Grape Expectations
Is one man’s attempt to establish a vineyard in Vermont foresight or folly?
Chris Granstrom ’74 is something of an accidental vintner. Like so many stories involving the odd and the unexpected, his begins with that ubiquitous time waster—the Internet. “I first stumbled across grapes by doodling around on the Web one day.” The site was a chat room dedicated to growing wine grapes in northern climates, which no one in Vermont had tried yet. One of the site’s contributors, a Minnesotan, offered to send Granstrom a few plants. “He sends me a shoebox of these little sticks,” Granstrom explained. “So I go out and stick them in the ground.” Five years later, those little sticks cover Granstom’s entire spread.
The grapevines at Lincoln Peak Vineyard stretch in long rows just off the shoulder of Route 7, five minutes north of the Middlebury. Twelve of the property’s 16 acres are good for growing, and all the soil space is planted right now. On a day that is brilliantly clear and bitterly cold, Granstrom wades through a foot of untracked snow to show me the pruning he’s been doing. In the late-afternoon light, the gnarled vines cast long, blue shadows across the field. It’s a curious twist on Vermont’s picturesque, pastoral landscape. Granstrom cuts liberally as he goes, eyeing vines for the best growth potential and tossing the slash in a wake behind him. The goal is to leave enough vegetation to supply nutrients to the grapes, but not so much that will shade them from the sun. Come spring, any extra shoots grow at the expense of the fruit.
On his way back down the row, Granstrom collects the piles of pruned vines and carries them into the winery’s retail space. “A year ago,” he says, “this was all bare concrete.” Now, it’s a warm room lined with butternut paneling and a hickory bar top; the wood came off the property, and Granstrom does nearly all the construction himself—from pouring foundations to hanging pipes. (“I certainly didn’t learn that at Middlebury.”) In the summer, the room will be full of tasters, from tour groups to neighbors, but at the moment the floor is covered in cuttings.
At the core of Granstrom’s nursery business is a task that a group of boys at Scout camp could take on with some sharp scissors and a free afternoon. Granstrom is propagating—in effect, cloning—new plants from the vines he’s just pruned. Unlike most fruits, grapes don’t need to be grafted. Instead, Granstrom cuts foot-long segments from the tangle, looking for the healthiest bits, wraps them in moist cloths, and bundles them in bags. They’ll spend the rest of winter like this, cold and dormant. In the spring, he’ll pot each stick in a little dirt, and begin it growing in the greenhouse. “Propagation is still magic to me,” Granstrom says. He can sell each new vine for a few dollars. Last year he sold more than 21,000, and shipped them all over the country.
Propagating and growing vines, not grapes, was how Granstrom first got into the business. Winemaking was little more than an afterthought. “We got into it from the nursery angle because it was an emerging business opportunity,” he said. He knew a lot about growing fruit, and the plants were in high demand. “The nursery was good, but to get cuttings for the greenhouse we had to have a vineyard, so we were growing and selling the grapes in bulk and just breaking even. I finally thought, ‘Oh man, I can’t do this, I just have to make wine.’”
