It’s a dry kind of cold outside on this mid-January night — snow thin on the lawns and the roads stained with salt, and in the basement at 382 South Main St., mango wine is bubbling gently in great glass jars.
Five-gallon carboys of fermented mango juice sit on the shelves next to black-red carboys of blueberry, cloudy orange pumpkin, hazy pink plum, clear amber apple and golden peach. All the wines will be clear in the end, still colorful but translucent after the sediment finishes settling. They will sit here for months, then each carboy will fill 25 bottles of wine, to be sold in the Home Fruit Wine shop upstairs.
The shop is a former garage, refinished with wood recycled from David LeClaire’s day job at Deerfield Packaging Service in Turners Falls and woodworking know-how from his years at the former Bedroom Factory. He refinished the basement in the same stained and varnished wood, hoping to make the space presentable for winery tours someday.
LeClaire, 51, and partner Lori Perkins, 55, took the first steps in what is now a young and growing small business in 2011, when the backyard peach trees gave more fruit than they knew what to do with. LeClaire has lived in this, his first house, for about 35 years and has accumulated a small but fruitful backyard orchard, snapping up dwarf trees and bushes when they went on sale. He said he likes the way the flowers look, and he planted the first peach tree as a memorial for a pet.
“I had a dog that was named Pearl, and the tree was named Pearl. Summer Pearl peach it is, and I bought the tree as a reminder for the dog. And the tree kept on growing over the years and we had a bunch of peaches, “ he said.
“I guess I was his influence, because I said ‘Let’s make wine,’” Perkins said.
Perkins said when she was growing up her mother used to make raspberry wine in a crock and those old enough to drink seemed to like it.
“So we went online and we ordered a gallon kit and we made peach wine and it was the most awful peach wine that you ever tasted, but we kept trying,” Perkins said.
Help came in the form of the Internet, trial and error and family. Perkins’ late uncle Charley “Sonny” Perkins of Templeton was a big help early on, providing books, the benefit of his experience with fruit wine and hard cider, and lots of fruit. There is now a label in his memory: Sonny’s Blueberry Sunrise. Three years of effort yielded good peach wine, keeping in mind that each batch takes half a year or more. They gave bottles away as gifts to friends and family, kept experimenting with other fruit and people reacted well enough that they decided to open a business.
And business went pretty well. The shop is right on South Main Street, also known as Route 122, and their illuminated wine glass sign is hard to miss after dark. Business was brisk during the holiday season, even with the shop open only four hours a day. They’ve already re-invested in an additional, larger, vat.
“We had a cranberry wine that was just for the holiday, we were hoping that it would last for three months. We sold 100 bottles of cranberry wine in three weeks, and we weren’t counting on that,” LeClaire said. He started another batch of 125 gallons in November, and it will be ready in time for next Thanksgiving.
Tomato wine was another surprisingly strong seller, once free samples overcame initial objections. Their license allows them to sell or give small samples in the shop, and they’ve found it helps.
Perkins and LeClaire said that when they began making wine they found that most of their older family members remembered their parents making it, elderberry wine in particular, but fruit wine isn’t familiar as it was. Sweet and flavorful, most of the fruit wines are meant to be consumed with desert. Tomato is a notable exception —
Perkins said it goes best with macaroni and cheese. Some people expect fruit wines will be too sweet for their tastes, and sometimes they’re right. People who don’t like dry grape wines like the fruit wine, the couple said, but people who do like dry wines sometimes don’t.
Most of the wine in the shop — the shelves hold almost 400 bottles and about 450 to 500 gallons more are in various stages of completion — comes from local sources. This was an exceptionally good year for New England fruit trees, and fruit was not hard to come by. Sources include the backyards of people who stopped in early on and revealed they had access to fruit. Pear cider from Clarkdale Fruit Farms in Deerfield went into one batch of pear wine and LeClaire tapped a neighbor’s maple trees for sap to make a sweet maple wine.
The work of the winery is done in the basement, on nights and weekends. The basement holds a large stainless steel sink, two primary fermenting vats, 55 and 75 gallons, a freezer and a walk-in storage room. A small vat of fermenting raspberry juice sits by the door, giving off a faint summer smell and the upright freezer is packed with stacked bags of berries, chopped rhubarb and more — including condensed orange juice for orange wine, an experiment in honor of LeClaire’s hometown. The smaller stuff freezes better, LeClaire said, so they save a lot of berries from the summer for winter production.
It takes about 25 pounds of fruit to make one five-gallon batch of wine.
The fruit goes through a small press or a smaller commercial-grade juicer and into the vats, where it sits in cheesecloth for a month or 45 days, with yeast and sugar to increase the alcohol content.
“We’ve been trying to keep it around 10 to 12 (percent alcohol), we find if you go over 12, you lose the fruit flavor and the hairs on the back of your neck start standing up,” LeClaire said. “You don’t get that hard liquor taste to it at all, it goes down real smooth, but the alcohol takes over.”
LeClaire stirs the fermenting juice daily and keeps records of the alcohol’s progress. When it’s ready, they drain the juice out a spigot at the bottom of the vat into the glass carboys and the cheesecloth full of fruit sludge goes into the compost. The juice sits in the carboys as the sediment settles to the bottom. LeClaire “racks” them every two months, pouring the wine into a new jar and discarding the sediment at the bottom, until it’s clear. Six to eight months later, the wine is ready for bottling and labeling.
The whole thing takes planning, and each new label has to be approved by the federal government, and the formulas as well, if the wine is blended or made with anything other than fruit or berries.
LeClaire tries to keep all stages of the process at capacity at all times, from the carboys waiting and aging in the storage rooms to the shelves upstairs.
“I work all the time. I found that nobody hands you nothing in life on a silver platter, and if you really have something that you really enjoy doing, you dedicate your life to something you enjoy. What I’m hoping is someday this will blow-up and turn into a real big business,” LeClaire said.
Originally, with the backyard orchard growing and the house conveniently located where the small highway’s traffic slows passing the local high school, LeClaire said he had pictured selling fruit in the front yard someday. Now, his latter-year plans look a little more colorful.