No vintner wants to see rainfall during harvest season.
Rain, so welcome early in the season, is a scourge during harvest, causing grapes to swell, sometimes even to burst. They lose their sweetness, as the water dilutes the sugar within. On their way to becoming wine, grapes are best when their flavor is concentrated.
This year, as the rain fell on the lush fields outside Auburn Road Vineyard & Winery in Pilesgrove, N.J., it’s not just the future of his 2014 vintage that winery partner Scott Donnini had to worry about. It’s now an entire region.
The Vintage Atlantic Wine Region, announced in September, stretches from the Brandywine Valley in Southeastern Pennsylvania down to the eastern shore of Maryland and then east, across southern Delaware to Cape May and the Jersey Shore. It gives name and marketing power to what is already up and running: More than 50 wineries, spread over six wine trails, all within easy driving distance of each other. Individually, they’ve been growing grapes and producing steadily better wines for years. Taken as a whole, they intend to establish themselves as a tourism destination, a significant draw for the region in a time when American wine consumption continues a decade-long growth trend.
They have a model to follow. It’s been only 15 years since the creation of the Finger Lakes Wine Country Tourism Marketing Association in New York. Today, the Finger Lakes is one of the largest wine regions in the country, boosting the local tourism market with 301,000 incremental day and overnight trips to the region over a seven-month period in 2012, and realizing an incredible return on investment of $44 in trip spending for every $1 invested in marketing, according to a Longwoods International study.
The Finger Lakes have helped create a market that the Vintage Atlantic Wine Region plans to draw: Well-heeled tourists who travel to taste, spend days in vineyards and nights in restaurants, and plan to stay overnight and have time to visit other attractions between winery tours.
Road map to a region
It was during a trip to the Finger Lakes that Scott Donnini found himself staring at maps. Or, more accurately, the same map, which he saw everywhere: inside wineries, at rest stops, when leaving restaurants, and on racks in convenience stores. The map was produced by Finger Lakes Wine Country and guided people to the wineries, yes, but also hotels, restaurants and other tourism locations-and it was full of ads. Something dawned on Donnini during that trip: “Our part of the world is, if taken all together, no larger than the Finger Lakes.”
The thought continued as he returned home. He started to have conversations with like-minded people and, eventually, found himself at Penn’s Place in Old New Castle (“A supercool place to sit and plan a revolution,” he said) with Chuck Nunan from Harvest Ridge Winery in Marydel, Karen Cline of the Brandywine Valley Wine Trail in Pennsylvania, and Sarah Willoughby from the Greater Wilmington Convention and Visitors Bureau. The potential for the Vintage Atlantic Wine Region came into focus there.
“There’s two things a wine region needs,” Donnini said. “You need good wine being made, and you need critical mass. And there is-and I know this for a fact-really good wine being made here.”
That fact, that good wine can and is being produced in the Vintage Atlantic region, is not news. As Kate Zernike writes in the New York Times, the region “features ideal conditions for growing wine, with sandy soil, mild winters, and a long growing season.” With growing confidence two years ago, state winemakers in New Jersey brought elite wine critics to a blind tasting of New Jersey wines and French wines. The resulting “Judgment of Princeton” ended in a tie-which was actually a victory for the fledgling wine region.
Still, most stories about local wine trails and vineyards in the regional press find themselves stuck in the “day trips” columns of local features sections. Donnini imagines much more.
“Little Auburn Road Vineyards, or even Brandywine Valley Wine Trail, is not in itselve a destination,” Donnini said. “But now, let’s say you come into the area, and you want to spend a week. You go down to Cape May wineries, you go across the Cape May-Lewes Ferry, and you do the ones in Delaware and Maryland. And there’s all sorts of other things to do. This is where the region really gets some legs. What we’re trying to do is encourage people to stick around. We’re an economic driver, and what the wineries have been [in other regions] is the thing that stitches things together.”
Finger Lakes model
In 1998, one of the largest employers and industrial leaders in the Finger Lakes, Corning, commissioned a study to investigate what would drive local tourism and help attract high-quality employees to the area. At the time, Corning was in the middle of a $65 million renovation to its Corning Museum of Glass, but the study found that it wasn’t glass bringing people into the area as much as what was inside the glass.
“The commonality was wine,” said Tom Tranter, president of Corning Enterprises.
At the time, the area was primarily known for outdoor recreational tourism -clearly driven by the area’s natural beauty, but drawing primarily what local tourism officials called “pork-and-beaners,” tourists who drove in, shopped in local grocery stores, went camping, and then went home. With a $250,000 grant that was matched by three surrounding wine-producing counties, Corning Enterprises launched Finger Lakes Wine Country. By most accounts, it has been an overwhelming success, Tranter said. Attendance has increased at most attractions, not just the wineries, on an annual basis. Hotel rooms are full, and more hotels have been built in the past 15 years.
“We really feel we accomplished what we set out to do,” Tranter said.
The annual budget for marketing the wine region has increased to about $900,000, but the funding sources have changed. A third still comes from Corning, and another third from the counties, but the rest comes from the wineries themselves, which have seen the clear benefits of marketing the region as a whole, rather than themselves individually-overcoming the parochialism that the region struggled with in the beginning.
“Some would say I only want to spend the money on my attraction,” Tranter said. “You have to recognize that the whole is stronger than the sum of the parts.”
Cooperative thinking
In New York, getting past that parochialism required the cooperation of three counties-no small feat. The Vintage Atlantic Wine Region requires cooperation between four separate states, each with its own tourism departments, alcohol distribution laws, and budgetary concerns.
But so far, the organizations are working together.
“Connecting and collaborating on this initiative has been exciting and energizing,” said Willoughby at the GWCVB. “For me, I want advertising at the Philadelphia, Baltimore, Atlantic City and Wilmington airports. With all of our culture, history and gardens, the Vintage Atlantic Wine Region is a reason to come sip, stay and explore.”
After passing the hat among the tourism organizations, wine trails and other interested parties, the Vintage Atlantic Wine Region has gathered about $30,000 in seed money, Donnini said. They don’t have a corporate angel like Corning behind them yet, but Donnini sees other advantages. For one, the Finger Lakes success shows that wine regions, as economic drivers, are not just possible, they’re profitable. Businesses understand that concept.
“Plus, thinking back to 2000-01, there was not the locavore movement there is now,” Donnini said. “And people did not drink wine then the way they do now. Wine as a viable beverage is much more of a thing now. We are a wine-drinking county. That’s why [the wineries] are all here.”
Indeed, even on a rainy Thursday afternoon, a group of corporate co-workers gathered inside the Enoteca (wine bar) at Auburn Road, preparing for a tour and a tasting. They were there on a field trip out of Wilmington, an afternoon of team bonding while discovering the wines being made 20 minutes from their offices.
Auburn Road, with the help of some very good press in New Jersey and New York, has already become a destination. Weekend tours are booked solid through January. These local wine drinkers are the low-hanging fruit, the people Donnini wants to reach first-to teach them how much more there is in the region, just a short drive away. A map will help, and creating that map-much like the one he saw in New York-is first on his agenda. With advertising sales, they hope to raise another $20,000 for the region with a map.
But wine seekers haven’t needed a map to find Harvest Ridge Winery in Marydel. Owner Chuck Nunan tracks his website traffic carefully, and he’s seen a steady stream of referrals coming from the Vintage Atlantic Wine Region website.
“When you have 50 wineries, it becomes a destination, not one for an afternoon, but to come for a week,” Nunan said. “They’ll be eating at restaurants, going to events, going to Longwood Gardens, looking at history. And that’s going to do nothing but benefit everybody.”
The next step is getting local wine inside local restaurants.
“You don’t see that so much, and it’s an absolute tragedy,” Donnini said. “That’s part of the evangelical mission.”
In New Jersey, state liquor laws allow wineries to operate a number of “microstores” around the state, which Auburn Road has smartly leveraged to set up shop inside about 12 BYOBs that sell their wine exclusively. But what works in Jersey will not work in Delaware or Pennsylvania, where the laws are inherently different.
“I think it’s our duty, as being one of the destinations for oenophiles in the area, to have those wines on the list, absolutely,” said Roger Surpin (at the time, the general manager at Domaine Hudson in Wilmington, and now with The Westin Wilmington). “The market is hot for something new and adventurous.”
Domaine Hudson currently stocks Virginia wines for visitors who ask for something regional, but Surpin is eager to offer wines from closer to home, especially after a blind tasting last year where he mistook a New Jersey wine for a Bordeaux.
“That really stunned me, as far as the quality,” Surpin said. “And I think their potential is enormous.”
As for the rains, one wet day does not a harvest make. The days that followed one dreary day at Auburn Road were sunny and unseasonably warm-perfect conditions for grapes ready to come off the vine. The prospects for the 2014 vintage are looking bright indeed. n
(Matt Sullivan is a writer and communications consultant from Wilmington and can be contacted at mgs375@gmail.com.)
