Laura Zastrow
Old Sugar Distillery founder Nathan Greenawalt (center) picks grapes for an upcoming batch of brandy with the distillery’s production manager, David Van.
If you stand near Dave Mitchell and listen awhile, you are bound to hear something profound. Wearing a worn ball cap and sunglasses, Mitchell looks out over rows of woody grape vines at Mitchell Vineyard and declares, “It’s just like how you put all your energy into your children....” Mitchell explains how grapes grow: “The plants put all of their energy into ripening the grape seeds, so when the grapes are picked, the plants can put energy back into their roots.”
In 1972, Mitchell opened the Wine and Hop Shop on Monroe Street. He soon had the idea to grow grapes to supply his home winemaking customers. That dream was realized in 1976 when Mitchell first planted grapes in these fields 15 minutes south of Madison near Oregon.
Forty years later he has 47 rows of 12 different grape varieties, including Concord, Foch and Prairie Star. About half of his harvest this year will be used by Old Sugar Distillery on Madison’s east side to make its Brandy Station.
On this warm mid-September morning, Mitchell has organized a group of people, mainly through Craigslist, to harvest for the distillery. Old Sugar was founded by UW graduate Nathan Greenawalt, who worked for Mitchell at the Wine and Hop Shop for five years before launching his own business.
A motley crew of about 15 people has gathered to pick Concord grapes. Together we will pick 3,000 pounds, and our haul will be added to the 21,000 pounds of previously harvested grapes that will be crushed, destemmed, distilled, aged in oak barrels and ready to drink in the fall of 2017.
We join Mitchell, Greenawalt and Old Sugar production manager David Van in the vineyard and get to work. Among us there is a bartender, a retired teacher, a television news producer, a bike courier and pedicab driver, a veterinarian turned school teacher, and a house-sitter.
Mitchell says it is rare to get people who return for more. “It’s romantic to pick once,” Mitchell says. “But the edge of romance wears off; it’s not as much fun the second day.”
Derek Jarvi, a bartender at downtown Madison bar Merchant, is a rare veteran picker. This is his sixth or seventh day in the vineyard. “I like to be outside,” Jarvi explains. “And I like mornings.”
Aside from the heat, the work isn’t particularly taxing. The Concord grapes are plentiful and all at our height, so we don’t have to bend over or stretch. I hear this isn’t the case with other varieties.
As we leapfrog down the rows, using shears to cut bunches of purple grapes and drop them into five-gallon buckets, we start to learn more about each other. We share the names of our children and the stories behind those names, other places we have lived, and career changes.
Occasionally a man drives a four-wheeler down the row collecting buckets of grapes and leaving empty ones behind.
Want ads are the reason most of us are here (we’ll each get $10 an hour for our labors). A classified ad is, in fact, how Mitchell got started on his career. While finishing a graduate degree at UW-Madison in the early ’70s, he spotted one for a winemaking class.
It led him to Bob Wollersheim’s house, where he bought a wine-making kit. When Wollersheim decided to restore the land outside of Prairie du Sac to a working winery, now the site of well-known Wollersheim Winery, Mitchell helped him plant the grapes. There was no looking back.
“One of my favorite sounds is to go out in the morning,” Mitchell says. “To hear that plunk of the first cluster of grapes into the bucket, that is music to my ears.”
Years it takes a grape plant to produce fruit: 3 to 4
Rows of grapes at Mitchell Vineyard: 47
Length of each row: 600 feet
Feet between rows: 9
Feet between grape plants: 8
Name of the vessel used to hold crushed, destemmed grapes: Tote
Weight of a full tote: 2,000 pounds
