Cluster on the vine | Wineries are hot spots for tourists. But for Maine's emerging wine industry, success is a group effort.
A 50-foot Ferris wheel peeked over the roof of the main building at Cellardoor Vineyard on May 9, making an incongruous addition to the stately winery in its hilltop setting in Lincolnville. A crew of men spent a day assembling the wheel in the back parking lot after hauling it to Maine from Iowa.
In the early afternoon, Bettina Doulton, Cellardoor's co-owner, walked out to the back porch for a quick inspection of the wheel's progress. After an employee tending to a garden dryly told Doulton she had just noticed it, Doulton joked back, "It's easy to miss!"
The Ferris wheel was part of the winery's spring festival, held in mid-May to herald the arrival of warm weather and the winery's season opening. This year, more than 800 people came out for the party, perhaps due to the rare chance to take a carnival ride high above growing vines.
Doulton and John Tynan bought Cellardoor in early 2007 from a couple who had planted the vineyard 10 years prior. From the start, they have opened the vineyard up to the public. "For us, it's not about the sale of wine, it's about connecting with people, connecting people with each other," Tynan says, sitting recently in the cool, dim balcony of the post-and-beam tasting room where he could watch the season's first guests sip Queen Ann's Lace or Vino Divine, or any one of Cellardoor's 11 homemade wines.
Doulton adds, "We really love the opportunity to interact with guests around communication, around community. It's about conversation, food tasting, wine tasting." The two are corporate refugees, having left Fidelity Investments in Boston to jump into their winemaking dream after Doulton made a full recovery from breast cancer.
At Cellardoor and the other 11 licensed wineries in Maine, now is the season to open the doors, dust off the bottles and let the wine flow. During summer and fall, most Maine wineries sell between 50% and 95% of their bottles from their tasting rooms. Vintners say they can pull in as many as 50 to 200 visitors on a busy day, tapping into the deep reserves of tourists who flock every summer to Maine, and especially to the midcoast, where the wineries are concentrated.
For most of the Maine wineries — many of which are fairly young — attracting visitors is essential for survival. Elmer Savage, the co-owner of Savage Oaks Vineyard and Winery in Union, says two-thirds of the farm's visitors are tourists, and 95% of the farm's wine is sold on the premises to tourists and locals. Elmer and his wife, Holly, are now making 10,000 bottles — or 2,000 gallons — of wine a year, six years after planting their first vine. What they don't sell at the vineyard gets sold at local retail stores. Last year, Savage Oaks' wine sales hit $40,000 — double the previous year's revenue, and about two-thirds of the farm's total revenue. (Besides growing grapes, the Savages also raise cattle and pigs and sell pork, beef and blueberries on their 95-acre farm.) "At our size, we couldn't make it without having people come right to the farm," Elmer Savage says.
Local production
Maine's small wineries aren't likely to grab a large share of the global wine trade. For starters, oenophiles aren't yet embracing Frontenac or St. Pepin as the next great wine grapes. But the main reason is that Maine wineries just can't produce enough wine to fill more than a local demand. What's more, Maine wineries are hurt by state laws prohibiting shipments of alcohol via mail or the Internet, unlike 25 other states that allow interstate wine sales. This makes on-premise sales all the more vital for wineries that have not yet established a widespread presence in shops, grocery stores or restaurants. Plus, selling bottles from the winery itself means higher margins for vintners.
The key for these wineries, then, is to make the wine-tasting process an experiential one, and to lure tourists off the beach and into their tasting rooms. And once those tourists are in the winery, they typically leave with a bottle or two — or better yet, a case — of the wine.
Bob Bartlett, co-owner of Bartlett Maine Estate Winery in Gouldsboro, says wine tasting is becoming more and more an essential rite for tourists when visiting a new area, like having to eat a lobster in Maine or fish-and-chips in England. "Tourism is extremely important in this business," he says. "Historically in Maine, most of the business is tourism, and that applies to wineries."
These days, Maine wineries also have strength in numbers. With an unprecedented number of wineries in Maine opening in the last few years, 12 licensed winemakers have recently formed the Maine Winery Guild. (For a map of guild members, see "Reds and whites," page 25.) Another nine businesses are also non-voting members, but are not yet licensed. Wineries require a state farm winery license, which costs $50 a year, and a federal license from the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau. The guild intends to market Maine as a wine destination, something a bit unexpected for this cold corner of the country.
But these vintners are tapping into a growing desire. The mystique surrounding the fermented fruit drink has not dimmed in the thousands of years people have been drinking it — indeed, wine's allure is only deepening. (To learn more about the surge of wineries across the country, see "Aging well," this page.)
Although Maine Office of Tourism Director Pat Eltman has not yet met with the guild, she says wine tourism has potential here. "Wine and culinary tourism is an up-and-coming tourism market for Maine," she agrees.
The Guild and the trail
Although their ranks are growing, Maine's wineries are eying each other as allies rather than competitors. Last fall, Maine's winemakers and grape growers gathered at Cellardoor for an inaugural meeting to launch the Maine Winery Guild. The group's first step has been to create the Maine Wine Trail, a map that links all the wineries within a day's drive.
James Baranski, co-owner of Shalom Organic Orchard, Winery and B&B in Franklin, designed a trail brochure and map, and plans to print 10,000 copies for distribution at tourism bureaus, kiosks and other spots.
Shalom Orchards, which makes organic apple, blueberry and cranberry wines — as well as raspberry, kiwi and honey mead — got its winery license from the state in 2002 and produces about 5,000 bottles of wine each year. Baranski and his wife, Charlotte, sell 25% of their bottles from the farm and the rest are sold wholesale in several wine stores around the state. "We depend pretty heavily on getting people to come and visit our wineries and vineyards," he says.
Tom Hoey, the owner of Sow's Ear Winery in Brookville, says he's hopeful the wine trail will bring more visitors to his 18-year-old farm, where he says he could easily double the winery's 6,000-bottle annual production if demand picked up. "People like to get their food locally, and the same goes for wine," he says. "The [Maine Winery Guild] has the possibility of making local wines more widely known."
As a microbrewer and winemaker, Doug Maffucci, co-owner of Atlantic Brewing Co. and Bar Harbor Cellars, is aware of the benefits of cooperation. Beer makers launched the Maine Brewers' Guild in the late 1990s, and its 25 members now organize an annual fall brew festival that attracts people from all over New England. "I think the wine trail will have a similar effect," he says, adding that there's a possibility in the future Maine will host some type of wine bacchanal, too.
Maffucci and his wife, Barbara Patten, opened Bar Harbor Cellars four years ago. They're now restoring a 19th century barn to expand their winery, as well as tripling the size of the parking lot. "We've been seeing a nice steady growth in wine business along the way," Maffucci says, which helped his business last year sell 18,000 bottles. By 2010, he predicts that number will double.
Members say although the guild is in its infancy, it has promise. Shared national or regional advertising is being considered, along with a guild website. Joan Anderson, co-owner of Winterport Winery, says the guild also could be helpful in advocating for business-friendly policies in Augusta, such as working against more beverage taxes or loosening mail restrictions, to gain an advantage in a what she says is a difficult industry.
Too much wine?
And though most of the wineries have heartily agreed to participate in the Maine Wine Trail, there is also a small dab of worry that Maine could reach wine saturation.
"It gives a critical mass to the whole movement," says Bartlett. But, he adds, "I think 11 [wineries] is enough. I don't know how the state will support it all."
Bartlett and his wife, Kathe, were Maine's wine pioneers, establishing their winery 25 years ago when they helped amend the state's farm winery bill to allow operators to sell bottles on their premises. The Bartletts now sell 7,000 cases, or 84,000 bottles, a year.
Jane Firstenfeld, a writer for Wines & Vines magazine in San Rafael, Calif., says a region can't ever have too many wineries. "It is better to have a bunch of them in a fairly confined area because of wine tourism," she reassures. "The more wineries there are, the better it makes for a tourist attraction. It's obviously a huge economic boon for the country, the city and for all the allied businesses supported by tourism."
Not all of the wineries in Maine actually grow grapes; some import "must," the unfermented juice from grapes, to make their wines. Despite the advancement of cold-hardy grapes, Maine's short growing season is still challenging for the sun-hungry fruit. Wineries such as Shalom Orchard, while they don't grow grapes, cultivate apples or blueberries that are then fermented to make dry or sweet wines. Some upcoming farms, such as Riverside Farm Market in Oakland, only grow grapes for sale.
"Everybody is doing different things," Joan Anderson of Winterport Winery says. "But we're all in the category of trying to make people realize Maine has some very good wines."
To stir interest and attract visitors — both locals and tourists are essential to maintaining steady business — most wineries in Maine rely on brochures placed in hotels or chambers of commerce, as well as on their websites and word-of-mouth.
Some wineries have adopted other strategies to bring people in the doors. In addition to the Ferris wheel for the spring fling, Cellardoor this summer will begin offering winemaking camps. Doulton and Tynan have slotted five four-day sessions, from June to October, charging participants $1,500-$1,850 to learn how to make wine. The price includes lodging in a local inn, breakfasts and wine-heavy dinners.
Cellardoor, which sells 90% of its roughly 5,900 cases of wine from its tasting room a year, is also opening a new retail space called The Villa on Route One, where it'll hold wine events and advertise the wine trail. "We will use The Villa as the head of the wine trail to let them know about the other wineries," Tynan says. "We see the value in really educating people about the overall state of the industry."
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