Sustainability Is Important To Us

We built our winery into the hillside. The lower level contains our wine production area and barrel cellar. Being built into the hillside eliminates to need to heat or cool this space. All of our lighting is LED. Our furnishings are re-purposed or restored items that we have repaired and refinished.

Our barrel room is underground. The soil below the frost line stays at a fairly consistent 55-58 degrees Fahrenheit. This temperature keeps our basement walls, which are over one foot thick, cool and consistent. The area inside then stays at a fairly constant cool temperature and humidity. Our wines age for up to two years in barrels.

Our event space is a timber frame building with a 10 inch thick foam core roof panel system. The wall panels are 6 inches of insulating foam core. This reduces our energy needs for heating and cooling. We reused old barrels to create our light fixtures. The barrel staves, unseen in the picture, created the loft railings on two sides.

Our Niagara Escarpment vineyard is in a sunny and windy location. To take advantage of this, we have a 10 kilowatt wind turbine and roof mounted solar panels. Together they produce most of our energy needs. We also have geothermal heating and cooling.

We have never used herbicide in our vineyards. Instead, we cultivate or mow under the vines to reduce weed growth. We keep our sprays to a minimum by employing cultural practice like leaf thinning to keep sunlight on our fruit and leaves. Wild flowers and plants in our vineyard rows reduce soil erosion and keep pollinators fed.

Clean water is important. We have grassy headlands near a small drainage stream that bisects our property. This prevents runoff from our vineyards from entering the waterway. We compost our used grape seeds, skins and vine prunings to provide a healthy addition back to our vineyard soil.