Morgan Creek Vineyard kicks off growing season

By RON LARSEN

Journal Staff Writer

CAMBRIA -- It was cause for celebrating a new growing season and the introduction of a new wine at the Morgan Creek Vineyards near here Saturday.

Visitors sampled Morgan Creek's new release, a 2002 Bacchus semi-sweet vintage called Bacchanal; it's a richly colored red wine made from a blend of Minnesota-grown St. Croix and Marechal Foch. The blend produces delicate blackberry and earthy herbal aromas.

In a festival atmosphere, visitors toured Morgan Creek's winery and vineyard or just sat back, savoring the wines and listening to a musical group brought in for the occasion.

Meanwhile, owners Georg and Paula Marti circulated, answered questions from the curious and occasionally led tours of the grounds.

"It's an important event for us this year as for the first time since we started 80 percent of our (wine) stock is home grown," Georg Marti said.

With just three acres of grapes on the farm the Martis own two miles off Highway 68, east of New Ulm, Morgan Creek's wines have been about 50-50 home-grown stock versus imported stock in terms of percentage of volume until now.

It was the Martis' goal when they started the winery to produce 100-percent home-grown wines.

So, Marti has been contacting local farmers, offering them $3,000 an acre for their production, if they would grow grapes. That drive to get local farmers to grow grapes is finally bearing fruit, so to speak.

"We now have 15 acres of grapes being grown by area farmers, and because it takes about three to four years to get a full crop, we're now seeing full crops coming off some of those acres," Marti said.

"It's a win-win situation for both of us because we get the additional home-grown production, and the farmer has another cash crop."

Of course, Marti credits the research work being done at the University of Minnesota because researchers continue to come up with more Minnesota winter-hardy grape varieties that can be grown here.

While the new Bacchanal is a blend including a University of Minnesota-developed hardy variety, the winery's other new wine, Nova, a semi-sweet blush, is 100 percent Frontenac, the first cold hardy varietal of University of Minnesota origin.

It was planned to have it ready for release along with Bacchanal, Marti said, but the winery ran into some production-related delays that set back the date for Nova's release.

In deference to the Marti family's German heritage as determined by August Schell making his home in New Ulm, the winery carries two German wines in its inventory that are not as hardy as the University of Minnesota varieties, Marti said.

The semi-dry Gewurztraminer and a semi-sweet Riesling are representative of the wines grown in Schell's homeland on the Rhine river, Marti said.

"It takes more work because the vines have to be buried in order to survive our winters," Marti explained, "but, in this area, we can't not have any German wines, can we?"