Winter at the Vineyard

New Year, New Vine

Snow has blanketed the vineyard and so far it’s been a beautiful, vintage Vermont winter. The sustained cold weather means the vines are now fully dormant, quietly recovering from the last growing season and eagerly preparing for the next. Dormancy also means that it’s time for one our favorite vineyard tasks of the year: pruning.

Pruning is like pressing a vine’s reset button, shedding the wood that laboriously produced last year’s harvest and making room for new growth. We may remove up to 90% of the vine’s wood every year, each cut strategically placed to maximize the plant’s potential and longevity. Nothing we do in the vineyard has a bigger, more lasting impact on the vine’s ability to fully and sustainably ripen fruit than pruning.

It’s not a glamorous process - maneuvering pruners with hands incapacitated by bulky gloves, unwrapping impossibly strong tendrils, and trying to avoid getting whipped in the frozen face by a rogue cane - but each vine is a unique and fascinating puzzle.

Without foliage to block our view, we can clearly see the vine’s structure and the clues it left us from the growing season. These clues - the length and thickness of a cane, the presence of a scar or stretch mark, the spacing between buds - help us decide what to cut away and what to retain. In this way, we can affect the shape of the vine, improve its immune system by redirecting sap flow away from damaged or diseased wood, encourage growth of a new trunk, and balance its vegetative (shoots, leaves, etc.) and reproductive (grapes!) potential.

Pruning is cold, hard work but its methodical nature and the quiet of winter make it a time for reflection, sharing stories, planning, catching up on podcasts, and discovering new music. The tracks in the snow remind us of the wildlife that share this land with us. And we stand in reverence of the vines, masters of regeneration and resilience.

Update from the Winery

Kevin and Rosie working on 2024 Limestone blends.
Taste. Discuss. Conceptualize. Blend. Taste. Discuss. Repeat.

Tis the season for blending

The darkest months of the year tend to be the slowest in the winery. It’s a rewarding and restful time for a winemaker; a time for reflection, planning, and lots of tasting.

As the yeast convert the last bits of sugar to alcohol, the ephemeral aromas of fermentation dissipate and the wines begin to clarify and take shape. This is when the nuances of the growing season and our practices in the vineyard and winery begin to reveal themselves.

The wines are still very young, especially the reds, but we can see more clearly than ever where they’ll go. Time alone will do most of the work, but there are a few techniques we can utilize in the cellar to pull the wines in one direction or another. These include careful oxygen exposure (or lack thereof), timely rackings, and bâttonage.

Most important, though, may be blending. The majority of wines that end up in our glass are a blend of different base wines from the cellar, carefully combined to build complexity, balance, and beauty. This, we think, is the most artistic aspect of winemaking.

Blending season kicks off with an early look at the new vintage of Limestone because the 2023 is almost sold out! We’re putting together bench blends with different proportions of Louise Swenson, Prairie Star, and two expressions of La Crescent. Teasing out flavors, popping aromatics, and building textures. It’s pretty fun. Grab some bottles of 2023 Limestone before they’re gone!

Winemaker Dinner Recap

Oh. What a Night.

This past Saturday we hosted 40 special guests for our very first Winemaker Dinner. We started in the tasting room with a grazing board loaded with local provisions before heading into the winery for a wonderful meal among the tanks and barrels. With the help of our friends at Dino Bones, it was a magical evening filled with delicious food, intriguing wine pairings, laughter, and thoughtful conversation.

Homegrown and handmade wines like ours have so many stories to tell, and these dinners are the perfect opportunity for us to explore each wine in detail and share its stories from the soil to our glass.

We’re already looking forward to the next one!

Thanksgiving Wine

Turkey & Marquette:
A Match Made in the Vineyard

Ben and SeSe, our spectacular summer winegrowing interns who tended carefully to the vines throughout the growing season, first came across our flock of wild turkeys in July. It was a small flock then, but by September we were shooing 16 birds out of the Upper Marquette vineyard every morning. We usually found them perched up on the posts, helping themselves to the top half of every cluster of ripening Marquette they could reach. They had found the best fruit at Lincoln Peak and we had to do something about it. But after the game warden forbade us from “terminating” wild turkeys, we had to go greet the birds every morning and politely ask them to leave, with the help of the best vineyard dog around.

This year we’re thankful for new friends and 12 barrels of 2024 Marquette. We think Thanksgiving dinner is the best meal of the year to pair wine with. So many wines work well with all of the different dishes on the table, from cleansing and acid-driven whites like Limestone to textural, full-bodied reds like Marquette. It’s worth opening a few bottles for the feast and these are the wines our family is most excited to drink next week. Come pick yours up from the tasting room or order online and we’ll send them to your door.

Harvest Wrap Up

Time for the vineyard managers to rest and the winemakers to get to work. Oh, wait…

That’s a wrap on Harvest 2024 and what a beautiful vintage it was! The month of September delivered fantastic weather with very little rainfall and lots of sun, giving us the freedom to pick each variety at peak ripeness. The vineyard produced 17 tons of grapes with big sugars and bigger flavors, all of which is now fermenting away in the winery, well on its way to becoming the next bottles of Lincoln Peak wine.

The wines have a lot left to reveal as they continue to develop, but so far the quality in tank and barrel is looking excellent. These wines are like our children, so it’s impossible to pick a favorite, but we are especially excited about two very different expressions of La Crescent, a rich and textured Frontenac Blanc, and a few different lots of Marquette already aging away beautifully in barrel. We can’t wait to share these wines with you next year!

With the first frost at the vineyard last week, the vines have dropped their leaves and will soon begin their long, well-deserved sleep. It was a whirlwind of a growing season - simultaneously seeming to drag on and fly by - but we feel so fortunate to have been graced with a great vintage in our first year farming the vineyard. We are endlessly grateful to this community, our volunteers, and our family and friends for supporting us throughout the year. It’s good to be back home in Vermont.

Austrian Wine Culture in Vermont

We lived in Austria for six months in 2019, working vintage at a couple wineries about 60 miles up the Danube from Vienna. Nichole spent most of her time in the cellar at Weingut Bründlmayer in the Kamptal region and Kevin was out in the vineyards at Weingut Jamek in the Wachau. Winegrowing has been the main business in this part of the world for 2,000 years and they’ve certainly figured some things out along the way. The growing season is somewhat similar to ours here in Vermont, and a lot of the philosophies and techniques that we practice at Lincoln Peak we learned during our time in Austria.

We also left Austria astounded and inspired by how this long history of growing grapes and making wine has affected the entire culture of the region, how proud the locals are of their wines, and how passionately they support the farmers that have been tending these impossibly steep vineyards by hand for generations.

The region is made up of small villages each with a handful of wineries, most of which are just big enough to support the family that runs it. Throughout the year, but especially in the fall, each winery in the village takes a turn opening their doors for a month at a time, offering the wines from their vineyard paired with local specialties like cured meats, cheeses, and fresh veggies.

This tradition is known as Heuriger, and has been an integral part of Austrian wine culture since the 18th century when Emperor Josef II passed a law allowing wineries to sell their own products, instead of just the noblemen. Just like the wines, every family’s Heuriger is a little different, but they all offer a cozy, humble atmosphere and the whole village seems to come out to drink the new wines, eat some hearty food, and chop it up with their neighbors.

After long days of picking fruit in the vineyard and fermenting wines in the cellar, we loved walking to the local Heuriger, nourishing our tired bodies, and tasting some amazing wines. We’re excited to bring this tradition to our community in Vermont and will be offering a Heuriger in the tasting room for the entire month of October. We’ll have new Austrian-inspired charcuterie boards paired with your favorite Lincoln Peak wines, as well as some sneak peeks at the new 2024 wines fermenting in the winery.

Harvest Begins

The 2024 harvest has officially begun, with our earliest ripening variety, Adalmiina, coming off the vines on the last day of August. She's now happily fermenting away in the winery as we impatiently wait for the rest of the fruit to tell us when it's ready. Mother Nature hit the pause button on ripening last weekend with cool temperatures and a shot of rain, reminding us that fall is coming soon...but not yet! We're back to perfect conditions in the vineyard and it looks like it'll stay that way for a while. It's the home stretch of the growing season and we expect to be picking fruit in earnest over the next few weeks before all of our attention moves into the winery to focus on processing and fermentation. It's a magical time of year and we can't wait to make some wine.

2021 Farnsworth - Grown in sunny times

Our Reserve Farnsworth is from the 2021 vintage, characterized by its evenness. Consistent but small amounts of rain and significant sunshine allowed fruit to ripen slowly and uniformly, leading to big flavors and bold tannins. From this ideal season came a stunning expression of Farnsworth, one that we will see as a benchmark from this vineyard for years to come.

2020 Marquette - Highlight of our region

While a difficult year for us humans, 2020 was a great year for grapes in Vermont. A warm, dry summer developed the fruit to perfection, leading to a Marquette with so much color, fruit intensity, and richness that you might not recognize it as Marquette. Four years of bottle aging has led to a concentrated, cohesive, and beautiful wine that showcases the very best of our growing region.

2023 Black Sparrow - Levity and grace

As longtime fans of Lincoln Peak, Kevin and I were so excited when approached with the opportunity to take over the vineyard. The more we learned about its history and inner workings, the more impressed and inspired we became by all the enlightened work that was done before us. We wanted to find ways to pay homage to this past, and bringing back some of the previous labels felt like a good place to start.

Thankfully, Chris and Sara had a knack for branding and design because we had plenty of cool label art to choose from. Black Sparrow was the first thing to catch our eye, with its silhouetted birds flying playfully out of the frame. We felt that the label communicated levity and grace, and we wanted the wine in the bottle to do the same.

Black Sparrow is a blend of three white varieties, Cayuga, Gewürztraminer, and Chardonnay, that come together to produce a wine with delicate aromatics and a juicy finish. The wine was arrested prior to the completion of fermentation, leaving a touch of sweetness to balance the bright acidity and yielding an easy-drinking summer sipper. Come by the tasting room this week to have a glass and watch the birds flit around the pond.

2023 Starlight - Born in difficult times

Obscured by the imposed formalities of drinking wine and the mystique of making it, we sometimes forget that wine is an agricultural product. Winemaking is farming, and like all farmers, we are at the mercy of Mother Nature and her increasingly unpredictable behavior. We work hard to embrace her whims, adjusting our farming practices and winemaking decisions to best represent each growing season. It’s a wonderful thing working so closely with Mother Nature, but sometimes she can just be mean.

The 2023 growing season in northern New England was historically difficult. A hard freeze in mid-May wiped out vineyards and orchards across the region, including 80% of our crop at Lincoln Peak. Farmers were forced to look elsewhere for their fruit, a sad reality when you’re focused on expressing local terroir, but a great opportunity to collaborate with other growers and work with some new fruit.

Starlight was born from this collaboration. Gently pressed Marquette from the Finger Lakes, a wonderful winegrowing region with a lot of similarities to ours, was fermented and blended with Vermont-grown Petite Pearl to yield a darker spin on dry rosé. In the glass, look for aromas and flavors of wild strawberry, cranberry juice, vanilla bean, and a distinct herbal note reminiscent of amaro. Come by the winery this weekend to check it out!

And please take care of Pachamama so she’ll take care of us.

Limestone 2023 - An ode to Vermont whites

People often ask if you have a preference for white or red. I usually say that I’m moody about it, that it depends on the weather and my meal. But I think deep down I prefer whites. Maybe it’s because white wines are more delicate and transparent in the cellar or possibly more reflective of terroir 😱 These nuances show themselves so expressively and vulnerably in whites.

Our Limestone white is right up my alley. Dry, full of minerality and citrus. Serious and quaffable. Unfortunately we didn’t get the opportunity to taste what Limestone was in its previous life. But this is our interpretation and we think the wine earned its name. The blend is mostly Louise Swenson and La Crescent with a splash of a few other varieties that grow well in Vermont. It’s a great representation of what our brave little state can grow by way of grapes. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do!

Farnsworth 2022 - Our very own varietal

Like many of the grape varieties that we grow in Vermont, Farnsworth was developed by researchers at the University of Minnesota. These plant breeders cross cultivars from Europe with those native to North America, combining the high quality winemaking characteristics of the former with the cold hardiness and disease resistance of the latter.

A couple decades ago, the University sent cuttings of an experimental variety to Lincoln Peak to see how it would grow in Vermont. Chris was a big fan and decided to propagate the vines himself, expanding the planting to multiple acres over the next few years. In the meantime, the researchers gave up on the variety and never released it to the public. Lincoln Peak was left with the only commercial planting in the world and, naturally, the naming rights.

The Granstroms named the variety after the Farnsworth family who farmed the land that became Lincoln Peak Vineyard from 1816 to 1919. Never would they have imagined that unique wine grapes would one day grow on their hill.

Farnsworth produces a dark, robust wine with smooth tannins and pronounced spice. From the cooler 2022 vintage, look for aromas and flavors of dried fig, green olive, fresh raspberry, hazelnuts, and white peppercorn. Get your nose in a glass of this one-of-a-kind beauty at our Tasting Room or online.

Marquette 2021 - Our Flagship Red

Our flagship red, Marquette may be the most important and widely planted cold-climate grape variety. Here at Lincoln Peak, we have two blocks of Marquette, one in the loamy, loose soils of the Upper Vineyard and one in the rich, heavy soils of the Lower Vineyard. The vines show great disease resistance, healthy crop levels, and the ability to make dense, opulent wines with incredible fruit intensity. Our elevated site, with its consistent breezes typical of the Champlain Valley, allows us to hang fruit late into the growing season, soaking up every last bit of sun and creating a benchmark example of this special variety.

The 2021 vintage was a dry one with lots of sun and little rainfall for much of the growing season. Periodic showers returned in late summer, giving the vines a much needed drink, but the fruit remained pristine with great ripeness and flavor density. In the glass, look for aromas and flavors of dark cherry, plum compote, brown spice, and violets.

Check out more information about Marquette 2021 and our wines here.