Changes in the Vineyard

This spring we are converting our small vineyard from Vidal Blanc grapes to Elderberries. While we had marginal success with the Vidal Blanc, we hope to greatly increase our production of Elderberry wines by growing our own fruit. Since elderberries prefer wet areas we are constructing a series of ponds and streams for a semi natural setting. We will post pictures of the construction here.

New Bottling Line

The bottling line is finally installed and we have used it to bottle 2004 Vidal Blanc, 2004 Pinot Gris and Sparkling Cranberry. This week we will bottle Roughshod, the last of the Sparkling Cranberry and the new vintage of Sparkling Blueberry.

Each of these wines are being bottled using a new synthetic cork. We look for your feedback on this cork. If you would like more information go to Supremecorq.com.

For the past five years, we've relied solely on our Gai six-head semiautomatic bottler to fill the bottles and on various manual corkers that all seemed to have a useful life of three bottlings or fewer. The corkers were a particular nuisance. They seemed to always wear out just when we were at the beginning of a bottling run. And, as production of Blueberry wine quintupled, we discovered that it took us 5 days just to bottle a single batch. We needed to find a bottling line soon, because if we didn't, we would have a mutiny on our hands.

In December 2004, the crew traveled to Milan for VinExpo, the world's premier Wine Equipment Trade Show. We found the bottler we wanted but we had no place to put it. When we returned, we started construction of a new bottling room on the site of the former South Casco Post Office.