Grape Expectations

Is one man's attempt to establish a vineyard in Vermont foresight or folly?

By Kevin Charles Redmon '09
Illustrations by Jack Molloy
Photograph by Todd Balfour

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.’”

Before grapes it was strawberries, and before strawberries it was apples. Apples were “an ill-fated operation,” Granstrom admits—the orchard his parents helped capitalize while he was still in his twenties eventually went under—and strawberries were fickle. Granstrom’s you-pick strawberry operation lasted 22 years, but by the end he was exhausted. The energy required to cultivate grapes is spread more evenly over the year, which makes summer days a little less frenetic. He seems content with the notion that wine grapes will be the final step in his evolution as fruit grower.

Granstrom, a Boston native, is in his 50s now, but three decades of working and playing outside seem to have arrested the aging process. He has a youthful countenance, and when he focuses intently, his tortoise-frame glasses slip down his nose. He also possesses a farmer’s work ethic, which means he can’t keep his hands still for very long.

One afternoon, I find him perched on a stool, sketching a new wine label and going over the books. Like most things at Lincoln Peak, the graphic design process is very homespun. He shows me his spring to-do list, and it includes items like “install laundry sink and pipes” and “paint trim yellow.” Indeed, much of Granstrom’s success derives from his tirelessness.

“The typical narrative,” he observes, “is that someone makes their bundle doing whatever, and then by late middle-age they get into the wine business. It’s their little retirement project. But that’s not the angle we’re coming at it from.” For Granstrom, growing things has always been a focus rather than a distraction.

Granstrom’s childhood was colored by a fixation with agriculture—the way most boys take to dinosaurs or airplanes. “Even when I was a little kid, I loved farms,” he says. “If we passed by a field, I’d have my nose pressed up against the window, trying to figure out what was growing out there.” At Middlebury, he fell into geography. “I was fascinated with the relationship between people and the landscape,” he said. “Why things were where they were, and how people interacted with the place where they lived. And so I took it one step further, and started doing my own interacting.” During his junior year he found work on a dairy farm—not the direction most of his classmates headed. “I wasn’t cut out for long stretches of intellectual discourse,” he said. “My personal makeup was somebody that needed to be active.” He began working summers dairying, but “I soon realized I was more of a plant person than an animal person.” He took jobs on a handful of vegetable farms, eventually ending up on an apple orchard in Shoreham.

Five years after graduating, Granstrom met his future wife, Michaela Pontoppidan ’75, at a College reunion. They purchased and settled on a 16-acre plot in New Haven, the same one they still occupy. The first building they erected on the site was a crude structure, intended to be a workshop. “Instead, we decided to move in. It was never what we imagined, but we added a little insulation, a wall or two, and it just sort of grew from there.” Strawberries replaced apples, and soon the first of Chris and Michaela’s two daughters was on the way.

Until five or ten years ago, the Minnesota grape varieties that Granstrom now uses weren’t yet fully developed, and most of the wine grapes being grown in northern New England were poorly adapted to deal with the cold. The region is a fine place to grow Concord grapes—the kind you’d make jelly with—but they have what Granstrom calls a “foxy” flavor. Not something you’d want to press and bottle. Still, North American rootstock has long been valuable to European vintners because it’s naturally resistant to phylloxera, a bug that wreaks havoc on vineyards—which wasn’t a concern until the bug jumped the Atlantic in the 19th century and nearly wiped out the European wine industry. The solution was to graft European vines onto American roots. Today, cross-breeding the two species produces hardy plants that can grow in harsh, cold-weather climates but retains the grapes’ delicate and complex tastes.

Jim Luby—father of Claire Luby ’10—is a professor of fruit breeding at the University of Minnesota. He oversees all fruit hybridization projects in the agricultural school, including the grapes now growing at Lincoln Peak. Nearly every variety Chris Granstrom grows in Vermont began as a seedling in Luby’s Minnesota laboratory. For any given hybrid that makes it to market Luby crosses about twenty thousand, a process he describes as “sorting through a pile of garbage to find jewels.” And success in a controlled greenhouse only goes so far in predicting how well a vine will grow in the Green Mountains.

Granstrom’s learning curve has been steep as a result. But in terms of vine growing and fruit cultivation, he says, Lincoln Peak is the most well managed vineyard in the region. “A lot of people underestimate the workload and technical expertise required to grow grapes. From all the years of growing strawberries we understood farming and fruit. We hit the ground running.” His early success seems to have elevated him to the position of a regional wine grape guru. It helps that he’s patient, because everyone who drops by invariably wants to talk shop.

When the owner of a nascent but well-financed vineyard just up Route 7 wanders in one afternoon, he has a laundry list of questions for Granstrom—what he was planting and when, soil temperatures, bottle prices and sizes. The owner then spends a long time walking up and down the rows, looking at Granstrom’s work and making notes. What most people would consider proprietary secrets Granstrom divulges freely. This wiki approach works, in part, because nobody knows much about how to grow these grapes. “It’s not as if there’s this traditional body of knowledge that we just haven’t tapped into,” he tells me later. “We’re creating it. We’re the pioneers. We’re all learning together.” If it’s overwhelming at times, then it’s exciting in equal measure.


With a room full of fermenting and holding tanks just steps away from his makeshift office, Granstrom tastes a lot of wine. The winemaking process itself is as much experimentation as it is precision, and there’s a lot of activity to keep track of—yeasts, sugars, oxidation, and aging. Granstrom goes about it zealously, like a kid with a new chemistry set. “I take two cents from anyone who comes along,” he says, as he fills a small wine glass from an enormous, stainless steel tank and hands it to me. We’re making our way around the unheated room, sampling a half-dozen different whites and roses. In the corner, red wine pressed this fall ages in oak casks. Granstrom takes a sip and chews. It’s a sweet white wine, from one of three batches in which Granstrom has been adjusting sugar levels. The other two are drier, with more of a bite. “Our terroir is going to produce high-acid wines,” he says. The trick is to allow the juice to ferment just long enough to bring out sweetness to balance the acidity. It’s not unlike trying to coast a freight train to a stop right in front of the station. The only way to get it right is to allow yourself a lot of opportunities to get it wrong first.

At the moment, though, the object of Granstrom’s attention is a small batch of ice wine that occupies two child-sized tanks in the middle of the room. Using a turkey baster as a wine thief, he fills a small flute for me. It’s a deep, glowing yellow color, sweet as cider but with an aggressive edge. “The acidity of this grape is off the charts,” Granstrom says—a curse for table wine but a blessing for dessert wine. “If the wine wasn’t so sweet you could peel paint with it.”

Ice wine is made by allowing the grapes to freeze on the vine. When it’s about eighteen degrees outside, you pick them and press them, still half frozen. The result is that most of the water is locked up ice crystals, while the sugars and flavors are concentrated in the small amount of juice that drips out. The cycles of freezing and thawing that the grapes undergo on the vine produce subtle notes you couldn’t get otherwise.

Lincoln Peak released a vintage of ice wine earlier this fall, and it all sold immediately. Like bread, wine is one of those ancient foods that haven’t undergone a lot of innovation in the last few thousand years. People like ice wine because it’s novel. Even Granstrom is surprised. “People are fascinated by the whole concept. They say, ‘Ice wine, what’s that?’ Their eyes get big, and they want to know everything about it. They take out their money and starting peeling off their dollars. I don’t know, it’s just a magic combination of words.”

Granstrom’s biggest concern is what to call his new creation. This batch was made from grapes frozen in a freezer—not on the vine—so “ice wine” is technically a misnomer. He says that a few California vineyards have begun calling it “vin de glacier.” Something to convey iciness. I suggest “arctic ambrosia.” “Maybe,” says Granstrom, looking doubtful.


The ice wine is a big hit several weeks later, at an after-hours tasting in February, when Chris and I are joined by Michaela, Jay Leshinsky, head of the College’s organic garden, and Andy McCabe ’85, owner of Vergennes Wine. The whites, reds and roses are paired with local cheese, and for a while the discussion turns to Vermont terroir and the “local pour” movement. McCabe, erudite, smoky-voiced, and sporting a blazer with flannel and sneakers, steals the show. “At the end of the day,” he says, “terroir is all about rocks. How they acidify the soil, how they retain heat. In this loamy, fertile soil, you’re not going to have terroir in the traditional sense.” Clay may lend a hint of cinnamon, and limestone comes off as mandarin orange. But, McCabe says, without the stress of growing in rocky soil, Vermont wines will turn out exactly how you expect: clean and pure.

Chris mentions that two decades of strawberries occupied the soil before the vines went in, and wonders aloud if this gives the wine particular notes. Michaela suggests that if they really want to bring out the berry undertones they might water the soil with strawberry liquor.
We taste the three whites in which Chris has been tweaking sugar levels. McCabe leans back in the rolling office chair he’s been given and calls the dry version “a bit mean spirited.” “It’s like a Fauve painting, where the color goes outside the lines,” he says. He points to the sweeter white. “Whereas this is more contained; it’s happier.” He likens it to Renoir’s “Boating Party”—very marketable.

The ice wine arrives last. It comes in a dark, elegant bottle, half the traditional size, accompanied by a strong blue cheese. It’s one of the few remaining from Granstom’s first vintage. McCabe tastes it, and pauses philosophically. He says that the acidity in the grape drives the fruit out of complacency, and tells Granstom he could get twice the price he’s asking for it.

A visitor from Italy said the same thing a few weeks ago, Granstrom says. “He tried all the wines and said some nice things. And then he got to the ice wine. He said, ‘You hold onto that for a few years, and you’ll be a rich man.’” Perhaps like finding himself in the wine business at all, Granstrom seems a little bemused by the thought of imminent success. “Ice wine isn’t really where my heart is,” he says, with a trace of a sigh, “but it may be our niche. Winter comes early here.”

If the idea of a burgeoning Vermont wine industry seems unlikely, consider that in 1933 the state didn’t have any ski lifts, either. Jim Luby, at the University of Minnesota, said that while New England will never match the output of, say, Napa Valley, it will produce a different style of wine, and some of it will be very good. “California also grows carrots,” he mused, “so should Vermont not bother with carrots, either?” And local pour movements may mean that the environmentally conscious won’t have to choose between tee totaling and the size of their carbon footprint. What’s more, Granstrom’s wine, still in its earliest vintages, isn’t just kitsch—it’s good. Even Andy McCabe, who sees a lot of wine, said his skepticism has been assuaged since Lincoln Peak rolled out its first wines last summer.

Kicking around the retail space one afternoon, warm light filling the windows and public radio murmuring away in the corner, Granstrom tells me that he doesn’t spend a lot of time being introspective but that so far everything is going well. When he says this he seems to be referring as much to his four decades as a farmer as he is to the vineyard.

And winemaking presents him with a new outlet for his curiosity. “One thing you have to realize,” he says, “is that we’re way out on the cutting edge.” He pauses, considering the idea. “And, you know, that’s not even the right metaphor. We’re, like, out on thin ice.” He seems to relish the thrill of arriving at middle age to find himself still toeing the ice’s edge. Spend enough time with him, though, and you get the distinct sense that even if he were bottling vinegar Chris Granstrom would be enjoying himself. He still gets to watch things grow everyday, still gets to work with his hands, still gets to play outside.