Carolyn Fath Ashby
This space will be the home of the new bistro.
When it opens around Labor Day, Dane County’s newest restaurant will offer food prepared by a chef trained in France, served in a historic 162-year-old building. It also will serve canned wine.
Welcome to Wollersheim Bistro, the latest addition to the ever-growing winery and distillery complex located on the Wisconsin River near Prairie du Sac.
The bistro comes in response to continued customer requests for more food options at the complex, one of the area’s most popular tourist attractions.
“We’ve been thinking about this for 10 years,” says chef Romain Coquard, who will run the bistro. He is the son of son of winery owners Philippe and Julie Coquard. “We already had the wine and cocktails, and visitors kept asking if there was any food to go with them.”
The Coquards are currently putting the finishing touches on a commercial kitchen in an area adjacent to the fermenting room in the winery’s original building, constructed in 1857.
The bistro, a $400,000 investment for the winery, will be on the building’s first floor near the tasting and tour-start area and will accommodate about 50 diners, says Romain. The outdoor patio will allow for 100 more diners during nice weather. The building’s second floor will be reserved for special events and educational sessions.
Initially, the bistro will feature counter service only, with customers ordering and picking up their food deli-style. The menu will consist of sandwiches, paninis, flatbread pizzas, soups, salads, desserts, charcuterie and cheese boards, as well as daily specials. Food will be locally sourced and the menu will change seasonally.
After graduating from UW-Madison in food sciences, Romain trained at the Institut Paul Bocuse in Écully, France, near Lyon. He spent several years traveling throughout Europe and Asia, and has also worked at Graze in Madison and the House of Embers supper club in Wisconsin Dells.
“It was the regional differences in food that impressed me the most,” says Romain. “Everywhere I went there were specialty dishes based on climate and culture. Those were what I enjoyed most and I’d like to bring that emphasis to our bistro.”
Coquard would also like to include culinary influences from the Beaujolais region of France, where his father Philippe was born and raised.
The Wollersheim property has a long history of winemaking. Hungarian Count Agostin Haraszthy, traveling through the area in 1840, planted the first grape vines on the Wollersheim acreage. When the Wisconsin winters compromised the vines’ survival, the Count packed up and moved to California. He’s been credited with starting the Golden State’s mammoth wine industry.
Following Haraszthy, Peter Kehl made wine on the property until 1899, when it was turned into a more conventional farm.
Another item Wollersheim will bring to the bistro is its first canned wine. Wollersheim White launched early in August as a convenient way for customers to bring wine to areas where glass bottles are not allowed, says Julie Coquard. Her parents, Bob and JoAnn Wollersheim, started the winery in 1973.
“This was an idea brought up by my daughter Céline and her husband a few years ago as a packaging alternative,” says Julie, the winery’s vice president of marketing. “There is greater portability and people find recycling aluminum sometimes easier than recycling glass.”
Wollersheim created a new wine to launch its can line. Wollersheim White, a blend of Riesling and Gerwürztraminer grapes, is lightly effervescent and well suited for the can, she says. Next summer a rosé may follow. The packaging also features the winery’s new label design, which soon will appear on its traditional glass bottles.
Wollersheim cans are sold individually and in four-packs. Each can holds the equivalent of a half bottle of wine, or a little over 12 ounces.
“But we’re not going to replace glass bottles with cans,” she adds.
