Additional Articles for July 2002 Issue                      

Try this Lincolnville Riesling

    
     

By William Lannon

From the north windows of the old barn, you can see Levenseler Mountain. Shortening your view, you see the vineyard of the Cellardoor Winery, which runs north and south off Route 52 on Youngtown Road in Lincolnville. There’s also a spring-fed pond in which a beaver has taken up residence and a circle of stakes to the northeast of the pond which looks to the uninitiated like a crop circle, but which is really a vigna 

Vintners Stephanie and John Clapp pause for a moment in the sun in their 6-acre Lincolnville vineyard. Lannon photos
  

tonda or round vineyard. The primary rectangular vineyard encompasses six acres north of the vigna tonda. The barn itself is an impressive showroom for the various Cellardoor wines which number as many as 20 created from 25 different kinds of grapes.

The vineyard has been created by John and Stephanie Clapp who in the last five years have made the Cellardoor Winery a reality despite the fact that experts said it couldn’t be done. The eponymous winery itself has been installed in the high-ceilinged cellar of the Clapp’s adjacent house, which is also a bed and breakfast.

      

The vineyard has been created by John and Stephanie Clapp, who in the last five years have made the Cellardoor Winery a reality – despite the fact that experts said it couldn’t be done.

    

In November of 1997, after they had sold The Old Granite Inn on Rockland’s Main Street, the Clapps bought the Lincolnville property and immediately began clearing the considerably overgrown north pasture for the vineyard. The entire property is a mile and a quarter long, but only 500 feet wide. Stephanie explains that the odd configuration was created by the King’s Road grant of the eighteenth century.

  

The six acres of vines represent an extraordinary investment of time and material. The four thousand vines if planted in a straight line would extend for four miles of trellised rows. Twelve miles of wire support the vines. Each double row is 750 feet long. Though six acres may seem a small size, it is the largest vineyard in Maine.

John Clapp is originally from Massachusetts, but moved to Maine in 1971. He’s had a number of careers: as a boat builder who has worked at Penobscot Boat Works and Wayfarer, as a merchant mariner and master, an exhibiting artist particularly proficient in metal sculpture, and, with Stephanie, as a restorer

    
The six bottles at the right will shortly be filled with wine. The six bottle filling device is one of the few labor-saving machines at Cellardoor.
   

of houses from Maine to Georgia. He started making wine 20 years ago as a hobby.

Nor has Stephanie been idle. She grew up in Belfast and Lincolnville and proudly declares herself a "token local." She has taught art classes and coordinated activities in hospitals. When the Clapps owned and operated Rockland’s Old Granite Inn, which they converted from an Elks Lodge, they also ran the only bakery then in the Lime City and supplied some 17 restaurants and stores with breads and pastries. They were married in 1982.

Now the wine is their living and one that they work at some 11 hours a day. This is their second year of full production. Last year they bottled 8,000 bottles and it was all sold in Lincolnville, Rockport, and Camden. That’s perfectly all right with the Clapps who are extremely happy with being the "village winery."

Actually, at the moment, they are the state winery, in that they produce the only Estate Bottled wine in Maine. "That’s a legal term," explains John, "which means ‘grown, produced, and bottled’ on the premises." The last Maine vintner, Fairview Wine of Maine, located in Lewiston, not surprisingly went out of business during Prohibition.

Not all the Clapps’ wine is Estate Bottled. The Clapps do buy grapes for some wines from other sources, notably upstate New York. For now, however, they are the only folk in Maine who make a grape wine commercially with their own fruit. Some other firms produce wine entirely from other people’s grapes and it is not unheard of for a firm to buy the juice of grapes from elsewhere and bottle it themselves. There’s more money in making wine than in growing grapes," explains John.

Stephanie Clapp asserts, "This is a business. It’s not just for fun." They created their own ten year business plan with the goal of being self-supporting, with "maybe a profit." They are not sanguine about being able to make it simply as a curiosity, either. "You have to give them what they want," she declares, "or you won’t last." Having been in the hostelry business for 20 years, she knows the need to "capitalize on your experiences," as she puts it.

  

This is their second year of full production. Last year they bottled 8,000 bottles and it was all sold in Lincolnville, Rockport, and Camden. That’s perfectly all right with the Clapps, who are extremely happy with being the “village winery.”

  

The Clapps go to great lengths to give them what they want. They offer tours of the premises and walks through the vineyard. From books to corkscrews, the showroom offers every amenity and device needed for the enjoyment of good wine except a discriminating palate. However, they’re working on creating that palate because the showroom is set up for wine tasting events and is large enough to accommodate bus tours. Even with a large group, however, the Clapps are not likely to go broke from hosting large wine tasting sessions. State law limits each taster to five ounces.

And, what a variety there is to taste: reds, whites, greens, and yellows. Last year "they were waiting in line to buy the Riesling," according to Stephanie. Cellardoor also makes a Chardonnay, a Vidal, which is similar to a White Zinfandel, a Cabernet, a Cayuga White, a DeChaunac, and a Marechal Foch similar to a Merlot. The winery also produces pear, peach, apple, and blueberry wines.

Stephanie particularly enjoys the wine tasting sessions and has studied the patrons’ behavior with some interest. She reports, "husbands usually defer to their wives and don’t say very much during the tasting." She has no explanation for this phenomenon. She does observe though that wine seems much more popular now than it did some years ago. "The United States is learning gracious living," she remarks.

  
    Gracious living is all very well once one is sitting around a candle-lit dinner table, but it requires a good deal of effort on behalf of the vintner to bring fine wines to that table. It takes one square foot of grape leaf to create a pound of fruit and fourteen pounds of fruit to make a gallon of wine. A gallon of wine will fill five bottles. In Maine, there isn’t that much time in which to grow that fruit to make the wine. John points out that, "You have to grow and harvest between the frosts, roughly from May 10 to October 10." So, had the 8,000 bottles of wine John made last year all been made from grapes, it would have come from 1,600 gallons of wine which started as 22,400 pounds of grapes from an equal square footage of leaf. The fruit wines such as apple, pear and blueberry require varying amounts of produce. In an extreme example (because the  
The Clapps hung out their shingle on Youngtown Road in Lincolnville, and now own and operate the only "estate winery" in the State of Maine.
  
berries were small due to the drought), it took John 300 pounds of blueberries to make seven gallons of juice.

Once the fruit is harvested, the indoor work begins, and a lot of work it is. From crushing to fermentation to aging in the barrel and then to aging in the bottle, the most automated the process ever gets for John is his ability to bottle six bottles at a time using a hand-operated filler. The cellar houses all the equipment including the 60 gallon wooden barrels (225 litres) in which the wines age. The barrels are a story in themselves for they are made in Missouri of wood with a European ancestry which enhances the wines’ flavors. The length of time required for aging varies with the wine. The Riesling takes one winter; the pear takes two years. Cabernet and apple require three years of which two are spent in the barrel and one in the bottle. It’s all very complicated.

  

From books to corkscrews, the showroom offers every amenity and device needed for the enjoyment of good wine except a discriminating palate.
  

Not only is the process complicated, it is also at the mercy of many variables which make it far from precise. According to John, the wine never stops aging and it does so more rapidly in the bottle. The 20 years of experience he has seems absolutely essential to his work and while theory is important, working with the fruit and the wine over the years is more so. John is constantly studying and experimenting to learn even more about his craft. Entrepreneurs are never satisfied with the status quo.

Still, as Stephanie is fond of saying, "Life is short. Enjoy it!" In 1987, the couple sold the Old Granite Inn the first time (they bought it again in 1993), bought a 115-foot, 78-ton net, Baltic Trader built in 1914 called the S/V Windermere. They put 3,000 books aboard, then sailed the coast of Maine and read for three years. When they finished the books in 1990, they came ashore refreshed.

For now and the foreseeable future, however, the Clapps are very hard at work making wine and being hospitable. Their efforts have not gone unnoticed. This month, "Made in Maine" will be taping at the winery and well they might. The showroom is stocked not only with Maine-made wine, but also with a host of other Maine products. It may be that making an excellent wine will attract the customers, but it certainly doesn’t hurt to enhance one’s image and attraction with a variety of related products.

Certainly, that philosophy is at work on Cellardoor’s Web page. A vast number of photographs and links to local events and attractions as well as numerous wine links make the page very informative indeed. In addition, it shows the Clapps mean it when they speak of being the "village winery." A sense of belonging to the community, of being a part of its fabric and evolution is powerfully projected.

If, as Stephanie Clapp maintains, "Paradise is not found, but made," the Cellardoor Winery seems to be a very good project with which to start.

For more information: Cellardoor Winery and Bed & Breakfast, 4150 Youngtown Road, Lincolnville, ME 04849. Telephone: 207.763.4478 (toll free: 877.899.0196); email: <info@mainewine.com>; Website: www.mainewine.com.

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