Maine Wineries Reaping Green From the Vine

Maine Winemakers
Originally Aired: 10/2/2009

5:30 PM

(Duration: 5:49)

Bettina Doulton makes a few final arrangements for Vinfest 2009, an annual wine festival she set up three years ago when she established the Cellardoor Winery in Lincolnville - a converted 200-year-old farmhouse and barn overlooking a five-and-a-half acre vineyard.

It's a picturesque scene more reminiscent of Italy or France than mid-coast Maine.  Cellardoor is one of an estimated 18 wineries throughout the state, most of which have sprung up in the last few years.  "The number of wineries up here producing beautiful wines is developing very quickly," Doulton says.

The move to Maine was a leap in the dark for Doulton, who until 2006 had been a fund manager for Fidelity investments in Boston.
It's been a steep learning curve she admits, and now instead of picking stocks, she's picking grapes - well, not quite.

Cellardoor has been growing grapes for a couple of years now, but they're not yet ready to harvest.  She says that's a process that takes four years. So, for now, grapes are shipped in from outside and blended on site - a practice repeated at most of the state's wineries.

Within two years though, Doulton hopes to be able to offer her customers some wines that have actually been grown, as well as blended, in Maine. "The goal is, from our own vineyard, about 20 percent of the juice that we use, to be from our vineyard. We'd obviously want to be able to have our guests come in and say, 'What's made just from the vineyard here.'"

Despite the number of wineries in Maine, there are still a limited number of acres dedicated to vineyards.  And that's a situation Doulton hopes will change.

"I'm really hoping that as this industry develops here, that as we start to prove what grapes can grow here, we can expand our vineyard space, but that we'll also work with farmers who then can plant their own vineyards, and we can contract-buy inside the state of Maine and so that we can really get a value-added element of the economy growing here," she says.

Growing vineyards in Maine, however, is difficult.  "We have a very short growing season, we get really cold - last winter we hit negative 24 - we get really wet soils, we get a lot of rain, grapes hate rain, we have turkeys that eat all of the grapes," says C.C. Peet and her husband Aaron, who studied viticulture - as the art of wine-production is called - on the West Coast, before returning to their native Maine to work at Cellardoor 2 years ago.

She says despite the challenges, it's easier to grow wine here than it was 15 years ago, thanks to the development of hybrid grapes, some of which are more able to withstand cold temperatures and are better adapted to the shorter season.

Cellardoor winery is using hybrids developed by viticulture experts at the University of Minnesota - grapes which are more suited for the acidic soil of northern New England.  

C.C. Peet:  "We've picked those hybrids in hopes that that's what's going to grow well here. So we should be able to make good wine out of them.

Tom Porter: "How do you think the wine's going to taste that comes up through the soil here?"

CCP:  "You're definitely going to have higher acids -- our cold climate's going to give you some pretty high acids, so we might leave significant residual sugar in the wines to offset that acid, which is why in Germany you tend to have sweeter wines. Generally the cooler the climate the higher your acids, the more you're going to want to have sweeter wines."

As the Cellardoor prepares to offer its unique blends at this weekend's festivities, some wine-growers in the state have what could be described as a more purist attitude towards wine production.

"We bought this place in '99 and we planted our first block of grapes in 2000," says Steve Melchiskey, who owns the Maine Coast Vineyards in Falmouth, near Portland. "We worked very hard on the agriculture portion of this, on viticulture, on wine-growing because that's what wineries are about. They're about growing grapes to make wine that reflects the place you live in."

Melchiskey first learned about wine when he worked on a vineyard in Germany as a teenager. His wine education continued in the Bordeaux region of France, where he lived for several years, before ending up in California, where he also worked in the wine industry.

He prides himself on the fact that all the wine he produces is grown on his two-acre vineyard.  All his bottles have "Maine" stamped on the label as place of origin, a boast that few, if any, other wine producers in the state can make.

Tom Porter: "When you tell people you grow wine in Maine, what's the reaction?"

Steve Melchinskey: "What I like is to give them a bottle of the wine, and then they look at me and go, 'You grew this in Maine?  Wow!'"

It's a tough challenge producing wine in this part of the world:  While his first, 2008, vintage produced around 2,000 bottles, this year was a virtual washout, he says, thanks to the record amounts of rainfall.

But, like most tough challenges, Melchiskey says it's worth it.

"If we can get a core of farmers who want to dedicate themselves to some degree, on their land, to growing grapes, we could have  in southern Maine alone, six or seven very nice wineries with Maine-grown grapes that also complements the food industry, and the agriculture industry and the fishing industry of our state," he says. "I mean, why do you like French goat cheese? It's because you get to drink a Loire valley Sauvignon Blanc with it. Why would you love scallops here in Maine? Because you could get to drink a great Maine white or rose to go with it."