History
OK this is really a history, not a story. To see Our STORY in PHOTOS please visit our gallery.
For the rest of you, i.e. the media…
Alton Farms Estate Winery began as a dream on a bucket list.
Wine grape growing along the south shore of Lake Huron
South Lake Huron did not have a history of wine grape growing. But research convinced our owners and winemakers, Marc and Anne Alton, that wine grapes could be grown and a new wine region started.
They searched for and eventually purchased the property in September 2005, moving their young family from Bright’s Grove to Aberarder Line in Plympton-Wyoming.
Our goal was simple “creating a vineyard and winery, making delicious wines and developing a new wine region”. Marc knew that geographically, this location in the middle of the world’s wine belt, the zone between 41 and 44 degrees north, would be an ideal one. (Note: Recently, with climate change, some reports have been calling this area the upcoming “Bordeaux” region of the world.)
Planting
We hand planted the first test acre in the Spring of 2006 with more than fifteen different varieties, including:
Cabernet Sauvignon,
Chardonnay,
Sauvignon Blanc,
Riesling,
as well as hybrid cold temperature varieties like
Frontenac,
Marechal Foch,
Baco Noir.
A second test acre followed in the Spring of 2007, with even more varieties including Shiraz and Lucy Kuhlman.
We then focused on planting larger blocks to make management practices easier. An additional acre was hand planted in each of the next years and today, we have seven acres of producing vines.
Once the vines were mature enough to harvest for wine making, about 7 years, the real fun began! We became the pioneer winery in Ontario’s emerging wine region of Lake Huron South Shore.
We now hand craft 13 to 18 different wines each year.
Infrastructure
This pioneer winery in Ontario’s emerging wine region, is appropriately housed in a century old drive shed, where we process and age our wines. A Barrel Room was added in Fall 2016 using predominantly re-purposed material. And our Tasting Room and Wine Store was expanded in early 2018.
For a birds-eye view of our vineyard and an inside look at our winery, check out this video by Ontario Southwest.
Sustainable Practices
There is a lot of talk about Sustainability in the Ontario wine industry. We currently cannot be certified as sustainable under the Ontario programs due to a lack of manpower. The majority of the Sustainable Certification is metering and paperwork and as there are only 2 of us, we do not have the capability to track, or set up systems for tracking of our sustainability, nor do we have the capital to put in the metering required. We prefer to spend our efforts being sustainable in our everyday practices.
However, we started this winery with the idea to be long-term sustainable for our children and the environment, and we try to be sustainable throughout our vineyard and winery as much as possible. Some examples follow:
Vineyard
Sustainability is key to all our practices; in other words we try to work the vineyard so that it can produce quality grapes with minimized chemical inputs, but also continue to produce grapes in the long term.
We also try to use natural fertilizers such as composted manures to help our vines grow. We keep our rows natural with grasses to keep down erosion and reduce evaporative water losses, weeds to help insects, clover to add nitrogen to the soil and reduced mowing to help keep nature in the vineyard. And from the winery, we compost our wine making residues – spreading this material in the vineyard to aid the plant growth.
Weed control
Cultivation, to keep down weeds, is usually mechanical, not chemical. This is labor intensive, but it reduces chemical input into the final wines. We mow alternate rows during the growing season to maintain the beneficial insect population. As the grapes start to ripen we allow the weeds and grasses to grow, reducing nutrients and water to the grape plants which helps to shut down the vines and mature the fruit a little earlier. We don’t use chemicals to shut down the vines.
We also use our herd of sheep to keep the vineyard weeds (somewhat) under control and remove the lower vegetation on the vines. This opens up the vineyard to winds, allowing better drying of the vines and less chemical use. Sheep also digest seeds and help to reduce the weed burden in the long term. Sheep manure, must (grape skins, seeds and yeast remains after winemaking), and local horse manure is our main source of fertilizer for long term vineyard health.
Insect control
Insecticides are seldom used in the vineyard as they disrupt the ecology – we accept the fact that we will have some insect damage to the plants and the fruit. If necessary, we remove insects by shaking the grape bunches prior to making our wine. We do lose leaves due to insect damage (especially Japanese beetles), we do lose grapes to other insect damage, but our practices reduce chemical input into our wines. We leave damaged fruit behind in the vineyard for the birds.
Birds
The worst problems we face are birds and mildews.
We use a large arsenal of bird scale techniques – propane cannons, bird scare calls, plastic owls and scare eyes, reflective tape, netting, noisy equipment and other noise makers to help control the bird population. Bird watchers are welcome – we have lots of birds in the vineyard even with the controls.
Mildew
Two of the few things we cannot ignore, Downy and Powdery Mildew, are controlled with chemicals. Some of the control chemicals are organic, some of them are best practices for sustainability. For example, we could use 3 kg of copper per hectare, or 300 grams of Sovran to combat Downy Mildew. The copper can be considered organic, but we need to balance that the copper is left behind in the soil forever, and will both find its way into the wine and keep killing the soil life for the long term. Sovran, on the other hand, has low toxicity and is readily degraded by microbial activity, so we choose to use this commercial product as it is the better sustainable choice.
We don’t irrigate, which tends to keep our wine quality up and reduces our water use.
Winemaking
We try to minimize the chemical inputs in the winery as well. We use grapes, yeast and yeast nutrients mainly in the processing. We minimize filtering and clarification additives by allowing our wines to drop to near freezing temperatures over the winter. During this low temperature soak, the natural tartrates drop out of the wine, carrying down much of the sediment. We rack, and once the wines are ready, bottle using a gentle gravity method.
Infrastructure
We believe in re-using whatever we can. Have you wondered about our buildings?
Our winery is one of the original century farm buildings, completely renovated down to the massive wall timbers, then heavily insulated so that we minimize temperature changes in the barrel room (allowing our red wines to gently barrel age).
Our new barrel room (wine storage facility) is mainly recycled/reused materials, and also heavily insulated, to minimize our environmental footprint. All the building cladding is recycled steel (except the roof for obvious reasons). The rafters and much of the wood framing are recycled from a heritage pig barn. One day we may get around to painting it, but it seems that you like the look, so maybe not…
And finally our store and event center:
The store and event center has just undergone the installation of a new heating system to reduce our carbon footprint in this space by about 95%. We used to heat this area with heating oil and have now installed an ultra-high efficiency heat pump running on electrical power.
The store and event center was created in one of the old houses we have on the property. Cozy and re-used…. creating the pioneer winery in Ontario’s emerging wine region of Lake Huron South Shore has been a challenging and rewarding effort … next time you are in South-Western Ontario, drop by and try the wines from this effort.
