Mount Airy, MD - Thursday April 21, 2011

As you know from my last writing, as of March 13, 2011, we have gone 100% wind power, which is part of our sustainability goal for our winery. What you might not know is that on April 16, 2011 at about 8pm, we were hit by a F-1 tornado which gave us a lot of natural lighting by removing roofing from the processing room, tank room and the building we store the grape harvester, tractors, and festival equipment and supplies. Believe me, we really didn’t contract for this much wind power. As of this writing, 5 days later, we are all back under roof, with some new added skylights for natural lighting, and just finishing cleaning up the processing room tanks so we can resume normal operations. Folks who have been long time customers of ours know that over the last 35 years we have been ardent supporters of repurposing and recycling materials and byproducts at the winery to help keep the planet “green”. To that point I am proud to announce that we have been selected as a finalist for the Maryland mid-size business “Green Business of the Year Award” by the Baltimore Business Journal. I don’t know if we will win but to me it doesn’t matter, I feel honored just to have been selected and to see that our efforts have been noticed by others. We are very good at “keeping our light under a bushel” as it were. We don’t tend to blow our own horn because when we obtain one objective we start working on the next one down the list. This forward thinking mentality has been the driving force of our business and I truly appreciate the recognition but that isn’t why we do what we do. We do it because it’s the right thing to do for our business, for the farm, for the planet. Thank you for your continued support of our family business all these years and please help in continuing this process as we all progress forward from here.

Anthony Aellen - Your Winemaker


Mount Airy, MD - Sunday March 13, 2011
Wind to Wine Rules! “A recycling story”

Not too many years ago, actually just about two to three generations ago, most Americans lost their connection with agriculture. With the dawning of the age of industrialization folks moved from farms to find jobs building cars, running machines, working in cities where the factories were being built. America was on the move. Massive immigration occurred as America was seen as the “land of opportunity”. The world was becoming more mechanized more efficient more industrial based less agricultural based. Things were growing. Though two world wars and other major conflicts, industrialization continued to take over a larger and larger part of present day society. No one seemed to care as long as we were moving forward.

Agriculture became more efficient, utilizing both mechanical innovations and crop hybridization which produced larger and larger harvest using fewer and fewer people. To the point where we are today in which a large segment of our population has no clue where their food comes from, who grew it, how it was grown, what happens to it from its journey from the field to their table, or what the accumulated environmental impact was in all of these processes. Or do we even care, as long as we can get traditionally seasonal crops, tomatoes for example, year round? Most folks know that the tomatoes in the winter look like tomatoes but don’t taste like tomatoes. So we are shipping over longer distances, produce that merely look like what nature produces when it’s in season in our area.

The whole “eat local movement” started back in the ‘60s to try to get real food produced by thousands of farms scattered across the country, who (this was the intention anyhow) were sell their produce to the local community, thereby avoiding the massive use of fossil fuel to truck perishable food stocks across the country. But we had grown accustom to having those tomatoes, grapes, and lettuce on our table in January. But at what price?

In 1976, the first year we started making wine commercially, all of our pressed fruit pulp was hauled out to the pasture where we had 60 head of beef cows just waiting to devour the spent skins, seeds, and pulp. Which worked out well, we got the juice from the press to ferment into wine, the cows got the pulp, and we ended up with marinated beef on the hoof. All recycled nice and neat. As the winery grew we got out of raising animals in ’85 and found that the dry pulp was great for keeping the deer away from the vineyards during harvest, if we put piles of pulp in the woods. It would keep them eating there, while we harvested. Behavior modification at its best! A few years later we found folks who wanted the tartrate crystals from the bottoms of the aging tanks and casks, and those along with the paper on the take-up reels from our labeler go to local nursery schools for “play dough” and drawing paper. When the “barn” was renovated into our tasting room and a banquet hall we reused the barn siding for the woodwork in the tasting room on the lower level, the cask room and the upstairs banquet hall were insulated with a concrete foam insulation which is totally nontoxic and is 5 times more efficient than fiberglass, high performance windows, radiant heat in the floor, concrete permanent siding. A lot of these technologies were not generally known when we did the work. Use of CFL lights alone dropped the banquet hall electric demand from 4000 watts of power to 800 watts.

We instituted a recycling program for glass, paper, aluminum, plastics, and cardboard, basically anything that can be recycled is recycled, which started years ago. This program alone has kept over 15 tons of recyclable material out of the landfill just last year. Our next major thought was to try to “get off the grid”. Our aim was to produce enough power on the winery premises so we were independent of the local power company. I started work on this project around 2001-2 and first looked at going solar. With the research I did combined with the information provided to me by local suppliers I found out that to replace just 30% of our electric needs at that time was going to require an investment of over $800,000.00 in solar cells which seemed just ludicrous. Years went by and new proposals came in with solar arrays coming from Japan and quite frankly I was ticked that we couldn’t supply an American made panel to an American company, “Oh the Japanese solar cells are so much more efficient” is what I was being told. Sorry the cost was still way to prohibitive to make it a viable option and I really wanted to “Buy American” We looked at roof mounted wind turbines but they couldn’t produce enough power, the large tower mounted turbines are way too costly, and our location, although it says Mount Airy isn’t in a good “wind zone” according to the national wind maps to keep the tubines turning enough hours each day. Then one day along comes a company called Clean Currents who marries environmentally conscious buyers with wind turbine energy producers. The wind farms have energy to sell. I want the wind energy to buy and POOF 100% of our electric is now supplied by a wind farm! It’s that easy. So my lights, my filters, my pumps, crusher, press, refrigeration, is all running on the wind. In doing this it is the equivalent of taking 30.5 cars off the road, saving the CO2 emissions from almost 18,000 gallons of gasoline, or the equivalent of 160 Metric Tons of Carbon Dioxide in one year alone! The same wind that powers the turbines may be some of the wind that comes through our vineyards, through our tasting room, through your homes! ”WIND TO WINE POWER RULES!” This is not by any means the end of the story. The evolution of the winery continues and we would like to thank all the folks who have supported us throughout the years and have helped keep our family winery thriving and growing.

Mount Airy, MD – Tuesday November 02, 2010

It’s election day, and as with all decisions we have to take time to reflect and think about the future. What will be that next shinning star? What will the future bring that we couldn’t have imagined just last year? Well these questions are the norm every season for a 21st century winemaker. Last year brought rain, rain and more rain. This year the grape gods looked more favorably on us and gave us a remarkable growing season. Yes, even though your lawns were brown, this is the type of weather we dream about but very rarely get here in the mid-Atlantic region. The lack of rain produced fruit which has a great concentration of sugar and flavor and this just what we are looking for to produce great wines! You have the opportunity to taste the first of this great vintage with our just released 2010 Nouveau. It will be featured for the full month of November. This dry wine is deep red in color, full of fruit and low in tannin. With its soft palate, cherry background, and opulent color this wine pairs well with poultry and soft cheeses.

We encourage you to come out and relax with a wine tasting and a tour of the winery and learn how we make our wine for you. Taste the first of the vintage which shows the promise of the wines you will see in the next year to four years as the 2010 wines come of age. Taste, relax, and enjoy life!

Anthony Aellen - Your Winemaker

Mount Airy, MD – Friday May 14, 2010

It’s been quite a while since my last installment to the “Wine Thinks” column as things have been busy in the winery the past few months. We have been filtering and bottling like crazy these last few months. The last of the ’09 white wines are in cold storage for cold stabilization prior to bottling. There they will sit for weeks at 27F for final acid reduction and tartrate stabilization. May has brought with it the addition of our seasonal treat, May Wine. This slightly sweet German style ‘09 white, is spiced with Sweet Woodruff which gives the wine a slight cinnamon background. Traditionally served with fresh strawberries in the glass, this is a great wine for casual entertaining out on the deck of patio. As normal, production of this wine is limited so I don’t expect it to be around long. With festivals just around the corner and the grapes about to bloom we are looking forward to another great year of “Great Wines and Fun Times” for 2010. So in your travels make us a stop along the way and taste the new wines.

Anthony Aellen - Your Winemaker

Mount Airy, MD – Thursday December 02, 2009

Welcome to this section of our website where I will occasionally post "Wine Thinks" which are happenings in and around the winery. So, people have this idea that, as the winemaker, I get to sit and sample wines all day. That's perfectly true, except only in their imagination. The real world, unfortunately, gets into the "romance" and injects a certain amount of reality into the situation. This column is designed to be a sort of peek at the real happenings here at the winery. Well that being said, it's been a long and winding road to get us to the end of harvest this year. Winemakers all over the East and Midwest were just looking to find the end of the prolonged tunnel, which was our harvest season. The cold and wet spring worked into a cold and wet summer, which was followed by a cold and wet fall. Ripening was about a month behind schedule and our Vineyard manager, my brother Eric, and his crew worked their respective tails off to keep the fruit in prime condition. Production from our vineyards was up four fold this year and the flavors, although delayed due to the weather, showed up as ripening progressed. The juice went through a long cold fermentation and the wine is now coming out of fermenters. The first of our '09 wines, our Nouveau, was released on November 1st. Typical of young reds, our Nouveau shows more fruit when it is young balanced by a slightly higher acidity. We are in the process right now of centrifuging whites to remove the yeast, which has done its magic in transforming the juice into wine. The clean wine is being transferred to stainless steel aging tanks, where it will be allowed to sleep over the winter as it develops its true personality. You will see these wines in the spring and summer of 2010. I just have to say they taste delicious. Okaaay, so we have to do some “quality control”. If you have any questions, I am reachable at Anthony@Linganorewines.com. Thanks for your continued support in our family's endeavor and I hope you enjoy my entries in the life of a winemaker.

Anthony Aellen - Your Winemaker