As annual grape harvest gets underway, Cambridge Winery marks production milestones
Working alongside Peregrine and others this week, local resident and regular Cambridge Winery customer Lyn Larsen said she volunteered because “I like wine and I thought it would be fun.”
When Frank and Laurie Peregrine planted the first grapevines at their newly-founded Cambridge Winery in 2015, they had a vision for someday making wine entirely from their own locally-grown fruit.
In 2021, other than buying a small amount of La Crosse variety grapes for use in some of its blends, the winery will mark that milestone.
“We’ve been buying fruit from other growers every year. This year, it will be almost exclusively from our vineyard,” Frank Peregrine said this week as he joined staff, a winery consultant from the Lake Geneva area and community volunteers in beginning the annual hand-harvest of about 10 acres of red and white grapes.
Working alongside Peregrine and others this week, local resident and regular Cambridge Winery customer Lyn Larsen said she volunteered because “I like wine and I thought it would be fun.”
Dan Shumate, who lives in The Vineyards at Cambridge Apartments a short walk away, similarly said he has a long-time passion for winemaking and has volunteered at the winery in other capacities this season.
“I really love being out here and being so close to nature, and seeing how it all develops,” he said.
The harvest of the winery’s eight varieties of grapes will go on until about Oct. 1. Petite Pearl, a red grape that this week remained in tight, still-maturing and still-sour clusters, will be the final variety picked.
Peregrine said it will be the first year since the Cambridge Winery’s founding that it won’t buy Marquette variety grapes from other growers, that are used to make its Marquette Reserve wine.
He said the winery plans to continue the buy some white grape juice every three years from the Finger Lakes region of New York for use in its sweet white wines, including its CamRock wine. But he said it did that just last year so no purchase is planned for 2021.
The first grapes to be picked in this year’s harvest that began on the warm, sunny morning of Monday, Aug. 30 were the white Brianna variety, used to make the winery’s popular Brianna wine and blended into several of its other wines.
Brianna grapes are the variety most grown in Cambridge with 650 vines that this year are expected to yield about 3.5 tons of fruit, or enough for about 200 cases of wine.
“Brianna is very fragrant and very tropical,” Peregrine said, and gives the winery’s blends “a nice nose and nice flavor profile.”
In all, today, the Cambridge Winery vineyard stretches over about 12 acres with more than 5,000 vines. About 10 of those acres are now mature enough to be producing, Peregrine said as he clipped bunches of Brianna grapes from leafy vines and dropped them into a 5-gallon pail.
In coming days, the Brianna grapes will begin to be processed at a winery in Ripon. That resulting white wine is expected to be ready for bottling in the spring of 2022.
Red wines are typically barrel-aged longer, bottled about a year after the grapes are harvested.
Peregrine said he has a long-term vision to process wine on the Cambridge Winery site, in a facility that would be either free-standing or connected to its Event Center. He said some of the Cambridge property remains vacant, earmarked for that, but those plans are down the road.
The winery’s first grapevines were planted in 2015 and 2016. They struggled several winters ago with a punishing stretch of sub-zero weather and are just now fully recovering.
Peregrine said the hot, dry 2021 growing season was perfect for grapes that need a minimum number of high-temperature days to mature with a desired sugar content.
He said he has hopes of increasing the harvest volume in coming years but said “somebody told me it might take 40 years to get your volume up where you want it. I hope to live long enough to see that.”
Peregrine said inviting community members to help with the harvest is something long done by other wineries.
“There’s a certain comradery when you’re out here,” he said. “It’s kind of fun; we’re all in it together.”
“Most wineries I know of try to get volunteers. It depends on where they’re located, if there’s a town there,” he continued. “In our case, we’re right here in town, which is kind of part of the whole concept of having a vineyard that’s part of a neighborhood.”
The Vineyards at Cambridge neighborhood’s apartment buildings and single-family homes wrap around the grapevines. Some backyards are steps from where maturing grapes basked this week in the warm, late summer sun.
Peregrine said the Petite Pearl vines were intentionally planted on the back side of single-family homes and along the entrance driveway to the neighborhood because of their picturesque, deep purple color and because they are on the vines the longest, lending a full season of ambiance.
He called the annual harvest “not only the culmination of a season’s worth of work, but also lots of seasons’ worth of work that got you to this point.”
Peregrine said community members who want to help with this year’s harvest should email him at frank@cambridgewinery.com. They’ll be added to an email list and get alerts when grapes are ready to be picked, which is dependent on the weather and other factors.
So, volunteer flexibility is key.
“Sometimes we don’t know until a day or two before,” he said.
