"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

The vineyard is located at 4288 Kinkead Road, three miles from the winery.

The front barn, built in 1909 for $90.
 

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. 

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.

"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

Early drawing of the Kinkead Property

Click on the picture above to enlarge it. Apparently there were grapes being grown on the farm!

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

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."

Early and Current Photos of the farm
click any photo to enlarge it

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!

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. 

Interesting History of Ohio Winemaking with some great Longworth illustrations at
http://eater.com/archives/2011/01/10/ohio-the-birthplace-of-american-winemaking.php#american-wine-ohio-1

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."

(2) Information above from The Wines of America, Leon D. Adams