September 2009

By Matt Reese

September 2009

“Hello, nice to meet you. Where are you from?”
Like most people, when I first meet someone, one of the first things I ask about is where they live. This is probably because that provides a little insight into their background. No matter where they are, it seems that people carry at least some of their home with them and it shows up in their tastes, personality and lifestyles.
Wine is much the same way. The effects of soil, climate and terrain on the grapes used to produce it shape much of the rich personality of an individual wine. This is known to folks in the wine industry as “terroir.” Each unique place produces its own unique terroir. Growing regions with similar growing conditions, resulting in wines with a similar terroir, are called appellations. Ohio is home to five recognized viticultural appellations. The two most noteworthy appellations in Ohio are along the border of Lake Erie and the Ohio River Valley that stretches through southern Ohio.
The best way to taste the terroir of Ohio wines is to make sure the wines you are drinking are made entirely from grapes grown in the state. Such wines are making a name for themselves in national and international wine competitions as they continue to pile up awards.
Bill Skvarla understands how to win awards with the wines he makes from grapes grown in his Harmony Hill Vineyards just outside of Cincinnati in Clermont County. In 2001, Bill and Patti Skvarla started growing grapes for selling to the rapidly expanding wine industry in the area.
“We were just going to grow the grapes to sell to other wineries around us. We had a good market for them around here,” Skvarla said. “We had been making basement wine for years. I made all my mistakes early in my wine making career. Then, just for fun, we entered some competitions for amateur wine and we started winning. So, we decided we would use our grapes to start making wine.”
The couple won medals at the Indiana International Wine Competition, the largest wine competition in the United States, in 2002, 2003 and 2004. This has been followed up with a pile of recognitions for Harmony Hill including a double gold for Harmony Hill 2007 Rubato and a Gold for Harmony Hill 2006 Rhapsody at the 2008 Appellation America Competition.
Though among the smallest commercial wineries in the state, Harmony Hills still makes 1,200 cases of wine a year using all of their own grapes unless they have a short crop. From harvest through bottling and labeling, the entire process is done by hand with as many as 25 seasonal workers, including volunteers, 12 part-time employees and the Skvarlas.
The harvested Ohio grapes go into a destemmer/crusher that “replaces Lucille Ball stomping on the grapes,” Skvarla said. Yeast is added, and the duration of the contact between the juice and the grape skins through the fermentation process in the fermenters (ranging from a couple of days to three weeks) determines the color and flavor of the wine. From there the wine is separated from the dregs in settling tanks and transferred for storage in an appropriate container — stainless steel for white and oak barrels for red. The stainless steel tanks keep air away from the white wine, which turns brown with oxygen, while the oak barrels allow air to mix with the red. To avoid pumping the wine, which diminishes its quality, the red wine is gravity fed to barrels in an underground wine cave, one of only four manufactured wine caves in the country.
The Skvarlas cater to customers who can bring their own food to the vineyard and enjoy live music and high quality wine in an open rural setting. People can even bring their pets to Harmony Hills.
“We work hard to make a very sound product here, but it is not even about the wine,” Skvarla said. “It’s about the ambiance. We’re 30 miles from Cincinnati, and this place makes people feel like they’re in the country.”
The pleasant autumn weather prior to the cold winter months offers an ideal opportunity for people to visit the state’s many wineries and sample the tastes of Ohio unique terroir. Wine connoisseurs will find that like the wines, wineries and wine makers each have a terroir all their own. So this fall, before you take a sip of high quality Ohio wine, be sure to ask where it’s from and let your taste buds tell you.
For more information about Ohio wines visit www.tasteohiowines.com. For more information about Harmony Hills, visit www.hhwines.com.

Matt Reese writes for Ohio’s Country Journal and lives in Baltimore, Ohio. For questions or comments, please contact him at mkcreese@yahoo.com. For more columns visit freshcountryair.blogspot.com. This column was brought to you by Ohio’s agricultural organizations.