One of the most important aspects of Three Lakes Winery is our tours. This is because we consider it an important tool in educating people about the difference between fruit winemaking and making grape wine. We also have the chance to show how our fruit wines are different from other fruit wines! The Tour has a prominent place in our website, too, although nothing can compare to the "real" thing. As you read, try to imagine the smell of wine fermenting, or the sound of the bottling machine in action...better yet, plan a trip up to Three Lakes and stop in! We are open all year round, seven days a week. Guided tours are given May through October; self guided the remainder of the year.
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Grapes are the fruit of choice for most winemakers around the world for many reasons. The numerous varieties of grapes used to make wine are only outnumbered by the seemingly endless assortment of grape wines on the market today.
But variety is not the only reason for the popularity of the grape. If this were true, the apple, for example, with its almost endless list of varieties, would be in stiff competition with the grape. Another big reason is that grapes are made up of comparatively high concentrations of sugar. The alcohol in wine is the by-products of yeast digesting this sugar. Also, the skins of grapes contain high concentrations of tannic acid, or tannin. Tannin is a natural preservative allowing wine to age and in some cases, become better over time. High concentrations of sugar and tannin make grapes the perfect candidate for winemaking. However, the story only begins with grapes. Wines can be made from more than just grapes, and have been for many centuries. Fruits and berries of all kinds can be used to produce high-quality wines that would pleasantly surprise even an ardent wine connoisseur.
Unlike grapes, with naturally high concentrations of sugar (often as much as 35% or more), most of the fruits and berries we make into wine have relatively low concentrations of sugar. Cranberries (our most popular wine) contain approximately 4% sugar whereas strawberries and apples contain approximately 10% to 15% sugar. In order for fermentation to take place (without heating) and to achieve the desired alcoholic content (through natural fermentation), we must blend pure cane sugar and water with the whole fruit.
Most of the fruit we use is fermented in its natural state and does not need to be crushed because there is a thin skin and little or no fibrous structure; red raspberries for example. Cranberries and Granny Smith apples, however, require crushing. This is necessary in the case of the cranberries and apples because the yeast could not otherwise penetrate the skins of either fruit. This also helps to give the yeast access to all of the pigment areas of the fruit, thereby bringing out all of the natural color. In the case of wild plums, we run them between two rollers separated enough to avoid splitting the pit but close enough to break the skin. All of this is labor-intensive and also messy, but we have found that fermenting the whole fruit on the skin makes a superior, more full-bodied fruit wine. Most other fruit wines start out with the fruit concentrate, or the juice of the fruit and skip this entire process. Even more often (and for a much cheaper price) you will find sweet white grape wines that have been flavored with the "essence" of a particular fruit, and labeled as a fruit wine. When compared to "real" fruit wine, though, its like a fresh blackberry versus blackberry flavored kool-aide. Yes, even fruit wine drinkers have their snobs!
Some ask why we don't just add grape juice instead of pure cane sugar. In fact, many makers of fruit wine do add grape juice (or some other grape derivative) to the fruit in order to take advantage of the qualities of the grape mentioned above (tannins as a natural preservative). We prefer to use pure cane sugar because of its undetectable impact on the delicate flavor of the fruits and berries. Next, we add one of many varieties of yeast, depending on the fruit. Within less than an hour the yeast begins to digest the sugar, producing alcohol and carbon dioxide, among other trace by-products. The yeast literally consumes the fruit. Within days the fruit is reduced from its original color and texture to a dull colored, pulpy mush, skins and seeds. The wine has now taken on the characteristics of the fruit and something special has also happened. The character of the fruit itself transcends the chemical process of fermentation into the wine. Each fruit wine displays its unique character through a wide range of subtle and not so subtle flavors and aromas. Once fermentation has ended, the digested fruit is removed from the wine and pressed to remove any excess wine. The wine is then left to settle for as little as a few days but not much longer than a month. Filtering is the final step before the taste test. In order to ensure quality and consistency, each batch is tasted by the wine maker, Scott McCain, and often he is happily joined by whomever happens to be in the building at the time!
Unlike a typical winery which bottles wine from inventory as they need it, we make fruit wine all year round. A traditional year for the grape wine-making industry contains the harvest in late summer, the busy crush and then the creation of the next "batch" of wine. We make our wine as we need it. We store our quick-frozen fruit in a temperature controlled warehouse and then remove a few barrels at a time, depending on demand. During the summer, our busiest time for making fruit wine, you may see many different varieties of fruit in various stages of the wine making process. We have tanks that hold up to 1225 gallons, but we make sure we have a small batch on hand so folks can look down into and see the fermentation process at work. At other times of the year, you will also see fermentation taking place, but during the slower times we like to experiment with small batches of different fruits and berries for our next Gold Medal Winner!
One of the reasons we make wine as needed is to insure quality. We do not add any preservatives to our wine, and because most fruits (other than grapes) do not contain large quantities of tannins or sulfites as natural preservatives, the wines produced from them, in our opinion, are best when young. Our wine is best consumed 6 months to a year after its making. After this, the wine does not go "bad", only it may acquire a dusting of pigment at the bottom of the bottle. We also believe it losses some of its sparkling fresh flavor, as any fresh-squeezed fruit would after time. So for qualities sake, too, we make wine year round!
In 1998 we purchased a fully automatic bottling and labeling machine, a GAI 1503 Triblock and an OMB labeler. The machine enables us to produce 1,500 bottles an hour - compare this to four to six hours of bottling the same amount by hand. This is how we bottle all of our 750 m. bottles now, instead of by hand, which we have done since 1972.
For those of you who have been to the winery and are wondering about "John's Record Player/Heat Gun Invention?" Not to worry, we still use it in the manual line for our small 375 bottles. We start the manual bottling process with our hand operated bottle filler; the wine is siphoned from an elevated tank to a small receptacle on the filler, from which four spouts fill each bottle with 375 milliliters of fresh fruit wine. A screw cap is then applied and a plastic seal is heat shrunk to the cap and bottle (that's where John's Invention comes into "play.") One thing we have stopped using is the gluing machine - labels were applied by hand after they had been passed through a gluing machine, which glued you more than it did the labels. Good riddance!