Into the spirits

It's a labor of love for Central Massachusetts winery owners

by Mary Hurley

Photos by Paul Moreau Jr.

This is a winery located in Nashoba Valley, not Napa Valley, so there was no expectation of a baronial chateau or an imperious schemer like the Jane Wyman character in the '80s TV soaper Falcon Crest.

It was, however, a surprise to mistake an owner of the Nashoba Valley Winery for a carpenter.

There he was, one of three laborers repairing an outdoor trellis on a sunny late-summer afternoon. A reporter with an appointment to interview Richard Pelletier nodded hello and walked past them and into the main office. One of the three shortly presented himself as Pelletier, one of the winery's owners and its general manager.

But, hey, this is a place where the winemaker is a carpenter, too. "He can fix a toilet. He's a very talented guy," Pelletier boasts with a laugh. "He does wash his hands between jobs," he adds.

This brand of bathroom humor is pretty much a job requirement, especially in Worcester County, home of three wineries. Nashoba Valley, which emphasizes fruit wines, and is now expanding to include a microbrewery, is located in Bolton. Mellea Farm Vineyards, which specializes in grape wines, is in West Dudley. As You Like It, a unique bakery/winery located in downtown Fitchburg, produces mead, or honey, wine and is operated by a New Age order of mystics. Winemaking is a tough business anywhere, but it doesn't get any tougher than here.

"The winery business is pretty weird, as a general rule," Pelletier also points out.

In New England, it is a recent phenomenon. The New England Wine Gazette, a quarterly trade publication based in Rhode Island, lists 36 wineries in the New England region; a dozen are located in Massachusetts. Most of them have been in business for less than two decades, small operations run by wine enthusiasts. None of the three Worcester County wineries, for example, produce more than 5000 cases a year or employ more than a handful of staff. Winemaking in the region is an unstable venture, dependent on weather and seasonal buying.

Early fall -- the harvest season -- ushers in the busiest time of the year for wineries on any coast. Local wineries expect to ring up their heaviest sales from September until New Year's. Because of the difficulty in competing with larger and better-known wine companies for shelf space in retail wine stores, a large percentage of their sales will be at the wineries themselves. At both Mellea and Nashoba, the goal is to lure customers with myriad creative events, including outdoor festivals, art shows, food tastings, and wine dinners, in addition to their regular attractions of free winetastings and winery tours. The first three weekends in September, for example, Mellea Winery sponsored a "Specialty Food Tasting" for customers to sample gift-basket food items, followed by a "Psychic and New Age Fair" and an "Italian Fest & I Love Lucy Grape Stomping Contest."

Like a majority of their counterparts in New England, Worcester County wineries get little respect from wine critics.

"New England wineries are still fighting the mindset that the good wines are from California and France," says Allie Compagnone, who co-owns Mellea Winery with her husband, Joseph. "People don't believe that we can make wine in New England, and we can."

Local winery owners have a word for such people: snobs.

The biggest gripe of the wine critic, a/k/a wine snob: the local climate is not good for growing grape wines. Downright lousy, in fact. Ergo, local wineries are incapable of making serious wine. The wine connoisseur's reflex is to gag on fruit wines. A connoisseur does not even consider fruit wine to be real wine. Real wine is made with grapes, not with peaches and berries, for god's sake.

Unlike fruit wine, and the hugely popular sweet chardonnay that wine amateurs erroneously think of as a dry white wine, red wine is favored by the connoisseur because it is . . . complex. "Adult wine is red wine," says Richard L. Elia, publisher and president of the Quarterly Review of Wines, a national circulation wine magazine based in Winchester.

Red wine is not the forte of New England or Worcester County. Heck, it's a challenge to produce white wine here.

Elia tries to be sympathetic. "Growing grapes in New England and New York state is one hellishly hard battle." He blames it on our lack of terroir, a French term favored by wine experts. "Terroir is everything. The environment, the soil, the weather. . . . God and nature just didn't supply it here," he says.

To knock the regional winery "is kind of like being unkind to a grandmother," Elia realizes. "It has to be a labor of love." Local winery owners may take exception to Elia's view on their inadequate terroir. But on his last point they share common ground. Yes, they say, it is a labor of love. And yes, it has to be.

"There's sort of a romance about a winery, about having your own vineyard," says Allie Compagnone. Her husband, Joe, always appreciated a good wine, but a winery amid Dudley's pastoral farmland and rolling hills was not something they had planned.

"The whole thing was an accident. Joe needed a road," she says.

On to part 2