This article is reproduced from the University of Minnesota Alumni newsletter.
Roll Out the Barrel
Alumni vintners and university scientists hope
to establish southern Minnesota as an up-and-coming wine region
Paul Quast, who has a 1977 degree in accounting and a 1980 law degree, never planned to become a wine-maker. It was as an attorney that he returned to Aamodt's Apple Farm, outside Stillwater, Minn., where he had worked as a laborer throughout high school and college, to consult on a case. But there, the idea suddenly came to him.
"The owners and I were discussing something about the case and we walked into an old dairy barn and I said offhand, 'Wouldn't this be a terrific place to have a tasting room for a winery'" remembers Quast. "Then just a few months later I met Peter Hemstad [a grape researcher at the University's Horticultural Research Center (HRC)] at the State Fair and I mentioned it to him. And that's how it all started."
In 1990, Quast, Hemstad, and the Aamodt brothers who owned the apple farm convened to discuss the idea of opening a winery. By 1992, they were planting grapes and supplementing these early crops with grape juice purchased from New York and California. In 1993, they bottled their first wines and opened the St. Croix Vineyards' tasting room to the public.
Quast continues to work as an attorney during the week. But on weekends, particularly in the summer, he and his family spend most of their time at the vineyard. "I really enjoy the magic of working with the vines, says Quast. "They take on nearly human temperamental characteristics in terms of how they react to the environment and how you have to take care of them. This is an art and a science. And the satisfaction of seeing the beautiful trellises with all that fruit in September is thrilling."
Kelley Keyes, '96, is the vineyard manager at St. Croix - a small winery producing roughly 7,500 gallons of wine each year. Keyes oversees the day-to-day operation, nursing the wine through its stages of fermentation and bedding down the less hardy grape vines for winter by covering them with straw. While at the University she studied natural resources and was only peripherally aware of the research going on in grapes, but now she feels very lucky to have stumbled across wine making.
"Something just clicked for me when I started to work with grapes," says Keyes. "You affect how the wine will taste by how you treat the vines out in the vineyard - for example, how you expose them to sun, or whether you allow proper air flow through the vine, all affects the sugar level and the acid level. The process is so fascinating. I just love my job."
Meanwhile, Peter Hemstad continues his work breeding new Minnesota grape varieties at the HRC. Ideally suited to working with grapes - careful, driven, and a perfectionist - Hemstad is the state's leading proponent of wine making as a viable industry. He believes that he and his fellow researchers will conquer the doubts many people have about trying to grow delicate fruit in a climate that sporadically drops to thirty below.
"Yes, Minnesota is definitely on the cool end of the spectrum," Hemstad says. "But we do have quite a bit of heat in the summer - about the same amount as in Burgundy. The University is making progress on developing new grape varieties and the results are very promising. Recently, we introduced a grape called Frontenac which is now being planted on a large scale, all around the Midwest and in upstate New York. It doesn't need to be covered over in winter and it makes a good quality red wine.
Grape breeding work at the University began all the way back in 1908, explains Hemstad, but the interest was in juice, jelly, and table grapes. "Basically, they were trying to develop a hardy Concord grape for this area," he says.
The University began with the theory that Minnesota's naturally occurring breed of wild grapes - called Vitis riparia - might be the basis for vines that could withstand the cold and variable climate. And for good reason: Vitis riparia is the most cold-hardy species in the world. So the HRC began with the plants they could find in their own back yard and began crossing those strains with high-quality grape vines from Europe and more temperate regions in the United States.
But when the Research Center's attention was captured by apple breeding, other fruit projects fell away. It was not until 1944, when the University quietly introduced four new grape varieties, that the program was reenergized by the passion of a Wisconsin dairy farmer, Elmer Swenson.
Swenson convinced the HRC to give him some plants, and he began hybridizing grapes on his farm outside Osceola. He appeared at the University one day in the late '60s, with samples of the grapes he had grown. Researchers were reportedly skeptical, but after tasting the grapes, they offered Swenson a job as gardener and grape breeder.
And very soon, several small vineyards emerged. David Bailly, a 1956 U law graduate who went on to become a prominent Twin Cities trial lawyer, started the Alexis Bailly Vineyard in Hastings during the '60s. His goal was to have a diversion - "an artistic venture" outside of daily courtroom pressures. But in 1977, his daughter Nan returned from a wine-making tour of France intending to make the tiny enterprise economically viable. On a relatively modest scale (about 10,000 gallons of wine each year), she has succeeded.
And in 1982, Charles Knox, an associate professor in the University's physiology department, organized the Minnesota Winegrowers Cooperative Association with four other wine lovers. That organization developed a small vineyard and a winery, Northern Vineyards, which operates out of a storefront on Main Street in Stillwater, producing roughly 12,000 gallons of wine yearly.
For these and other Minnesota wine makers, the future looks bright. The Minnesota legislature gave the industry a boost last year by awarding the University $200,000 a year for grape research. These funds will enable the HRC to build a wine research lab and hire an enologist, a scientist who studies wine making, to serve as a resource for the University and for wineries around the state.
In the woodsy, cool tasting room at Northern Vineyard, a series of long-stemmed glasses rests on the rough-hewn wooden bar. The St. Croix Varietal Red has a dark garnet color and an aroma like new rain and oak. There is a German-style white wine, sweet and yellow as spun honey, and a drier, lighter white blend that bursts with a vivid pear tone - both derived from the Edelweiss grape variety. Prairie Smoke, made from the LaCrosse grape, is crisp and light, finishing with the surprising tang of grapefruit. Each glass has a distinctive hue, an original scent and a surprising range of flavor. Each one holds a wine made primarily from grapes grown in Minnesota, many of them developed by the University.
Included in the tasting is the Frontenac, the University's new introduction. This wine is slightly heavier, grapier, less finished than the others. Robin Partch, wine maker at Northern Vineyards, points out that the breed is still brand-new and the industry needs time to work with it: "One of the potential jobs of the University's new enologist will be to experiment with 25 different ways of making Frontenac. In time, that person will figure out how to use this grape to make the very best wine."
- Ann Bauer
The California Connection
Some University grads who caught the vintner fever have started their wineries in a more traditional wine region.
Albert Brounstein, a 1942 business grad, settled in Calistoga, California, after a 25-year career in marketing and sales. On 70 acres of canyon-country, he established the Diamond Creek Winery, which produces award-winning Cabernets that the Wine Spectator calls "some of the finest, longest-lived and most complex in California." While his winery produces only about 3,000 cases a year, some of his wines sell for nearly $300 a bottle and have what some critics have described as a "cult following" among Napa Valley devotees.
Brounstein acknowledged, when interviewed by Wine Spectator in 1990, that his wines are not typical fare. "When you're as small as I am, you don't have to make wines that please everyone," he said. "That's the beauty of this business: everyone can make their own style of wine."
Kent Rosenblum, a 1968 Vet Med grad, originally moved to Alameda, California, to open his veterinary practice and ski every weekend in the nearby mountains. But before long he found himself unexpectedly attracted to the wine business.
In 1970 Rosenblum and his wife, Kathleen, went to dinner at an upscale restaurant in San Francisco and enjoyed a bottle of Riesling wine, compliments of their neighbors. The two novice wine drinkers (Rosenblum says he had tasted wine only once before) began following the trail of Bacchus, visiting wineries and tasting thousands of different varieties. A few years later, they even traveled to France to learn European wine making techniques.
"Somewhere along the line, I realized I had some talent for the business," Rosenblum says. "I've always been able to smell things miles away that no one else could smell."
In 1977, the couple opened their winery, called Uniquely Rosenblumm, and sold small quantities of wine which featured a rose in bloom on the labels. Today their winery employs 24 full-time people and produces 60,000 cases a year. And Kent Rosenblum is now more vintner than vet; he works only two days a week at the animal clinic and reserves the rest of his time for wine making. Still, he's grateful for his experience and education in hard science. "At the University, I had more chemistry and biochemistry than most enology students," Rosenblum says. "So when it came to studying fermentation science, I was very well prepared."
- Ann Bauer
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