|
COPYRIGHT 2001 Hiaring Company
Nestlect in the small, northwoods town of Three Lakes, Wis., the Three Lakes Winery is a second-generation family business built on the development and production of a unique combination of fruit wines--none of which contain any grapes. Founded by John and Maureen McCain in 1972, the winery is now run by sons Mark and Scott McCain, and Mark's wife, Shane, and is still operated from the old railroad depot the business began in 28 years ago.
The railroad tracks are gone now and the little corner building sits back unobtrusively, a quiet part of the peaceful small-town landscape. Although the winery does a great deal of business in the summertime at the peak of Wisconsin's tourist trade, strangers driving through the little town might easily miss the winery altogether if they didn't know it was there.
In the Heart of Cranberry Country
Unless it happens to be the first full weekend in October, that is--during the area's annual Cranberry Festival. The winery becomes a hub of activity filled with tourists and locals boarding buses for tours of the local cranberry bogs. These same bogs produce the fruit used in the winery's unusual and best-selling cranberry wine, and in recent years those cranberry bog tours--one of the highlights of the festival--have been starting and ending at the winery.
The Three Lakes Winery also offers tours of their facility during the festival and year-round, so visitors can see firsthand how fruit wines are made and bottled, and can sample any of the 15 varieties of fruit wine. Of those 15 wines, the winery has become most famous for its unique cranberry wine.
Made from the finest locally-grown cranberries, cranberry wine accounts for nearly 50% of the company's production. Several cranberry blends--cranberry-raspberry, cranberry-apple, and cranberry-rhubarb--are also good sellers.
In addition, the winery offers blackberry, red raspberry, strawberry, strawberry-rhubarb, rhubarb, granny smith apple, apricot, wild plum, Italian plum, kiwifruit and elderberry wines and will soon offer a blueberry wine.
Winery Uses Whole Fruit Fermentation
The winery specializes in fruit wines made using a rather unique process--the basis of which is a process relatively uncommon in the wine industry called whole fruit fermentation. The McCains start with whole, fresh fruit, most of which is harvested from California fields and orchards and Wisconsin cranberry bogs and frozen at the peak of ripeness.
"Freezing not only preserves the fruit at its finest, but it also helps prepare the fruit for fermentation. It's actually a good thing," Mark McCain says, "because it helps break down the cellular structure-particularly with (fruits like) cranberries and rhubarb-- very tough fruits." Tough fruits like these need to be cut up or crushed to begin the fermentation process.
A cranberry, for example, is airtight, Mark explains. "If it wasn't frozen and then crushed, it would never ferment. The cell structure's just too tight." He said cranberries are actually ground down to a mushy consistency to prepare them for fermentation.
Softer fruits-like raspberries, blackberries, and strawberries-don't need to be crushed. "Rhubarb is very tough," Mark says, but "it comes to us sliced (in one-inch slices), so we don't have to crush it... apples, we grind up."
Mark says the frozen fruit is thawed, put into tanks, and then mixed with a00 sugar water base to get the sugar content high enough...
Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.
|
Bookmark this article
Print this article
Link to this article
Email this article
Digg It!
Add to del.icio.us
RSS
