Lincoln Peak Winery Press Room

Homegrown Grapes

By Melissa Pasanen, Burlington Free Press

09-04-08

Homegrown Grapes at Lincoln Peak Vineyard & Winery.

Lincoln Peak Vineyard welcomes visitors for tastings, tours and bring-your-own-picnics by picturesque pond.

It’s a long way from California’s Napa Valley and Oregon’s Willamette Valley, but grape-grower and winemaker Chris Granstrom stood on the crest of a hill in New Haven among 12 acres of lush vines last week and shared his high hopes for wine from the Champlain Valley.
“The reason I got into this business — and that vineyards are cropping up — is genetics,” said Granstrom, 55. “It’s an up and coming thing, a thing we couldn’t do before because we didn’t have good varieties.”

The credit goes to a farmer from Wisconsin named Elmer Swenson who grew up on a dairy farm but inherited his grandfather’s passion for grapes. “He was the first one to realize that breeding northern grapes based on Vitis labrusca was a dead end,” Granstrom said, referring to a native variety known mostly through the Concord grape, which tends to create wines with “foxy” or “nail polish” flavors.

“Not a good thing,” he clarified — in case that wasn’t obvious.

Against the background thrum of crickets and the soft rumble of
U.S. 7 traffic, Granstrom led a visitor through neat rows of grapes. He grows about 20 cultivars, most of which are the result of Swenson’s work crossing Vitis riparia, another hardy wild grape native to North America, with hybrids of Vitis vinifera, the European wine variety.

He even grows a small amount of delicious golden- and purple-skinned, seedless table grapes, which will be sold through the Middlebury Natural Foods Co-op in September. These small, tightly clustered Somerset grapes slip easily from their skins like wild grapes and have a distinctively tart-sweet flavor.

Arriving at a row of vines with bunches of dark purple, almost black grapes, Granstrom said, “This is Marquette, it’s a quarter pinot noir. This is going to put us on the map.” Popping a grape in his mouth, he noted that the flavor was good but not fully developed yet, and that there will be more tannins in the skin when the grapes are ripe.

Marquette is the main grape in Lincoln Peak’s Cove Road, a dry red. The vineyard also offers a crisp, light white that drinks like a sauvignon blanc and a rounded, fruity rose, each made from a blend of grapes. A Riesling-style white called Cloud Mountain has the deep apricot flavor characteristic to the Lacrescent grape with which it is made.

Granstrom expects to start picking the vineyard’s 35 to 40 tons of grapes in the middle of September and has already filled his harvest needs with a Craig’s List posting. “I’m turning people away,” he said with a bemused smile.

Many of those who applied for the jobs are young college graduates much like Granstrom was when he decided to go into farming. He came to Vermont from New Jersey to attend Middlebury College and took a summer job on a dairy farm. It was “one of the happiest summers of my life,” he said. “It just called to me.”

He saved up enough to buy 16 acres of a former dairy farm in New Haven where, for the next 24 years he and his wife Michaela, an art teacher, raised strawberries. “It was a high value crop you could do on a small acreage,” he said.

But about seven years ago Granstrom — also a successful freelance journalist and regular contributor to Smithsonian and Vermont Life — was ready for something new. “I was surfing the Web, a site about growing grapes in northern climates,” he said. Soon a shoebox full of Swenson grape cuttings arrived in the mail and he had launched a nursery selling vines mostly back to the Midwest.

Initially, Granstrom did not plan to make wine, but “We had to grow a certain amount of vines for cuttings so we had grapes.” For the first few years he sold the fruit to other Vermont wineries before realizing that along with the grapes, much of the potential profit was leaving the vineyard.

Of course, he noted, much of that same potential profit had to then be invested into costly winemaking equipment and a new building in which to put them all.

By 2006, Lincoln Peak Vineyard was a licensed and bonded winery and 2007 was the first year the Granstroms bottled wine under their own label. This summer, the family opened a brand new tasting room and now welcomes visitors for tastings, tours, and BYOP (bring-your-own-picnics) by a picturesque pond.

The increased interest in locally grown food and drink has been a boon to many farmers including vineyards, Granstrom said, but he acknowledged that the Champlain Valley still has a long way to go compared to those other famous vinicultural valleys.

“The local foods movement is enough to get people to come and buy one bottle,” he said, “but for them to come back, the wine has to be good.”

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