$10 wines toast of the town

Family winery off to big start StoneBrook is cranking

By Mike Rutledge Enquirer staff writer

CAMP SPRINGS - For five years, Dennis Walter had grown wine grapes in his vineyards. But only last month did he and his family produce and bottle their first vidal blanc wine.

"Finally, we're to the point of making it," Walter said the afternoon of Dec. 17 as he held the first bottle of the sweet vidal blanc ever to wear his StoneBrook Winery label. "We're really excited about the vidal, because it's our first estate wine."

In June, he and wife Bonnie opened the winery down Vineyard Lane from their house, and the family started crafting several boutique fruit wines - blueberry, blackberry, raspberry, strawberry, peach and pear - with help from 20-year winemaker Terry Shumrick of Hyde Park.

But the vidal was the first whose fruit - grapes - had ripened on the family's hillside vineyards, and therefore the family's first "estate wine."

Walter hopes it's the start of something big - part of Northern Kentucky's growing vine and wine industry, which proponents hope can generate money some area farmers used to earn by growing tobacco.

Sunlight streamed through a cellar door into the cold workroom where two of the couple's grown children, and their spouses, made up the production line, along with Shumrick.

Walter fondly reminisced about his family's winter hog-slaughtering gatherings of his youth.

"It was a gathering just like this," he said. "Everybody got together, worked together, and had a good time. And you got the job done."

The work moves pretty quickly, thanks to a gravity-driven bottling system that automatically fills bottles with 750 ml of white wine.

A cork-inserting machine is used next, and foil caps are shrink-wrapped around bottle tops using table-mounted heat guns.

"We can do probably 40 cases an hour when we get cranking," Walter said.

In recent years, smaller wine-making equipment has been manufactured, making it easier for smaller producers to make wine.

"Just a little bit of equipment nowadays, you can get the quality that you want," Shumrick said.

The process

"We picked the grapes in the middle of September," Walter said.

"And of course, we pick them when the sugar level is where we want it, and when the pH level is where we want it."

Grapes are crushed at the winery, in a machine that drops the pulp out the bottom, and drops the stems out the back. The pulp next goes into a press that holds 500 pounds at a time, and the hydraulic pump presses out the juice. Sulfur dioxide is added to kill the natural yeast in the grapes.

The grape juice is pumped to a cool room, where it sits for a day. After that, "we come back and add the yeast that we want for the taste and how we want it to turn out."

The wine ferments from September until late November, when the winemakers rough-filter it and stop the fermentation. It then sits in the cool room three weeks to "cold stabilize."

"And now, today we fine-filtered it, which takes out all the sediment that still would be left, and we've added sorbate and (sulfur dioxide) so there's no secondary fermentation that'll occur in the bottles," Walter said.

Last spring, the Kentucky Vintners & Grape Growers Association estimated about

12,000 new grape vines were planted across Northern Kentucky, about doubling what was already planted.

For this spring, the association alone has ordered 5,000 more vines on behalf of its members, said the association's new president, Tricia Houston. Others may have ordered on their own.

Houston has grown grapes for four years. The owner of The Cat's Meow Vineyard near Napoleon said she plans to open a restaurant and winery next spring across Ky. 35 from Kentucky Speedway in Sparta, and will plant 1,200 vines there.

Her association's overall goal is to help Northern Kentucky's wine industry as a whole, and foster an agritourism industry.

"We're where Virginia was 10 years ago, and Virginia has a pretty good wine industry at the moment," Walter said.

While StoneBrook's fruit wines sell in clear bottles, the white vidal blanc comes in blue. Next season, Walter plans to make red wine.

"We did a lot of research" about bottle color, he said. "It's a selling point. Sometimes people just gravitate to that blue bottle. They may not even know the wine, but they'll say, 'Give me the blue bottle.' "

Not sold in stores

All StoneBrook's fruit wines except pear are available at County Market in Alexandria. The vidal won't be sold in stores this year because the family is making only 125 cases (300 gallons) this season, and "I'm afraid we're not going to have enough to last us till next year," Walter said.

The winery offers monthly dinners with grilled steak and chicken, usually on the second Saturday of each month. This month's will be 6:30-10 p.m. Jan. 7. Even before the family bottled the vidal, which sells for $13, people who sampled it during early-December tank tastings wanted to buy it, Walter said.

Next year, he plans to boost production.

"We're going to wind up buying vidal (grapes) from a lot of these new growers that are going in now," Walter said. "We want to do some reds next year, and this fall, we'll probably be buying that from local growers."

Shumrick, who used to make wine at Chateau Pomije in New Alsace, Ind., describes the taste he and the Walter family are targeting:

"We try to make wines that are characteristically true to what we're trying to make," Shumrick said. "If it's a strawberry, we want it to taste just exactly like a strawberry. Not watered down or overpowering, but I mean what that fruit is."

Walter said his overall goal is to build a farm-based business for the family.

"I want to bring the kids back to the farm, and give them the opportunity to make some money for it," Walter said. "So this is just the beginning."

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