Tours and Our Virtual Tour

Our winery is quite small for our production. When we are processing wine there is really no safe way for visitors to tour. Therefore we conduct tours by appointment only, usually scheduled at 1pm or 3:30 pm when we can stop operations. It you would like a tour please contact us (tour)and we will try to accommodate you.

If you cannot make it to the winery or we cannot give you a tour, we invite you to browse through our virtual tour - covering the wine making process from fruit and juice arrival through bottling.

Fruit/Juice Arrival

We receive our fruit and grapes in a number of forms. Fruits usually arrive frozen, white grapes as juice and red grapes as must (juice plus skins and seeds). The fruit is then transferred into a tank or barrel for fermentation, nutrients added and yeast pitched. Large tank fermentations are temperature controlled at 60 degrees. Barrel and small tank fermentation are conducted in a cool environment but not directly temperature controlled

Racking

When fermentation is complete, the wine is removed from the leas. In the case of barrel fermented wines this is done with nitrogen gas pressurizing the barrel which forces the wine out through the racking device. Tank fermented wines are typically transferred either by pump for large tanks or by gravity for our smaller tanks.

Pictures coming Fall 09

Bottling

The final step the the wine making process is bottling. The wine is filtered one last time as it is transferred to the bottling line. Bottles are added to the line, rinsed, filled, corked and wire hooded (sparkling wine only). The Cime bottling line which we use has the ability to bottled wines under pressure and insert a still or sparkling wine cork. The videos illustrate each of these processes.