It's kinda like filtering the wine by adding something that pulls out certain particles. An example of a fining agent would be gelatin, which is added to a tank in the correct ratio and then racked off after a day or so, pulling out some of the particles that stuck to the gelatin.

I'm still so new at this, but I've got all these samples of different ratios of fining agents before I add them to the entire tank. It involves a lot of taste testing, which is always fun and simple additions and pH tests.

The warm weather has now quite officially conceeded to the unavoidable cold of winter. Construction is underway on the tasting room so hopefully we'll be cuddled around a warm fire, sipping our delicious 2009 Frontenac

harvest and crush, 2010

It's crush season. And harvest season. And pressing time.

The temperature is dropping, the days are getting shorter but the work hours just keep growing. This is the exciting time! This is so much work and so much fun all wrapped up into a ball of energy and exhaustion. I'm turning into this work-zombie where I just don't stop moving, even though I'm so tired. Between the park CSA wrapping up, the meat share getting in full swing, planting for the winter garden shares, and trying to get a chicken plucker working before the ducks are ready for the table, it's almost as if that's enough to totally fill my plate before even starting to think about the excitement of first crush, moving into the new production building, and harvesting the grapes and apples for the 2010 season.

Harvest round one came down last weekend. Started at 7am and with two different crews on two different days, we pulled down about 5 tons of grapes! The problem with harvesting wine grapes is that it's not just done when you pluck them from the vines. Within 24 hours they must be crushed and destemmed right away. The whites must then be pressed out into juice and the fermentation process begins.

The new production room is full of fresh wine smell and yeast blurps from the airlock on top of the Frontenac Gris tank. The Frontenac needs tended to several times a day and I'm trying to get together a crew to take off the netting, and harvest two days again and press on Saturday. Geez! I am completely going to make a bed in the rice hull loft at the winery.

The wine from last year has been tended by the wine doctor and turned into this smooth, amazingly beautiful finished product that's ready to be bottled any day now. Ohhhh man, it's good. I can't believe it came from our super acidic Frontenac grapes! I'd take it over a good Merlot any day. I hope that we have the same success with the batch of grapes from this year's hot, dry season. Only time will tell.

This whole thing seems like such a huge endeavor that I'm excited and scared at the same time. It's always something new and I am really looking forward to opening up the tasting room in a few months and letting you all try what we've made. What a feat of work has gone into it up until now and soon, you all will get to drink the fruits of our labor.

Cheers!