A unique passion drives oenophiles, people who love drinking wine, learning everything they can about it, collecting it, sharing it with others, even making it themselves.
Like beer and bread and cheese, wine isn't just a nice thing to consume, it's a living thing. Making wine - or beer or bread or cheese - involves living processes that require certain specific conditions for optimal results, and those processes can be tweaked repeatedly for endless variation.
In Vermont, winemakers are starting to catch up with brewers and bakers and cheesemakers.
More than 30 wineries and vineyards are scattered throughout the state, most producing wine from grapes cultivated to withstand long, cold winters; a few are using other types of fruit, mainly apples. They join dozens of breweries, as well as a handful of distilleries making vodka, brandy, and rye whiskey.
One thing these enterprises all have in common is a commitment to making use of agricultural resources and processes indigenous to Vermont. Until the late 1990s, that meant using fruit other than grapes, since typical wine grapes won't survive a harsh winter climate.
But over the past 20 years or so, botanists at Cornell University, the University of Minnesota, and, more recently, the University of Vermont have developed varietals that can withstand long frozen winters and still produce decent wines.
“It's one thing for a grape to survive, but it's another thing for a grape that survives to make a good wine, and that's what they've done,” Charles Dodge, owner of Putney Mountain Winery, said on a Fox Business News interview. “They've made it possible to make good red wines and good white wines from winter-hardy grapes.”
Dodge himself makes wine from other fruit, but he is active with the 17 members of the Vermont Grape and Wine Council and supports the industry as a whole.
Putney Mountain Winery, which began in Charles and Kate Dodge's basement in 1998, relocated to the Basketville store on Route 5 in Putney in 2008. With Jason Hubner as production manager and associate winemaker, the Dodges produce around 3,000 cases of wine annually - somewhere between 30,000 and 35,000 bottles.
Mostly apples, but also pears, strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, black currants, and cranberries make their way through the fermentation process, and except for the cranberries, everything is grown within 25 miles of Putney.
A recent addition to the lineup is rhubarb, a stalky vegetable that pairs as naturally with strawberries in wine as it does in pie. Rhubarb also makes a surprisingly good wine on its own, with a pleasant, slightly astringent quality.
“It's all sort of an ongoing experiment, because we keep thinking of new things to try,” Dodge said while pouring tastes at the winery recently.
A focus on winemaking
Honora Winery in Jacksonville uses some grapes grown locally but mainly makes wines with California grapes. Those wines wouldn't be eligible for an official Vermont appellation, but that doesn't concern owner Patricia Farrington.
“I love the process of winemaking, from the grape to the bottle,” she said while tending the winery's cheese counter over Memorial Day weekend.
For Farrington, the focus is on vinification (winemaking), not viticulture (the science, production, and study of grapes in the vineyard), which she takes care to point out are two distinct activities. Some growers, she explained, don't make wines themselves but are producing high-end grapes for others to vinify. (See sidebar.)
Instrumental in making those wines is Janice Stuart, who started as an intern at Honora and, as a winery employee, worked her way up to winemaker and vineyard manager, having worked in a degree in environmental studies and plant science along the way.
She's among the youngest winemakers in the U.S., a fact proudly shared by Jean Kurpiel, a colleague in the Honora tasting room.
Beyond youthful enthusiasm, Stuart shows a sense of confidence when she speaks about the wines she's making, with a clear-eyed focus on the intricacies of the entire process.
This year's 11 wines included several made with Vermont grapes, and all of those bottles were sold out by the end of May, Stuart said. Of the rest, a Syrah Reserve and a Cabernet Sauvignon Reserve each won an award at the 2012 New York International Wine Competition.
Stuart is particularly fond of the syrah grape, but also likes working with chardonnay and albarino, a white grape traditionally grown in Spain and Portugal.
On the viticulture side, Farrington and Stuart are involved with growing 12 varietals on 10 acres near the winery, including proven hybrids like Frontenac and St. Croix that are becoming familiar in the Vermont vintners' landscape.
“We're learning what those grapes give us in this climate, this soil type,” Stuart said. “We'll figure out what works and what doesn't.”
Cidermaking: History meets geography
Apples have been more of an inspiration for Jason MacArthur, who started Whetstone Ciderworks with his wife, Lauren, in the basement of their Marlboro farmhouse in 2010.
Having spent time at a vineyard in southern France, where he discovered a love of winemaking, MacArthur came back to the family farm with the realization that “wine is an agricultural product, but one that's been taken to a pretty high level.”
In southern Vermont, with the ubiquity of apples, he felt that cidermaking would be a more appropriate use of local resources, from a historical and a geographic perspective.
A nationwide cider revival has helped to generate interest among the drinking public, MacArthur said, but at the same time “consumers may not know what to expect from cider. They're surprised when they find it's complex.”
Much of that complexity comes from blending the juice of several types of apples chosen for their distinct characteristics, including obscure heirloom varieties like Esopus Spitzenburg and Hudson's Golden Gent.
And even though MacArthur admits that “we're at a pretty steep point of the learning curve,” Whetstone's 2011 inventory of 600 gallons sold out months ago, “a lot faster than we anticipated,” he said.
He expects to have this year's three ciders available by late July.
More wine in Vermont
Farther afield, Lincoln Peak Vineyard in New Haven, north of Middlebury, takes the commitment to local resources a step beyond growing a dozen different grapes for nearly that many single-varietal and blended wines.
An editor at winesandvines.com, an industry website based in California, wrote in July 2008, “Chris Granstrom and his crew built the farm structures themselves. Most of the wood in the tasting room came from butternut trees on the property, and the tasting room bar-top was crafted of planks from a single hickory tree in the woods. The winery takes its name from one of Vermont's Green Mountains, visible to the east from the vineyard.”
The Lincoln Peak Black Sparrow, a white wine made from Prairie Star and Louise Swenson grapes, has the crisp citrusy characteristics of sauvignon blanc. Other bottlings available include three more whites, three reds, a rosé, and a couple of dessert wines.
Considering the tendency for traditional wine grapes to prefer the kind of moisture-modulating climate in regions like the Mediterranean and the California coast, it seems only natural for a cluster of wineries to have sprouted along the shores of Lake Champlain.
Snow Farm, on South Hero Island, was the first commercial winery in the state to use grapes, in 1996, taking full advantage of the lake's microclimate and longer growing season.
With a French winemaker schooled at the University of Dijon in Burgundy, Snow Farm produces an assortment of reds and whites, among them a Riesling and a pinot noir. Over the years, the winery has also caught the attention of such publications as Wine Spectator, Food and Wine, and National Geographic Traveler.
Boyden Valley Winery in Cambridge has also gained notice among discriminating wine drinkers. Frank Larkin, co-owner of Windham Wines in Brattleboro, features several Boyden Valley wines at his shop, including a rosé.
Highlighting an array of rosés he'd put out for late spring, Larkin said the perception of rosé as too sweet and too pink to be taken seriously no longer applies; contemporary roses are light and fresh and sophisticated. He recommended Boyden Valley's Rosé La Ju Ju, dry with hints of tart berry, made from Frontenac and Cayuga White grapes.
Way up in the Northeast Kingdom, the Eden Ice Cider Company takes advantage of cold weather with a technique similar to that of ice wine, which uses grapes picked while they're frozen on the vine to make sweet liqueur-like wine. The water in the fruit freezes but the sugars don't, which makes for a much lower yield of juice but with more highly concentrated sweetness.
At Eden, the technique involves peak-harvested apples kept in cold storage, then pressed into juice, which goes outside for a weeks-long freezing-thawing process, and the remaining concentrate is what gets fermented into wine.
Taking another approach to winemaking, Artesano Meadery in Groton produces traditional and fruit-flavored meads from local honey. The history of mead production dates back thousands of years, presumably before the cultivation of grapes, and there are dozens of styles made in countries all over the world.
At Artesano, hand-harvested Vermont wildflower honey is diluted, fermented, and aged, then finished off with a little extra honey for sweetness and sometimes flavored with fruit or spices.
Visiting wineries is an ideal way to try different wines, learn about the winemaking process, and soak up the ambience. Winemakers are always happy to provide tastes and share information, and the experience of being there enhances the enjoyment of drinking the wine.
Vermont wines can also be found at wine shops, co-ops, farmstands, and grocery stores, where they're vastly overshadowed by wines from everywhere else. But they're gaining a reputation for quality and consistency.
At Windham Wines, Larkin acknowledged that wine snobs might turn up their noses at Vermont wines.
“But then,” he said, “they'd really be missing, out, wouldn't they?”