- [Voiceover] The following program is a production of Pioneer Public Television.

This program on Pioneer Public Television is funded by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund with money from the vote of the people of Minnesota on November 4, 2008.

Additional support provided by Mark and Margaret Yackel-Juleen in honor of Shalom Hill Farm, a non-profit rural education retreat center in a beautiful prairie setting near Windom in southwestern Minnesota, shalomhillfarm.org.

The Arrowwod Resort and Conference Center.

Your ideal choice for Minnesota resorts offering luxury townhomes, 18 holes of golf, darling reflection spa, big splash water park, and much more.

Alexandria, Minnesota.

A relaxing vacation or great location for an event.

ExploreAlex.com.

Easy to get to, hard to leave.

- Welcome to Postcards.

I'm Dana Johnson.

Today we taste the history of Minnesota grapes as we take a look at the unique aspects of three local wineries.

First we travel to Fieldstone Vineyards at the historic Ford Garage building in downtown Redwood Falls and join in on their annual grape stomp.

(people talking) - Fieldstone was originally established 12 miles outside of Redwood Falls, about four miles from Morgan, Minnesota on a century farm.

Planted out first vineyard in 2000 on that location, opened the winery in 2003 with the 2002 vintage, and then left that location in winter of 2010, and moved into Redwood Falls at our current location.

We're located in the historic Ford Garage.

That's what it was originally built for.

It was about 1920, it is three stories, about 9000 square feet each, including a basement that you can drive into, and was once deemed a fallout shelter.

And an upstairs that has a car elevator where they did the original assembly and some of the body work.

It remained a dealership through the mid sixties and then had a variety of tenants over the last 30 years.

We did the best we could with keeping the original fixtures in place.

The flooring is a hundred years old.

The basic layout of the front of our house is what the show floor of the dealership would have looked like with the exception of modern bathrooms and offices.

- Fieldstone's been involved with the Redwood Falls Chamber of Commerce and several other sponsors the last two or three years, putting on a fall festival and grape stomp in downtown Redwood Falls.

We block off several city blocks downtown that hold the grape stomp.

There's craft vendors that come down.

There's food vendors that come down.

We have a kid's grape stomp.

The last couple of years, we've also had live music and other types of entertainment throughout the afternoon.

We really had a fall festival that, up until a few years ago was losing momentum, I think, and the grape stomp helped to kinda revitalize that particular event for the city.

The Chamber also has a fundraiser involved with that particular fall festival, so it's a great way for the Chamber to raise funds as well.

- This is the third annual grape stomp here at Fieldstone Vineyards in downtown Redwood Falls, and it has grown.

We are very excited to say that we have more stompers this year.

And we have a big cash prize for the stomp, $200 cash prize, so that probably brought in a few extra, but it's just a great feel-good community event that brings out a lot of people for our fall festival.

Costumes are certainly encouraged, but not required for our grape stomp.

You'll see everything from Lucy and Ethel to people dressed as bunches of grapes, to we've got some football stars this year that are going to do grape stomping, so it brings out all kinds of people.

- One, two, three, go!

- [Lorna] We are a team.

She talked me into it.

Actually her mom is one of my best friends, and we're camping together this weekend, and they came down for, her mom is actually doing the... - grill off.

- The grill off with the steak with Gina's husband, John.

And so we just doing the park camping, and so we just decided to, she talked me into it.

- [Gina] I think it's just wonderful that our size town has something like this, and I just think it's good just to support the town and have fun.

- Well I'm gonna do the stomping.

I just told her, you know, I'm gonna try doing on my toes, and if that doesn't work then she's gonna have to tell me to use my feet, and - [Gina] Flat feet.

- [Lorna] Yeah.

- [Gina] It will be a team effort.

- Wow.

- A grape stomp is a celebration of harvest and kind of paying homage to how things used to happen before we had electricity and mechanical, or machines that did processing for us.

So in the way we run the event, each contestant or each team, rather, there's two people, will have ten pounds of fruit to crush with their feet, nothing else, and another person that will be trying to push the liquid towards an exit spout, and the person that captures the most liquid, or the team that captures, or produces and captures the most liquid will win.

As far as the juice, we always get this question, some of the wineries do use the juice.

We do not.

It all goes out to the compost pile.

- And we generally go through anywhere from a third to a half a ton of grapes for the grape stomp.

Just kinds depends on how many people register, how many people day of are walk ups, stuff like that, but I think this year, it was right around a half a ton.

The fall festival and the grape stomp absolutely draws from a larger area to pull people into town.

It's kind of an afternoon event.

We'll have couples that'll come down and stomp against one another.

We might just have a couple that's out for a Saturday afternoon.

They left the kids at home or it's a date weekend, but yeah it absolutely draws in from a pretty wide area.

I would say as far as the Twin cities in the northeast, and probably down towards Sioux Falls in the southwest.

- [Anne] We actually do have a kid's stomp.

It's part of our great kids' activities sponsored by very generous local businesses.

And they're down at the other end of the block, and kid stomping is completely free.

This is a great event for the community.

As I said, we have very generous local businesses, and lots of great volunteers for this event.

And it's something we've done for many many years.

The grape stomp, of course, is in its third year, but the fall festival has been around more than 25 years.

So people know that it's the fourth Saturday in September.

They look forward to it every year.

And we're just adding some new things every year to get new people's attention.

- Owning and running a winery allows for us to really be exposed to a pretty fantastic group of people.

Folks that are coming through our front door are not having a bad day.

They're here to have fun.

They're here to generally learn something, and so you're not typically dealing with people that are in bad moods.

They're all pretty happy to be here, and that makes for fun conversation.

- People who come to our location are here because they want to be here, not because they have to be here.

So it's very rare that we get people that are having their bad day in our location.

It's fun to talk to those people.

In the ten years we've been in business, we have had visitors from every state in the union and over 18 countries worldwide.

So we get to meet people from a lot of backgrounds, and as I said, they're happy to be here, so it's generally a fun day.

- Next, follow us for a fun day of wine tasting at Glacial Ridge Winery, and see what goes into the production of their award-winning wines.

- [Ron] Today we are at Glacial Ridge Winery in Spicer, Minnesota.

We are located on Highway 23 between Spicer and New London, right on the highway.

We bought the property as a orchard, and it came with 17 and a half acres.

The buildings and orchard of five and a half acres.

My wife always had a passion for doing something micro like this, either brewery or winery.

It seemed like the winery fit.

We found a wine maker that had been making wine for over 30 years.

It seemed like all parts were starting to come together to do the winery, so that's what we did.

This is Jimmy Appleseed Orchard, and which still is the name of the orchard.

And we market Jimmy Appleseed during the apple season so basically we market the Glacial Ridge Winery 12 months out of the year, and then Jimmy Appleseed a couple of months.

We're sitting in a building that was constructed in the sixties to actually house a wholesale mineral operation, but we are sitting in a room right now which is our wine tasting room.

And this is where you can come in and taste our wines.

And that's how we sell our wines.

- This tastes like rhubarb.

- We also created this barrel room right here for a lounge and it is created so that you feel like you're walking inside a barrel, and it's a nice little cozy room for a small little group, and it works very well.

- Ron and Kim are wonderful people to work for.

It's fun to work for a family, and it really does feel like it's Glacial Ridge Winery family.

I always sign that at the end of our newsletters, and I really feel that way.

There's just four of us that are the core staff here, and so we work really closely together and everything kind of feels like when you're having a bunch of people over at your house and it's really exciting and all the anticipation and stress, and then it's here and everybody's having a good time.

It feels kind of like I'm hosting parties at my home working here, so it's a lot of fun.

Before we were marketing to greater Minnesota, and now we're trying to come down to our local communities.

That's our home roots.

We want people to feel welcome here, feel like this is a regular place to come for fun on Thursday nights in the summer, or for grape stomp every year, or just to come here and have a wine sampling.

Working behind this bar, everyone's so happy to see you, and so glad to be here, and so interested in what you have to offer, and just really having a good time.

And they're here to have a good time.

They have a good time while they're here, and they leave to go have a good time somewhere else, so everyone comes here with this upbeat, energetic, peppy, you know, you can't go wrong.

You can't not have fun while you're working, so that's what I love about it.

- I was a grocer for 30 years, but when you're behind this bar and you're doing tasting with people that come in and never bring in their problems, it's one of the funnest places I've ever had to work.

Letting people taste what we have come up with, and watching their expressions and basically they leave just slightly happier than when they came in, no one ever brings their problems in here, and they leave a little happier, it's one of the best experiences I can remember in the working world is being behind this tasting bar.

- I'm Lynn Rasmussen.

I'm from Florida.

We're from the Villages, Florida.

It's a really wonderful winery, and you should come and try the wines.

They're really good.

We enjoyed it.

It's a wonderful experience.

- Right now, sitting here in September, mid September.

We are fermenting grapes up in the reductions area up in the pavillion.

So that's what you do smell, and that has a odor of its own, and some people like it, some people don't.

Fermenting is when we actually add a certain kind of yeast to the grapes with a nutrient that will turn the sugar of that grape into alcohol, and we turn then grapes into wine.

This is the first piece that the grapes actually go through, and this is called a crusher destemmer, and what it does, it actually draws grapes down into the body of this crusher destemmer.

It actually relieves the grapes from the stem, and actually crushes the grape.

Then what we possibly would do is move it into the press the next day and that's what this is.

This is a grape press, and it is a bladder press.

And what you do is you fill the inside of this cage with grapes and shut the cover, and then we start to fill this bladder in with air, and what it does, it expands like a big balloon, and what it does, it pushes the grapes to the outside inside, through the outside of this screen, and actually it forces the juice out of the grape.

Then after we feel our wines are ready to bottle, then we would use this machine first to bottle.

This is a bottling machine, and what it does is it has a pump in the bottom which actually fills this reservoir up here which holds about four cases of wine, and then actually gravity feeds into the bottles, so we actually put the bottle in each one of these, and we fill six at a time.

My wife is kinda my label developer.

She has a lot of fun with it, and she'll get up at two in the morning and go and tweak on the computer and I think I got it, honey, I think I got it.

So it's a lot of fun to watch her go at it, and she does an excellent job on our labels.

- I think it's really exciting to tell people, when they ask if we have Minnesota grapes, that yeah, we do, and actually if you look behind you, we have posters of the University of Minnesota grapes that they've discovered.

It's cool to say the University of Minnesota discovered how to keep these grapes going.

They made their own varieties and now we literally, the state, owns those grapes.

They were developed here.

They're grown here, and now we use them here to make wines, and I think that's a really exciting thing to show people, and tell people because people don't really think about grapes being grown here in Minnesota.

So cold climate grapes are now in existence and that's what makes wineries in Minnesota becoming more popular.

- One thing we, us Minnesotans like to do, is we don't like to go across to the east or the west of this continent and try to compare our tastes to them.

It's the same way with apples, the same way with grapes.

We will have our own taste, so we have to market our own taste, and that's what's happening.

We as Minnesota wineries do work together in order to promote our grapes that we can grow.

- [Erin] We have fantastic wines.

It's exciting to hear people say I've tried all your wines and there's not one I don't like, so how am I supposed to decide?

So to try something local and to get a feel for this area and if you're from this area, just to be a part of a really exciting up and coming local attraction.

- Now take a look at the history behind Morgan Creek Vineyards as we step into their underground winery in New Ulm.

- [Paula] We found this piece of property, actually, looking for firewood, and we came upon the fact that this place was for sale, and instead of buying firewood that day, we purchased a ten-acre farm site along the Morgan Creek.

My husband George and I have always been interested in agriculture and gardening, so we wanted to use the land in some way that would follow along those lines of interest that we had.

We opened the winery in 1999, built it in 98, and it took a while before we got our vineyard established to decide to go ahead with the winery itself.

We were really gonna just grow grapes and enjoy living here on this nice little piece of property in southern Minnesota, but my husband, whose background is in the beer business with the August Schell Brewing Company.

He said, well if we're going to grow grapes, we might as well make wine.

- August Schell was my great great grandfather.

August Schell arrived in this country coming from the Black Forest Area in Germany, a little town of Durbach, and it's along the Rhine, and it happens to be in the middle of the Baden wine growing area in Germany, and the town is on the little creek, and surrounded by hillsides that are covered with grape vines.

And so August Schell came from this area.

When he moved to Minnesota here to be part of this New Ulm community, so he was obviously a wine lover at heart, and when he had the chance, he did put in some grape vines, so we got a little history to there and we feel kinda proud now that myself here, as being a great great grandson here, have actually now totally connected the family back into wine on a commercial basis.

- [Paula] The preservation of a wooden barn here, is for us, was a great opportunity to preserve some history of the area.

This is part of the uniqueness of who we are and what we want to be about here at Morgan Creek Vineyards is preserving the history of this here, preserving the landscape as well as the architecture that originated here years ago.

- The barn, for me, kind of represented again, another element from the past, and we feel some connections with what's gone on before and in particular, Paula and I both appreciate the beauty that you see, that comes out from that history and you have, I think, an innate desire to want to hang onto some of that stuff, and to make use of what you had, even if it's not in all that great a shape.

- As George thought through it, he went back to the basics and he said, well how is wine made centuries ago?

They didn't have great big facilities that managed production, and you realized that years ago, wine was fermented by digging holes in the ground and lining the ground with clay casks, so the clay casks were submerged, covered, and the fermentation process actually went on underground, so that there was a constant temperature, something that was not variable, especially in hot climates, in the mid-eastern climates, where it's very hot, so he started thinking underground.

He kinda thinks like that, different ways of analyzing things.

So we proceeded with the plans for building underground, and we've never regretted it since.

We built smaller than we probably would now, but we use the space very efficiently, plus we're using our outdoor areas, our portico's a wonderful space for gathering.

We preserved all of the stone from the original barn that was here.

We used it all in our landscaping here, which was a challenge too.

It's been a great decision, I think, to do that, and it's been unique for marketing purposes.

We're the only underground winery in Minnesota.

We're striving also to become a family business where we can pass this on to the next generation.

Our kids are interested and all of them have been involved in one way or another.

Our son, Adam, right now, we're happy that he's the one full-time position here that we've been able to fund.

Our son, Ben, he just completed the ninth crush that he did.

He's our lead crush person.

He is a musician, however, a full-time musician.

He works in the region making his living that way, and so he also is our artist in residence here at the winery.

He performs here every Wednesday night, or Friday night for wine down for the weekend, which is a venue of classical and jazz piano that he does.

- [George] It's hard to describe, but when you taste the wine, that really touches you.

It's just like oh, there's so much more.

It's like it opens up a whole new world for you, and wine and pairing it with foods and so on, and so on, you can discover all these things where all of a sudden, that wine makes something way more than the combination of just the food and drink.

- [Paula] It's part of our mission, as well, in education in our tours and what we do is to help people understand wine, as George would express it, as a wisdom art, where a skilled wine maker will take the quality of fruit that's expressed from a particular landscape and carry its essence and its expression through production stages into the final vessel, which is the bottle.

One of the other unique parts of what we do is to make food and Minnesota cuisine a part of this experience of the artistic side of wine making.

Cause we believe wine is part of a lifestyle.

Food is an essential component.

We have a Valoriani oven, which is an Italian made oven.

It's a commercial oven.

The flavor that the oven provides is wonderful.

It goes great with wines.

It's a perfect pairing.

We just finished our wine pairing evening with our chef.

We work locally with Kim's Cuisine, Kim Ernest.

It's really hard work to get the best pairing, but when you find the right food with the right wine, you get that magic chemistry that comes together, and it enhances the wine.

It enhances the flavors of the food.

And when that happens, it's an a-ha moment.

It's just wonderful.

- It's a magical experience that you get, and that's what I think all people that like wine, that's what they're looking for.

And you don't find it everywhere.

Being a fifth generation brewery business, and participating in that, after a while, you'll just discover the fact that that's a very unusual situation, and that gives you a lot of pause for pride in the fact that the family has hung together and kept going a business through good times and bad times, and been able to continue that on now.

- That's all for this week.

For more information, go to our website.

See you again next time on Postcards.

- [Voiceover] This program on Pioneer Public Television is funded by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund with money from the vote of the people of Minnesota on November 4, 2008.

Additional support provided by Mark and Margaret Yackel-Juleen in honor of Shalom Hill Farm, a non-profit rural education retreat center in a beautiful prairie setting near Windom in southwestern Minnesota, shalomhillfarm.org.

The Arrowwood Resort and Conference Center, your ideal choice for Minnesota resorts offering luxury townhomes, 18 holes of golf, darling reflection spa, big splash water park, and much more.

Alexandria, Minnesota, a relaxing vacation, or great location for an event.

ExploreAlex.com.

Easy to get to, hard to leave.