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Early drawing of the Kinkead Property
HISTORY
OF KINKEAD RIDGE(1)
William Kinkead, Jr. arrived in the area in 1796. He and
his wife built their cabin on the J. Harris Survey, several miles
north of Ripley in 1796. In 1797 William and his father made a journey
overland to Chillicothe, Ohio and determined to settle there;
returning after the harvest was gathered, they packed their goods
and sent them by keel-boat to Chillicothe, while they drove the
stock across through the woods. The Indians (probably Shawnee) were
troublesome in that vicinity, and not liking the situation, they
returned to the Ripley area without unloading the goods from the
boat. Click here
for the story, written in the History of Clermont and Brown
Counties, originally published in 1913. William remained a resident for the rest of his life. He had
nine children, and there were several Kinkead residences along
Kinkead Road, some of which have now fallen, sadly, into disrepair.
The home on the property was built in 1880, as evidenced by the
"Plain and Fancy Plastering" plaque that was found
in a wall with a date and name. The style of the home is Gothic
Revival.

Early
aerial photo showing smokehouse, outhouse, foundry and chicken
house.
At one time, the
outbuildings consisted of a chicken house, outhouse, smokehouse and
blacksmith shop, as well as two large tobacco barns. This early
photo shows these buildings.
We
purchased the property in 1997 from Bill and Christina Lawson, who
lived on the farm for 30 years and raised their family there. There
was no indoor bathroom until one night Christina was in the outhouse
and a large black snake dropped from the ceiling. That very night
Bill started on the indoor plumbing!

The
Gothic Revival home
Prior to the
Lawsons, the Greiners owned the property. I learned from one of the
Greiner boys that at one time there were 200 pigs on the farm...
this probably explains why we can't find a single wild morel
mushroom! The pigs rooted them all up! The large barn was built in
1909 in six days by seven men for $90. Mr. Greiner was born in
1926 and lived at the house until he was about 25 years old.
He remembers plowing the field behind the back tobacco barn with
mules; they got their first tractor in 1951.
The area is
rich in wildlife, including bluebirds, cardinals, wild turkey,
turtles, deer, and rabbits, and there are wild black raspberries,
blackberries, elderberries, and edible giant puffball mushrooms.
Yes,
that is half of one edible giant puffball mushroom in my hand!
(1) From
the History of Brown County
Early
and Current Photos of the farm
click any photo to enlarge it
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"The
reason that site and variety selection are so important is because if we
get it right in the vineyard, we are able to make honest wines in the
cellar. Honest wines are wines in which the winemaker does very little,
with no additions of acid, tannins, concentrates, sugar, enzymes, etc.
Honest wines reflect terroir."
--Jim Law, Wine East , Jan.-Feb. 2006
"No
matter what you're doing, if you're not making decisions for quality
reasons, you're going backwards. Quality is the only thing that
endures."
--Anthony Terlato, Terlato Wine Group
CULTURAL
PRACTICE
Vines
are cane pruned and vertically shoot positioned. Shoot density is targeted
at 15 shoots per meter. Leaf pulling and
selective crop thinning maximize quality potential.

New planting, 1999
VARIETIES
Primary
varieties are Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, Viognier and Riesling,
with smaller quantities of Petit Verdot, Syrah, Roussanne and Sauvignon
Blanc. Experimental varieties include Merlot, Gamay Noir, Dolcetto, Sangiovese and
Semillon.
PLANT
SPACING
Narrow
row spacing of 7-1/2 feet minimizes vegetative vigor and maximizes fruit intensity.
HARVEST
PARAMETERS
Harvest
parameters vary, but in general fruit will be harvested with high sugars
and low acids at full maturity. We will pick when the flavors are
optimum.
GEOLOGY
AND SOILS
This
area lay at the bottom of a prehistoric inland sea. The resulting
limestone (ordovician) and soils derived from it are ancient and
unmodified by glaciation. The soils are about 30 inches deep to broken
limestone, rich in clay and well drained. This is nearly a perfect
situation for wine grapes.
CLIMATE
The
growing season is characterized by generally warm, humid changeable
weather, turning gradually cooler and drier as harvest approaches.
Effective degree days are adequate to mature most Rhone and Bordeaux
varieties during the last half of September. Winter can be cold with
enough temperature modulation to damage vinifera.
TOPOGRAPHY
The
rolling hills of the Bluegrass are characteristic here. The vineyard lies
on ridges rising more than 400 feet above the nearby Ohio River.
Randall
Graham on terroir:
Randall Graham, the iconoclastic proprietor of Bonny Doon Vineyard in Santa
Cruz, California, agreed that wines of terroir are subtle and “quiet.”
Graham said he liked author Matt Kramer’s coined term “somewhereness” as
an English translation of terroir. He said it happens in a wine when “the
plant and the soil have learned to speak each other’s language.” He said
that an appreciation of terroir is like recognizing individual beauty with its
inevitable flaws rather than ideal beauty. “Feeling terroir is feeling the
place through the wine – it’s akin to sensing a homesickness, even if you’re
homesick for a place you’ve never been.”
California Wine Web Feature Article
A
recent conference in Dijon defined terroir in a more specific way:
"A terroir is a delimited geographic space where a human community
has constructed throughout the course of history, a collective intellectual
knowledge of production, founded on a system of interactions among a physical
and biological milieu and a set of human factors in which the socio-technical
philosophies put in place establish an originality, confer a 'typicite', and
engender a reputation for a product originating from this terroir."
Nancy's
comment: This seems WAAAYYY too complicated to me. .. and now they are
developing sub-categories: Identity terroir, Promotional terroir, Legal terroir,
Agro-terroir, Vini-terroir and Territorial terroir. I think I need another glass
of wine!
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HISTORY
OF GRAPE GROWING IN OHIO(2)

Nicholas Longworth arrived in Cincinnati from New Jersey in 1803,
the year Ohio attained statehood. In 1823, he planted a vineyard
overlooking the Ohio River. He imported thousands of vines from
Europe, but they did not survive; he then planted Catawba(3),
and at one time had 1200 acres of vineyards. Longworth is also
credited with making America's first sparkling wine. By 1859 Ohio
was America's premiere wine state, producing almost 570,000 gallons
a year; 200,000 of those came from Brown County; there were 3000
acres of vines along the river between Cincinnati and Ripley. Around
that time, black rot and powdery mildew took its toll, and the vines
began to die. Meanwhile, grape planting began in earnest along the
shore of Lake Erie up north. In 1920, with Prohibition, the Ohio
wine industry collapsed a second time. In the 1940s, a southern Ohio
grape grower's son, Henry Sonneman, purchased a grape-juice plant
near Cincinnati and began making grape juice. The revival of
winegrowing in southern Ohio was sparked by Sonneman's son in
the early 1960s. The current growers tend to specialize in French
hybrid varieties, and in general purchase grapes from out-of-state
for vinifera. We intend to prove vinifera can be successfully grown
here and estate bottled, and to add our vineyard and winery to the
historical legacy begun so long ago by Nicholas Longworth.
(2)
Information above from The Wines of America, Leon D. Adams
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In 1854
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
wrote a poem "Catawba Wine"
to memorialize the city's vineyards.
The last stanza of the poem is:
"And
this Song of the Vine,
This greeting of mine,
The winds and the birds shall deliver
To the Queen of the West,
In her garlands dressed,
On the banks of the Beautiful River."

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Recognizing
Wine's Taste of Place
Linda Murphy, San Francisco Chronicle Wine
Editor
"One
of wine's finest attributes is that it can taste of the place
where the grapes were grown... Climate, soils, drainage,
elevation, slope, sun exposure, availability of water -- even
air pollution -- affect how a vine grows and thus the wine it
produces. Although winemakers can influence the aroma, flavor
and texture of their wines by their choices of barrels,
yeasts, fermentation techniques and aging regimes, few argue
that the environment in which the grapes are grown -- the
French call this terroir -- is key in determining how
distinctive a wine will turn out, how it will separate itself
from the pack of like varietals. It does this by expressing a
sense of place, or as my colleague W. Blake Gray wrote last
week about old-vine Zinfandel, a taste of history and distinct
personalities in a glass." |
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