Happy Holidays!

We had a lovely (and quiet) Christmas at Grace Hill Winery, and we hope yours was good too.

We had a huge crowd come out last weekend on the 20th, which was so fun and so gratifying, but a little overwhelming. We sold a record amount of wine (not too tough in your first year). But mostly we enjoyed the chance to share our wine with so many people. Thank you all so much! And for those of you who were so patient with us when we got busy, thank you again. We were really blessed to have friends who pitched in to bring out more wine and give impromptu tours when Dave and I got swamped in the tasting room.

When we closed up a little after 5, we realized that we never had lunch, and never had the chance to even think about it. A friend who has much more experience in retail than we do later gave us advice about how to sneak in some nourishment on such crazy days. "Keep a granola bar or something quick around at your desk, because you never know what a day will bring." I think we have a lot more retail advice to get from her, because clearly this is an area outside our experience. But we will get better, and next year we will hire some help!

We sold out of our Dodging Tornados wine, as well as our Red Barrel Reserve, so now we only have the White Barrel Reserve and the Cabernet available. But Dave spent yesterday in the cellar, getting the 2008 wines in place for bottling in the spring. We hope to have a full complement of wines back by April. Now we are looking at the other details, like how many pallets of bottles to buy and how many labels to order. And I am pulling together numbers for all my end of the year reports for the government.

We will be going to the annual meeting of the Kansas Grape Growers and Winemakers Association in Emporia in a couple of weeks. It looks like it will be a good meeting, with a solid agenda and some fun times too. Grape and wine meetings are generally much more fun than medical meetings, that's for sure!

We will remain open by appointment for the rest of the winter. So if you need some wine, give us a call.

"In the bleak midwinter..."

Actually, although we are now covered in snow (way more than predicted), it has been anything but bleak around here. We are having a great month!

Our talks at the Sedgwick County Medical Society (with wine) and the East Side Rotary (without wine) went really well. We seemed to be able to share our excitement about the winery, and it was so gratifying to see people get excited about it as well.

We have had a lot of traffic the past two weekends, and the party for the Whitewater Memorial Library was especially fun. The food was excellent! (Thank you, friends of the library- you were awesome!) Wine sales have been better than we expected. OK, we had no idea what to expect,but still they have been better.

And then on Sunday, in the Wichita Eagle business section, we had a beautiful story published about us and the winery. You can read it here, I hope: http://www.kansas.com/business/story/630776.html. We have received lots of calls and emails as a result, from people all around the country. Some are old friends, and others are people who got interested in our story. It has been amazing and humbling to see how many people are cheering us on.

So, if you are anywhere near Whitewater this Saturday, stop in between 11 and 5. You don't need an appointment, and we would love to let you try our wine and see what all this work has produced!

(By the way, Dodging Tornados Silver is sold out.)

OK, so it's December. I didn't get around to posting in November, even though a friend reminded me that time was running out. It seems like there is always so much to do this time of year. And blogging requires a certain amount of thought, I'm finding. I always thought newspaper columnists had it easy, but now I'm not so sure.

Anyway, the big news is that the 2007 Cabernet is now available, and it's really good! This Big Red Cab has plenty of Big Red Fruit with a long finish that should keep even the most discerning eonophile happy. It has enough cherry and raspberry flavors to withstand its 15.2% alcohol and enough tannins to allow one to lay it down in the cellar for a few years and see continued improvement over time. It spent 12 months in new American Oak before being bottled just 4 weeks ago. (Description by Dave)

We had a great open house on the 22nd of November- a lot of people came out, and we had so much fun! We are looking forward to being open the next 3 Saturdays, and are especially excited about the wine and food pairing event to benefit the Whitewater Memorial Library on Saturday evening, December 6th. (Call or email for details- tickets are still available).

We will be talking about the adventure of the vineyard and winery at the Medical Society meeting tomorrow, and then at the East Wichita Rotary on Wednesday. Public speaking is not what we are trained in, but somehow our enthusiasm for what we are doing makes it a lot easier. We do get excited talking about all the things we are doing, and especially why we like making wine so much. Although the three themes of the wine business seem to be

• That was more work than I expected,
• That took longer than I expected, and
• That cost more than I expected,

we still have to say that we love what we are doing, and we hope to continue to grow grapes and make wine for a long time.

Happy Halloween!

Out here in the country no one rings our doorbell. It's awfully quiet, but usually that's part of what we love.

All our wines are quietly aging in the cellar at this time of year. Dave is feeling a little lost with the vineyard quiet now. The days are shorter, and although today was beautiful, we've had our first freezes and the vines are quickly losing their leaves. It's not as picturesque as it was a few weeks ago, but that is all part of the cycle. We do feel the seasons more acutely now.

And yet, the planning for next year is already happening. The vines we will be planting (April 4th-mark your calendar!) have already been ordered. The endposts are in and the vineyard has been laid out. The midposts will be installed in the next month or so. The posts have to go in when the ground isn't frozen and is soft from recent rains-it has been perfect lately.

I am sure that when we are open regularly the Christmas season will be a busy one for us, but I don't think that will be the case this year. Maybe something will prove me wrong! Anyway, we are gearing up for the days we will be open this next couple of months. Come out then, and try the wines! We will be here on November 22, Dec 6,13, and 20th from 11-5. And other times by appointment. (That means just call and see if we are around. If we are home, we can be open.) 

We are pressing grapes tonight, but I had to come back to the house to get this post going. If I miss tonight, I miss September. Hard to believe, but true.

Harvest is over. We finished last weekend, with the help of lots of friends and family. We are so grateful to Heather, Adam, Glen, and Mary. Tom and Chris and Ray and Janet. Steve and his son Alex. Nancy and Ann. And as always, we count on Pat. Thank you all, so, so much! And Jeff- did we mention that we never could have done this harvest without you?

We came close to missing this last harvest. We somehow had the bright idea to travel to California wine country last week to see how things are done out there. (We figured harvest would be long since done, and Jeff could keep an eye on things.) Dave was concentrating on the winemaking and I was taking copious notes on the tasting rooms. We had a great time, made a side trip to the ocean, and tried lots of good wines. But at the end we were eager to get back to our own grapes, still on the vines. However, our flight home got diverted by a thunderstorm, so we missed a connection and ended up flying to Tulsa and then driving home to Wichita from there. We got in at 2:30 am, then got to get up for that last harvest. We made it, (caffeine helped) and had a really good day. Sunday was rough, though!

The processing goes on, and there is always more work to be done, but we are making progress. Most of the wine is in tanks or barrels, though we still have one lot of Cabernet Franc fermenting.

The wines from last year taste really good right now, and we are working on getting the tasting room ready for more regular hours. We will be open this Saturday, October 4th, from 11-5. Come on out!

Where did the summer go? It's the end of August and it never got blisteringly hot, we are just now finishing the harvest of our white grapes, and somehow I feel like summer eluded us. Is it age or strange weather that leaves me feeling confused? Dave kept announcing that the hot weather was finally here to stay, but it never was. So harvest is weeks behind what we have come to expect. I guess that's OK. 

In any case, the whites are now done, and we are preparing for harvest of the red wines. I don't know when that will be. Two weeks from now? Longer?

Harvest has been fun, and we have had the opportunity to get to know people in new ways as they came out to help. "Many hands make light work" has never been more true. People as diverse as middle and high school students and retirees, friends and family, and people we didn't really know well before have come out to help. A few more weeks and this year's harvest will be completely done. I have to admit that I feel sad when I look at the vineyard, at the vines that no longer have grapes. I know it's part of the cycle, but there is a feeling of anticipation when the grapes are still on the vine that I miss once the harvest is done. 

However, there is a satisfaction (and relief) when the grapes are safely harvested and are fermenting away, becoming wine. The cellar smells really good right now! 

We are very happy with the taste of our wines from last year. They have matured very nicely, and we are proud of them. We took them to the Taste of Butler dinner, where they were quite well received, and where we had a great time. It was an excellent dinner, and reminded all of us there what opportunities we have in locally produced foods. We do live well out here in the country. 

Harvest season has finally arrived!

It has been such a cool and rainy summer that the grapes are ripening very slowly, but they are finally ripening. The photo shows some of our Norton grapes, finally making progress. They will be deep blackish purple before they are ready.

The white grapes are starting to really arrive. We harvested the Seyval and Vignoles grapes last weekend, and we hope to bring in the Chardonel on Saturday. The Traminette still have a ways to go. It is such a relief and a joy to have wine starting to ferment in the cellar. It smells really good down there!

So if we can keep the grapes protected from the rain, the bugs, the birds and the deer for a little longer (did I mention fungus?) we should have a harvest to be proud of.

We will be taking wine to the Taste of Butler, a dinner of Butler County foods, on Thursday. We are actually in Harvey County, but I guess we are close enough. And our White Barrel Reserve will be in the People's Choice Wine Judging at the State Fair on September 5th. (If you go, vote for us!) But if you really want to try the wines, come visit.

Growing grapes is not for the faint of heart. (Actually, I don't think any type of farming is.) We are waiting anxiously for the grapes to ripen, but the weather is not cooperating. Neither are the pests. We have had cool and rainy weather for the last several days, so the grapes aren't making much progress but are more susceptible to fungus. (3 inches in the last 4 days-hard to believe it is August.)

And the birds and turkeys which last week were just decorative have become dangerous. The grapes are ripe enough to attract them!

This year for the first time we have applied bird netting to try to slow them down. It does seem to be helping, but we don't have everything covered. I think in the future we will. Dave put together a device to apply the netting that worked really well, surprising even him. So we hope that at least some grapes will survive until harvest. I just keep thinking we will start that process any day now, but no. Not yet.

However, one of the red wines that we bottled a couple of weeks ago tastes really good! It is our Dodging Tornados wine, Chambourcin blended with a little Cabernet, made dry. We are really excited about it, and we are starting to selling it now. The other reds should be ready for release within a few weeks if all goes according to plan.

If you read this blog and are interested in helping with harvest (whenever it happens), let us know. Send an email to info@gracehillwinery.com and we will add you to the email notification list. No obligation, lots of fun and a free lunch too!

Thank goodness July is over. It wasn't an easy month.

I could say that I haven't written because we had too many family obligations, which would be somewhat true. We went to Colorado for a family reunion to celebrate my parents' 50th wedding anniversary. (An absolutely marvelous time, by the way!) Then we had family members visit here-Dave's parents, his cousin, his brother and wife... Then we got to move the boys home from Lawrence. It has been busy, but now we have Jeff here doing an internship with us, which I think will be a very good thing.

But the truth is that the wines have been frustrating. So have the grapes. The grapes seem to be taking forever to ripen. Last year at this time we were harvesting. This year the grapes are so slow, painfully slow, to even start to turn color. I don't know when harvest will start, but not this week or next.

And we have had some ups and downs with the wines. The Seyval and the Rose had some issues, so we have suspended sales of them for now. (We do still have the Barrel Reserve White.) We have bottled some reds, so when they get through bottle shock, in another month or so, we will have reds to sell as well. We have certainly learned a lot in the process.

We survived our inspection by the Kansas Department of Agriculture today, so I guess that's good news. It was scary, but not as bad as I expected.

So the bottom line is that, like all procrastination, once I started avoiding this blog it became easier to just keep avoiding it. And it hung over my head, calling to me. So I'm back. And anyway...

Life at the vineyard is still sweet. We see the birds and butterflies, wild turkeys and quail, and just soak in the peace and quiet. We have kittens for a constant source of entertainment. It's a good place to be, and August will be a better month. Come visit!

Talk about a week of ups and downs...

First the good news! We had a great time at our open house on Saturday. The crowd was big enough that we felt like we were really open, but small enough that we weren't intimidated trying to remember how to use the cash register. We actually sold our first bottles of wine that day, so after 5 years of planning and work, we now have revenue. (Not profit, of course, but revenue never the less.) It was extremely exciting. We are now officially open by appointment, and would love to have people call us and come in for a tasting. We won't have regular hours until the fall, when we have red wines available too.

The other big pleasure is seeing the grapes grow. The vineyard looks absolutely beautiful this week. The grapes look like the real thing, though hard and unripe. They still have a ways to go.

Which leads to the bad news.

We were out in the vineyard last evening, as we are most evenings, and found we have fungus in some of the grapes. This has been such a wet year that we are even more vulnerable than usual. We have tried to be proactive with our spray regimen and our vineyard management, but problems have crept up anyway. We try to be minimalist with our spray regimen, but haven't found any way to completely avoid spraying for fungus. It's very discouraging when we have worked so hard to keep the grapes doing well. However, we think we caught it quickly enough that we won't lose too many grapes. We try to be philosophical and take the approach of our friend and farmer Willard, who tells us when we complain about the weather not cooperating, "That's farming."

Open house at the winery! This Saturday, June 21, 2008, we will be open from 1-5 pm for anyone who wants to stop by for a tasting. We are so excited to finally have wine, bottled and labeled, ready for sale. We probably shouldn't do this until our wine has had a little time to stabilize in the bottle, but we are too excited to wait. Besides, this way we can have a chance to try things out with a very small crowd. So if you read this blog, you're invited. And if you mention this blog, Dave is offering a discount on purchases. We have a dry white, a semi-dry rose, and a sweet Seyval now for sale. (If you are looking for red wines, you will have to wait for fall. They are still aging in the barrels.)

It has been busy and fun around here lately. We got the labels in (finally!) on Friday night, and immediately got to work on labeling the White Barrel Reserve, our dry white wine. Then Saturday we finished labeling it, and then bottled the Rose and Seyval wines. Today we labeled those wines, and now we are ready for business.

The work on the building is done for the moment, and we are ready to go. (We hope!) The drainage work on the area around the building is done; it has been tested thoroughly and worked well with all the rain we have had lately. We have been fortunate not to have had severe weather or flooding, but our parking lot is still a little soggy.

So come by Saturday. We are going to have a good time!

Bloom has about finished in the vineyard and baby grapes are now appearing on the vines. The wind is doing its best to destroy our trellis structure, but the vines are holding on fairly well. We are lucky in that we have not had the hail (or tornados) that have been all around us for the past week, but we are craving some peaceful weather. The sun, rain and warm temperatures have made the vines grow like crazy, and the weeds too. There is always more to do in the vineyard.

We are wondering if our labels will ever arrive. They were supposed to be here weeks ago, but problems keep cropping up. All we can do is hope that they will be worth the wait. If they ever come, we will actually be able to sell some wine, which is a very exciting prospect after all these years of planning and work. We should finish bottling the white and rose wines this weekend, and with any luck will have them labeled as well.

We have been doing some construction on the winery building, to get the tasting room ready for business. As with all construction, it seems to take forever. Although we are almost done, there are still several loose ends that need to be tied up. For example, we have a lovely new ramp but the access to it is a mess. We are having an open house this week for the Whitewater Area Chamber of Commerce. I hope they are forgiving of the poor access, and I hope it doesn't rain, because we had another big tree blow over, this one into our fledgling parking lot.

Yet with all the setbacks and frustrations, we have wine that we are really proud of. We can see the next step in the whole project, opening up the winery, just around the corner. It is very exciting!

Look at the happy graduate!

We took time away from the vineyard last week to go up to KU and see Jeffrey graduate. It was very exciting for all of us, seeing him and his classmates successfully make it through. We have known many of them for years, which made it doubly sweet. The weather was absolutely beautiful for the whole weekend, which we appreciated so much, especially when we came home to storms.

The weather has been unstable for days, first with high winds that toppled 2 large trees in the front yard, then with rain and thunderstorms the last three nights. We are supposed to get more severe weather today. We are fortunate not to have had hail or tornados so far, as many people around us have had.

We started bottling our wine yesterday, and have plans to finish the rest of the white and rose wines in the next 2-3 weeks. It all went smoother than we expected, and faster too. What a pleasant surprise!

The vineyard is coming out more every day. The new plants are growing quickly, peeking their heads out from the grow tubes. The older plants are getting ready to bloom, any day now. Bloom in the vineyard is tough to see, unless you look closely. On a few of our oldest plants there are a few blossoms present, as shown here. You would never notice if you didn't know what to look for!

Spring has finally arrived! When you look across the vineyard, it is now green- new baby shoots, but green. The photo on the left is a cluster of blossoms, not yet in bloom. But it's a sign that grapes are on the way.

It has been a bit of a rough week for us, but it finished gloriously. We were frustrated early this week when we went to filter the Barrel Reserve White, and the filter pump didn't work. After much swearing and frustration, we took it apart, figured out the problem and fixed it. So then we felt pretty good, because the winery business is full of technical problems, but we are getting a handle on them one step at a time. We did the filtering yesterday, and it went flawlessly. We are now on target to start bottling over Memorial Day weekend. Spring is flying past, but we are making progress!

The vineyard is beautiful now, with wildflowers in bloom everywhere around the periphery. Tonight was perfect, warm with no wind. We had a dinner salad of greens fresh from the garden, and it was wonderful. Days like this are why we moved to the country.

We have a new sign tonight! We have been working on it for a few days, worrying the neighbors, I'm sure. But we put it in place this evening, and we think it looks awesome. It somehow makes this adventure a little more real. Of course, now we need to quickly put up a "Closed" sign, because we aren't quite ready for company. (We need some wine that is actually in bottles before people start driving up.) Hopefully, in another couple of months, we'll be ready.

So here is an update on the vines; they are starting to come out, but so sloooooowly. This is the latest spring I can remember. Even the newly planted vines show (tiny) signs of life, but the vineyard still looks brown overall. You can see life if you look closely, so we are optimistic. We just wish it would hurry up and get green!

OK, it finally feels like spring. Today was warm, with a mild breeze and that slight humid feel to the air that smells fresh. It feels like we have been waiting forever! Last year the vines woke up early, but this year they are like lazy teenagers on a summer morning- just not ready to stir. However, we saw our first glimpses of life in the vines in the last couple of days. There are very few real leaves yet, but the buds are definitely swollen.

We got our first shipment of bottles today, and that was an experience! A pallet of bottles is much taller than we had somehow expected. Driving the forklift is still a new enough experience to be frightening for everyone involved, but we managed without any disasters. We are one step closer to being ready to bottle the white wines. This dream is becoming more real every week.

After all the flurry of activity with planting, things have slowed down. We finished putting on grow tubes, wires and irrigation by Monday afternoon, then watched the storms come in over the next few days. It has either been cold, windy or rainy, (or all three) ever since. Fortunately the grapevines remain dormant, so the freeze we expect tonight shouldn't be a big problem. But we are ready for budbreak! And decent weather!

We have been able to spend some time working on preparing equipment for bottling. Our directions were in English, rather than the Italian we have come to expect, but it still took some work to get things figured out. I think we are one step closer to being ready to bottle.

Planting day was yesterday, and it went very smoothly. We had a great crew of friends and family, almost all of them experienced, so they were very efficient. The weather cooperated, and although we started in jackets, most of us had shed them by lunchtime. We planted another small vineyard of Seyval and Chambourcin, which have been our most reliable varietals so far. They should be producing grapes for wine within 3 years.

At lunchtime we barrel tasted our 2007 Barrel Reserve White, and found it awesome! We will be bottling it soon. We also tasted the Chambourcin, which is coming along nicely, and went very well with barbecued brisket. The 2007 Cabernet is maturing well in oak, and will probably be ready for bottling in the fall.

Spring has finally started to come to the vineyard, though the grapevines are still dormant. At least the daffodils and the apricot tree are providing color. It was a great day to be outside!

Brian Sollo, this post is for you. Yes, this is your parents' website. Show your friends!

The pruning is finished! The last of the vines were pruned today. So now we have a moment of rest in which to prepare for planting. We will be planting new vines next Saturday, and we are very fortunate to have friends and family who have volunteered to help, as they have so often in the past. We will be planting around 550 new vines, mostly Chambourcin and Seyval. We have promised them better weather than last year, which was bitterly cold, and so far the weatherman is cooperating. We'll see- like so much of farming, we really have no control!

We tasted all the wines we have aging in the cellar yesterday. They seem to be maturing nicely. It really is fascinating to see how the flavors develop over time. We hope to start bottling our 2007 white wines within the next month or so, which should put us on target for a limited summer opening.

Pruning the Grapevines

The pruning continues, and fortunately the weather has cooperated. After the Easter freeze of 2007, we had a lot of plant damage to contend with, so this spring has been a challenge. But we are making good progress, and we finished pruning our hybrid grapes today. We still have several rows of vinifera grapes to go, but the end is in sight! We expect to see budbreak within the next two weeks, at least in some of the vines. Things will look much greener after that.

Welcome to our Blog!

We are busy with pruning our vines at this time and getting ready to bottle our 2007 vintage white wines. Planting day is coming up on April 5 and we are putting in more Chambourcin and Seyval vines. The winery building is getting updated and our website is now up and running. Thank you for visiting us here on the web and keeping tabs on the happenings at Grace Hill Winery. We look forward to seeing you out here!