March 19, 4:00 am
Winery

Process & History
What sets our winery apart is that all of our unique fruit wines and hard ciders are made on the premises with our own fruit. The only exceptions are the Blueberry varieties, for which we use Wild Maine blueberries. In the rare case of a crop failure or loss, there are a few trusted New England farmers whose fruits we may use to fill out the batch. But one of our overarching goals with the winery as with the farm on the whole is to use what we are capable of growing and to add value to our own crops. Our winery is a fully licensed and bonded Farm Winery that Max Russell started in 1988. Hard ciders were the first offerings in three varieties: Sweet, Slightly Sweet, and Dry. Sparkling hard cider and Dry Blueberry followed soon after, and as fruit production in the orchard expanded, the incredibly diverse range of wines grew to what we offer today. Max's son Jason ran the winery from 2008-2018 and introduced the very popular and highly praised J's Ice Cider. Today the wines are made by farm owners Doug and Miranda.

Fruits are picked at the peak of freshness and placed into large tanks to ferment. In the case of some fruits such as apples, the fruit is crushed or pressed prior to fermentation. Once a crucial level of alcohol has been reached, the fermentation process is stopped and then aging begins. Oak adjuncts are added at this point and monitored along the way. The wines are racked (moved from one vessel to another) and tested for microbial stability several times during the aging process. Some wines are regularly aged as long as four years, and some will be done in a matter of months. Filtering, racking, testing, and final touches are completed before bottling.
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