BRADY, Neb. (AP) — Connie Brittan describes the labor aspect of wine making within the harvest season as, “Thanksgiving on steroids.”
“There’s a time deadline, there’s a great quantity of cooking and there is a tremendous amount of clean-up,” said Brittan, one of the operators of the Feather River Vineyards, located in the southern Platte Valley
Brittan runs the establishment with her husband, Dr. Jeff Brittan, and Kurt and Jeanne Pieper. She talked about the wine making process while she was “mixing up a suspension of things to feed the yeast.” for the fermentation process.
Her workshop is situated just off the main floor of the vineyard where a number of tanks are stored and where the wine also is bottled. It had the look of a kitchen but felt more like a chemistry lab.
“Yeast stimulant and yeast activator,” Brittan said as she poured a measured amount of liquids into a pail. “Each is different based on what yeast you use and what style of wine you are making.”
Despite that, the goal is the same.
“It’s all about keeping the yeast happy,” Connie told The North Platte Telegraph.
Sharon Axthelm laughed when told of Brittan’s assessment of wine making.
Axthelm operates the Old Depot Vineyard & Winery in Brady with her husband, Jason, and Necole and Jeff Miller. The vineyard opened in July after the idea was first broached when the four enjoyed a bottle of Jason’s homemade wine.
“I thought (initially) it was going to be really fancy and romantic and it really is not,” Sharon said of the wine making experience. “First of all, it’s a lot of work and it’s all about math and science.”
Jason’s wine making has grown from a hobby, originally making wines only for friends and family members or for fundraisers. His knowledge has come from reading, talking with other wine makers and just trial-and-error over the years.
“He loves numbers and he loves science,” Sharon said. “Everything he does has a formula and he’s checking it against the numbers. He works it until he gets it where he wants to be with it. It is an art but it also definitely is a science.”
Feather River grows cold-climate grapes that can withstand lower temperatures.
“Some of these are good to minus-20 or minus-30 degrees,” Jeff Brittan said.
Feather River has a roughly 40-acre vineyard and harvest season begins about the middle of August. A mechanical harvest beats the vine with rubber sticks to get the fruit to drop, and once that happens a conveyor belt carries the fruit to a holding bin.
Jeff estimated that roughly 45 tons of grapes will be harvested this year.
“We’re not even back to full production,” Jeff said. “We had that bad hailstorm a few years ago and it took out about a third of the grapes. It takes about three or four years for them to get re-established.”
After harvest, the grapes are then put through a series of machines that crush, de-stem and skin them. The process happens outside and tubes transport the juice to fermentation vats inside the facility when yeast is then added.
After about 10 days the mixture is then pumped into a tank or barrels and allowed to sit for, “a couple months, maybe a year or two down the line,” Jeff said.
The crushing and skinning process at the Old Depot is done outside of the vineyard complex — a former depot building that opened in Gothenburg in 1909 and moved to its present location of 33651 E. Banner Road in October 2018.
The juice then travels to vats located in the structure basement through tubes.
The wine is also bottled and hand-labeled in the basement as well.
The Old Depot has established a small vineyard on its property — less than five acres — and has purchased grapes for its first harvest season. That includes product from Feather River and the Old Cellar Vineyard in Arapahoe and 5 Trails in Paxton.
Sharon said Old Depot received its final order of harvested grapes for the season at the end of September.
“We will probably never be able to grown enough (grapes) to produce at the level we want to produce at,” Sharon said. “We will always buy.”
The Old Depot used a hybrid grape that was developed by the University of Minnesota– the petite pearl — for their Midnight Star red wine, which Sharon described as having, “a fruity front but a dry finish.”
“It probably is our most famous, most accepted (offering) because people were so surprised to get such a nice, dry wine in Nebraska,” Sharon said. “It has a huge cult following where some people will only drink that.”
The Depot also created its Rambler offering using the hybrid frontenac and fredonia grapes.
“People who like both sweet and dry like that one,” Sharon said. “That’s probably becoming our most popular one now.”
