Winter at the Vineyard

New Year, New Vine

Snow has blanketed the vineyard and so far it’s been a beautiful, vintage Vermont winter. The sustained cold weather means the vines are now fully dormant, quietly recovering from the last growing season and eagerly preparing for the next. Dormancy also means that it’s time for one our favorite vineyard tasks of the year: pruning.

Pruning is like pressing a vine’s reset button, shedding the wood that laboriously produced last year’s harvest and making room for new growth. We may remove up to 90% of the vine’s wood every year, each cut strategically placed to maximize the plant’s potential and longevity. Nothing we do in the vineyard has a bigger, more lasting impact on the vine’s ability to fully and sustainably ripen fruit than pruning.

It’s not a glamorous process - maneuvering pruners with hands incapacitated by bulky gloves, unwrapping impossibly strong tendrils, and trying to avoid getting whipped in the frozen face by a rogue cane - but each vine is a unique and fascinating puzzle.

Without foliage to block our view, we can clearly see the vine’s structure and the clues it left us from the growing season. These clues - the length and thickness of a cane, the presence of a scar or stretch mark, the spacing between buds - help us decide what to cut away and what to retain. In this way, we can affect the shape of the vine, improve its immune system by redirecting sap flow away from damaged or diseased wood, encourage growth of a new trunk, and balance its vegetative (shoots, leaves, etc.) and reproductive (grapes!) potential.

Pruning is cold, hard work but its methodical nature and the quiet of winter make it a time for reflection, sharing stories, planning, catching up on podcasts, and discovering new music. The tracks in the snow remind us of the wildlife that share this land with us. And we stand in reverence of the vines, masters of regeneration and resilience.

Update from the Winery

Tis the season for blending

The darkest months of the year tend to be the slowest in the winery. It’s a rewarding and restful time for a winemaker; a time for reflection, planning, and lots of tasting.

As the yeast convert the last bits of sugar to alcohol, the ephemeral aromas of fermentation dissipate and the wines begin to clarify and take shape. This is when the nuances of the growing season and our practices in the vineyard and winery begin to reveal themselves.

The wines are still very young, especially the reds, but we can see more clearly than ever where they’ll go. Time alone will do most of the work, but there are a few techniques we can utilize in the cellar to pull the wines in one direction or another. These include careful oxygen exposure (or lack thereof), timely rackings, and bâttonage.

Most important, though, may be blending. The majority of wines that end up in our glass are a blend of different base wines from the cellar, carefully combined to build complexity, balance, and beauty. This, we think, is the most artistic aspect of winemaking.

Blending season kicks off with an early look at the new vintage of Limestone because the 2023 is almost sold out! We’re putting together bench blends with different proportions of Louise Swenson, Prairie Star, and two expressions of La Crescent. Teasing out flavors, popping aromatics, and building textures. It’s pretty fun. Grab some bottles of 2023 Limestone before they’re gone!

Winemaker Dinner Recap

Oh. What a Night.

This past Saturday we hosted 40 special guests for our very first Winemaker Dinner. We started in the tasting room with a grazing board loaded with local provisions before heading into the winery for a wonderful meal among the tanks and barrels. With the help of our friends at Dino Bones, it was a magical evening filled with delicious food, intriguing wine pairings, laughter, and thoughtful conversation.

Homegrown and handmade wines like ours have so many stories to tell, and these dinners are the perfect opportunity for us to explore each wine in detail and share its stories from the soil to our glass.

We’re already looking forward to the next one!

Thanksgiving Wine

Turkey & Marquette:
A Match Made in the Vineyard

Ben and SeSe, our spectacular summer winegrowing interns who tended carefully to the vines throughout the growing season, first came across our flock of wild turkeys in July. It was a small flock then, but by September we were shooing 16 birds out of the Upper Marquette vineyard every morning. We usually found them perched up on the posts, helping themselves to the top half of every cluster of ripening Marquette they could reach. They had found the best fruit at Lincoln Peak and we had to do something about it. But after the game warden forbade us from “terminating” wild turkeys, we had to go greet the birds every morning and politely ask them to leave, with the help of the best vineyard dog around.

This year we’re thankful for new friends and 12 barrels of 2024 Marquette. We think Thanksgiving dinner is the best meal of the year to pair wine with. So many wines work well with all of the different dishes on the table, from cleansing and acid-driven whites like Limestone to textural, full-bodied reds like Marquette. It’s worth opening a few bottles for the feast and these are the wines our family is most excited to drink next week. Come pick yours up from the tasting room or order online and we’ll send them to your door.

Harvest Wrap Up

Time for the vineyard managers to rest and the winemakers to get to work. Oh, wait…

That’s a wrap on Harvest 2024 and what a beautiful vintage it was! The month of September delivered fantastic weather with very little rainfall and lots of sun, giving us the freedom to pick each variety at peak ripeness. The vineyard produced 17 tons of grapes with big sugars and bigger flavors, all of which is now fermenting away in the winery, well on its way to becoming the next bottles of Lincoln Peak wine.

The wines have a lot left to reveal as they continue to develop, but so far the quality in tank and barrel is looking excellent. These wines are like our children, so it’s impossible to pick a favorite, but we are especially excited about two very different expressions of La Crescent, a rich and textured Frontenac Blanc, and a few different lots of Marquette already aging away beautifully in barrel. We can’t wait to share these wines with you next year!

With the first frost at the vineyard last week, the vines have dropped their leaves and will soon begin their long, well-deserved sleep. It was a whirlwind of a growing season - simultaneously seeming to drag on and fly by - but we feel so fortunate to have been graced with a great vintage in our first year farming the vineyard. We are endlessly grateful to this community, our volunteers, and our family and friends for supporting us throughout the year. It’s good to be back home in Vermont.

Austrian Wine Culture in Vermont

We lived in Austria for six months in 2019, working vintage at a couple wineries about 60 miles up the Danube from Vienna. Nichole spent most of her time in the cellar at Weingut Bründlmayer in the Kamptal region and Kevin was out in the vineyards at Weingut Jamek in the Wachau. Winegrowing has been the main business in this part of the world for 2,000 years and they’ve certainly figured some things out along the way. The growing season is somewhat similar to ours here in Vermont, and a lot of the philosophies and techniques that we practice at Lincoln Peak we learned during our time in Austria.

We also left Austria astounded and inspired by how this long history of growing grapes and making wine has affected the entire culture of the region, how proud the locals are of their wines, and how passionately they support the farmers that have been tending these impossibly steep vineyards by hand for generations.

The region is made up of small villages each with a handful of wineries, most of which are just big enough to support the family that runs it. Throughout the year, but especially in the fall, each winery in the village takes a turn opening their doors for a month at a time, offering the wines from their vineyard paired with local specialties like cured meats, cheeses, and fresh veggies.

This tradition is known as Heuriger, and has been an integral part of Austrian wine culture since the 18th century when Emperor Josef II passed a law allowing wineries to sell their own products, instead of just the noblemen. Just like the wines, every family’s Heuriger is a little different, but they all offer a cozy, humble atmosphere and the whole village seems to come out to drink the new wines, eat some hearty food, and chop it up with their neighbors.

After long days of picking fruit in the vineyard and fermenting wines in the cellar, we loved walking to the local Heuriger, nourishing our tired bodies, and tasting some amazing wines. We’re excited to bring this tradition to our community in Vermont and will be offering a Heuriger in the tasting room for the entire month of October. We’ll have new Austrian-inspired charcuterie boards paired with your favorite Lincoln Peak wines, as well as some sneak peeks at the new 2024 wines fermenting in the winery.

Harvest Begins

The 2024 harvest has officially begun, with our earliest ripening variety, Adalmiina, coming off the vines on the last day of August. She's now happily fermenting away in the winery as we impatiently wait for the rest of the fruit to tell us when it's ready. Mother Nature hit the pause button on ripening last weekend with cool temperatures and a shot of rain, reminding us that fall is coming soon...but not yet! We're back to perfect conditions in the vineyard and it looks like it'll stay that way for a while. It's the home stretch of the growing season and we expect to be picking fruit in earnest over the next few weeks before all of our attention moves into the winery to focus on processing and fermentation. It's a magical time of year and we can't wait to make some wine.