Winery Visit - "Batton Hollow Winery"

Greetings wine-os, and welcome to a special edition of Mike Drinks Wine! On today's episode, we visit Batton Hollow Winery in Lost Creek, West Virginia! Now wait, doesn't that sound familiar...?

*flashback to February 22nd, 2015 posting*

Whoa! Did Mike actually follow his word? You bet your grapes he did! I called up my cousin and got around to scheduling the visit to his parent's winery, and a week later, we drive 3 hours to spend the night and see whats new!

And what is new? Summer Breeze is... they saved bottling of a few hundred bottles until we arrived so we could get in on the action. The process went something like this:

Large tank of fermented wine on the left, bottle trough on the right (see below for details)

• Suck on the end of a short hose leading out of the bottom of large steel drum full of fermented wine to begin the siphon suction, and redirect the hose into a trough.
• From the trough, three bottle-taps were available, and you'd just push on the tap to let the wine pour into the bottle, shutting it off right before the lip and passing the bottle to the next station.
• Next came the corking, and this is where I jumped in; you take the bottle and line it up on this big mechanical press. Then, you drop a cork into the top hole and push down the lever forcing the cork down a precise distance into the bottle.
• After that, you dry the bottle off with a rag and slap a label on it with their sticker machine.
• Finally, you put a loose foil wrap over the cork and stick it in what I can only describe as an Easy-Bake Oven, that shrinks the foil down over the lip. The total time for each bottle was about 1-2 minutes depending how efficient each station was.
• We had my 4-year-old baby cousins manning some of the stations, so it was more about enjoying it than efficiency haha.

Punching in the corks in the bottling process

This was the last of their sweet white wine named "Summer Breeze", and tasting it fresh from the tank was one of the most delicious fruity white wines I've had. After the bottling, they showed us around the fermenting section of the winery.

They were at various levels of fermentation for each of their wines

We learned about the fermentation and aging process, and how differences in temperatures can play a big role in the end product of the wine. Almost all of the wines were housed entirely in steel tanks, but they were testing a special varietal named "Classic Red" in the oak barrel seen on the right.

Oak barrel used for aging one of their bestselling wines: Classic Red

All of their wines took about 6 months from receiving the grapes to bottling the wine, and most of their grape juice is imported from local growers. They do have a vineyard in the back, but it was planted last year, and as we learned, vines usually take at least 3 years before they're ready to start producing wine-grapes.

Tasting room art painted by none other than my own cousin; Beth Roselius!

Next we headed into the tasting room to try out the fruits of their labor (lol), in which the walls and the canvases were hand-painted by my cousin! I tasted the Vidal Blanc, Seyval Blanc, Summer Breeze, Chardonel, Riesling, Rustic Red, and Classic Red (from the bottle, the steel tank, and the oak barrel!), and was impressed and delighted be each one!

Me and the Miss leaving the Winery. Can't wait to go back and see the changes!

Overall, it was an amazing weekend, I'm glad we were able to go and see the bottling! They have huge plans for growth with separating the tasting room from the fermentation garage, and possibly creating a little Bed-and-Breakfast sort of deal. I ended up buying a whole case and can't wait to share the love with my close wine friends back in the 'Burg.