........To an open house at the winery.

This Sunday is the annual hatfield luminary celebration. Many of the houses and town buildings are decorated with candle luminaries.  Starting after sunset, cars slowly drive through town with their lights dimmed. There's caroling in the town center, santa stops by to celebrate with the town and it's just a fun all around  night. If you happen to be driving or walking through town admiring the lights, be sure and stop in for some wine tastings and treats.

Dip a strawberry or other treat in the chocolate fountain

take a sip of our raspberry wine and then a bite of the chocolate covered fruit - delicious!

This is the last weekend that we're open for last minute wine buying.

Open Saturday and Sunday, noon to 5 pm and Sunday evening. Happy Holidays!

 

After you've shopped the malls on Black Friday looking for that perfect gift

 Relax with a different kind of shopping at the winery for our version of Black Friday - Wine Friday!

We'll be open Friday along with Saturday and Sunday from noon to 5 for free wine tastings.

Along with our 7 varieties of wines, be sure to sample the Cranberry Pepper Jelly from New England Cranberry Company, the homemade raspberry jam in regular and seedless varieties, hand made chocolates and our Apple Harvest Sparkler Sangria made with our Apple Wine. 

It's just the thing to take your mind off the fact that there will only be 28 days left before Christmas!  Yikes! Pass the wine!

Thank you channel 40.

Like wine, your preference for where you like to get your news is a very personal thing.

In the mornings I watch Faye and Eric on channel 40 for my local news.

They always put me in a good mood to face the day.

A segment I really enjoy is their “coffee cup salute”.

Local businesses or organizations can send in their coffee cups (or in our case, wine glasses) along with their information and they talk about it on the air.

So I did and they did and apparently a lot of people watch Eric and Faye because we had so many people visit this weekend from all over saying they heard about us from Channel 40.

It felt like a party.

I often have available my Sangria for tasting (the recipe can be found in a past blog) along with chocolates and crackers and jams to try too.  By 3:30 the Sangria was gone, the samples devoured and the tasting bottles almost empty. 

It was so much fun! 

And…..guess who stopped in.

 

Yup, that’s THE Eric Fisher from Channel 40 news.  It was so fun to actually meet him after watching him on TV every day.  I took just one quick pic (didn’t want to go all paparazzi on him). So thanks Channel 40 and Eric and Faye for making our weekend so special.

 

Because when the weekend's over we get to drink the leftovers : )

Now that we're open, I just noticed it's fall!
The trees are quickly changing to vibrant reds, yellows and oranges.
The air is still warm but with a crispness to it.

If you're planning on stopping by this weekend, feel free to wander around with your tasting glass, go outside and walk the vineyard as you sip the wine, check out the stainless steel tanks where next year's wine is being prepared and breathe in the scent of apple juice bubbling away in the fermenting tub.

We stir it twice a day and the smell of apples fills the room.

Isn't is yummy looking?

Okay, maybe not yet : ) but it will be.  We'll keep it in this tub, stirring it until the yeast has eaten all the sugar in the juice.
Then we'll transfer it to a stainless steel tank to let the sediment settle to the bottom and the liquid starts to clear.

Oh, and if you're a fan of chocolate:

We're offering hand made chocolates in the winery this year.  For an extra special treat,  sip our raspberry wine and then take a bite of chocolate, pure heaven!

Come to town this Saturday for Hatfield's Harvest Festival Celebration of Agriculture! 

There'll be a book sale at the historical Emily Dickinson Library, an antique car show and a 5k road race.

Visit the farm museum behind the library.  This huge old tobacco barn is filled to the brim with Hatfield's farming history.

Oh, and be sure and stop by the winery as we open for the season.  From now until the end of the year we are open on weekends from 12 - 5 for free wine tastings of all our varieties.

Come try the new red

And this year, along with our apple, blueberry, raspberry and cranberry fruit wines, we're offering a new apple-raspberry wine.

Come and see which one is your favorite.

Hope to see you this weekend!

This weekend the weather was just perfect.

Perfect for pressing the grapes we recently picked and have been fermenting nicely.

Here is Casey getting the press ready to go.

Beneath that green mesh cover is a big metal round sieve that we have placed some fermenting grapes in.

In the very center is a rubber bladder that fills with water and expands pressing the grapes against the sieve squeezing out wonderful red juice. You can see it flowing into the bucket.  The green covering helps keep the juice from squirting out all over the place and keeps it flowing to the bottom and into the pail.

Below is another shot. 

Below is a pic of the inside of the press before it is activated.  You can see the soupy grape must around the bladder.  The juice flows out leaving just the grape skins etc to be pressed.

The next picture is the inside after the grapes have been pressed. See the expanded bladder in the center?

After multiple presses we fill stainless steel tanks with the juice to age.

 

And rain it did.

We picked Friday and Saturday this past weekend and it rained both days.  We got wet. Wet got soaking wet but we also got grapes.

This is Casey showing one of our nephew's friends how to harvest the grapes.

Here's our nephew J.J.  I know I'm biased but he's awesome!!! Thanks J.J.

Here are some grapes in a fermenting tub after we put them through the crusher/destemmer.

And lastly please indulge a grandmother with a picture of two of our grandchildren, Torren and Annabella.  Annabella made Torren hold her baby while she drove.

Obtain fruit - ferment - transfer - bottle - repeat.....

And so it goes.   Just as we are finishing bottling our wines from last year's fruits, the wonderful people at Cranberry Hill delivered 300 lbs of beautiful organic cranberries to begin fermenting for next year.

We break them down to release all their cranberry bog goodness.

Then put them in bags (think cheese cloth) which make them easier to handle but still release all their wonderful flavor and color.

They'll stay in these fermenting tubs for about 2 weeks.

 

Two of these tubs contain cranberries, and two contain blueberries.  We also managed to put up a teeny tiny tub of precious blackberries that I have great hopes for : )

Round and round goes the wine!

 

We were feeling pretty good.

Even with arguably the wettest summer on record and cooler than normal temperatures, weather that grapes do not appreciate and do not produce well in, we have a nice crop.

Growing grapes organically, our arsenal of weapons to use against the onslot of disease and pests that sort of unusual weather breeds is limited and can be not as effective.

But hey, The Burts have been farming for over 6 generations.  We've seen it all.  The hurricane of 1938, the flood of 1955 and other assorted crazy weather New England is Known for, so we can handle it and were excited when the grapes began maturing.

 I have never seen water pooling in our vineyard before, even in spring.

The onslaught of rain and some hail thrown in for good measure pommelled the electric fence we had just put up to keep the critters from eating our crop.

I was standing in water up to my ankles in the vineyard taking these pictures.

Now, logically, I know this is not personal but I can't help feeling that mother nature is just not a wine drinker!

Hopefully the grapes willl dry out!