Agritourism and quality wines on Harmony Hill
Posted on September 28th, 2009
By Matt Reese
A far cry from the rich soil, blue skies and trellised vines of their vineyard, Bill and Patti Skvarla have spent their lives serving others in the challenging world of healthcare. Bill is now semi-retired from a career as an ER nurse, and Patti continues her work as a nurse anesthetist. Both have found solace from the rigors of their professions in the aromatic air of their well-manicured Harmony Hill Vineyards in Clermont County, just outside of Cincinnati’s 275 Outer Belt.
“We work hard to make a very sound product here, but it is not even about the wine,” Skvarla said. “It’s about the ambiance. We’re 30 miles from Cincinnati, and this place makes people feel like they’re in the country.”
The couple did not have a farm background, but they shared a general love of animals, three golden retrievers specifically. Seeking room for their dogs to run, the couple moved from a subdivision to 15 acres near East Fork State Park by the town of Bethel where they inherited some horses and miniature donkeys from neighbors.
They expanded the farm to 70 acres and started growing medicinal herbs including ginseng and black cohosh in 1996. When faced with a chance to either expand their herb business or get out, the Skvarlas opted to start growing grapes for selling to the rapidly expanding wine industry in the area. They planted a vineyard in 2001.
“We were just going to grow the grapes to sell to other wineries around us. We had a good market for them around here,” Skvarla said. “We had been making basement wine for years. I made all my mistakes early in my wine making career. Then, just for fun, we entered some competitions for amateur wine and we started winning. So, we decided we would use our grapes to start making wine.”
The couple won medals at the Indiana International Wine Competition, the largest wine competition in the United States., in 2002, 2003 and 2004. This has been followed up with a pile of recognitions for Harmony Hill including a double gold for Harmony Hill 2007 Rubato and a Gold for Harmony Hill 2006 Rhapsody at the 2008 Appellation America Competition.
After two years of laborious vineyard establishment, the Skvarlas had 3,000 vines on more than 3 acres. The first vintage from Harmony Hill was in December 2003. And, bolstered by a timely Cincinnati Enquirer story, the business took off quickly.
“We opened up on a three-day weekend for July 4 and we were expecting maybe 100 people,” Skvarla said. “We didn’t know what we were in for. We had 1,600 people that first weekend. Based on that, we thought we had a good market for a weekend winery.”
This is the idea behind the Skvarla’s unique approach to their own brand of agritourism that starts with the rural setting that draws visitors. The Skvarlas have built upon their location with strict attention to detail and landscaping to create a very appealing setting with paver paths, a patio and covered outdoor seating, and live local music.
“The musicians love to play here because it is out in the country, and the people here are actually into the music and they are really listening,” Skvarla said. “We just sell the wine here. We tell people to bring their own food to eat. One couple always sits at the same table and they bring some friends with them. They bring their own candles and placements and just eat and enjoy the wine and music.”
With most bottles costing about $12 or $13, the quality products keep people coming back.
“The secret is keeping our prices reasonable. This is an inexpensive date,” he said. “This has become some kind of meeting place for people and that is very rewarding for Patti and I.”
They converted their former horse barn into a serving area where customers can also peruse a selection of products for sale, including honey from the farm, local pottery and other local items. Customers also are permitted to bring their pets to enjoy the miles of trails to explore and the perennial garden walk. Children are welcome to participate in juice-tasting events and feed the miniature donkeys on the farm.
“The miniature donkeys get a lot of attention,” he said. “Some people even bring carrots for them.”
While things were going well, the Skvarlas wanted their business to become even more of a destination for their customers.
“We started to see that we were becoming just another stop on the list of places some people go on a Saturday morning. They’d go to the grocery, run some errands and stop here to pick up a bottle of wine. So, we started a Saturday farmers market,” Skvarla said. “I get the vendors’ traffic and they get our traffic. It has turned into a reciprocal arrangement for both of us.”
Due to limited space, there is only room for two or three local vendors who pay no fee to be at the farmers market. Skvarla requires that the vendors are Ohio Proud members, and that they grow everything they sell on their farms. The small market offers lamb, beef, cheese, bread and a variety of vegetables. The farm also has hosted a local group who brought their reptiles out for display, and a local alpaca group who demonstrated fiber spinning and brought some alpacas for visitors to see.
The farm is open to customers from late May through early this month and closes when harvest picks up and wine making begins in earnest. The tents and chairs are packed up for the winter, and the visitors are replaced by a mountain of grapes and production equipment. Though among the smallest commercial wineries in the state, Harmony Hills still makes 1,200 cases of wine a year using all of their own grapes unless they have a short crop. From harvest through bottling and labeling, the entire process is done by hand with as many as 25 seasonal workers, including volunteers, 12 part-time employees and the Skvarlas.
The harvested grapes go into a destemmer/crusher that “replaces Lucille Ball stomping on the grapes.” Yeast is added, and the duration of the contact between the juice and the grape skins through the fermentation process in the fermenters (ranging from a couple of days to three weeks) determines the color and flavor of the wine. From there the wine is separated from the dregs in settling tanks and transferred for storage in an appropriate container — stainless steel for white and oak barrels for red. The stainless steel tanks keep air away from the white wine, which turns brown with oxygen, while the oak barrels allow air to mix with the red.
To avoid pumping the wine, which diminishes its quality, the red wine is gravity fed to barrels in an underground wine cave, one of only four manufactured wine caves in the country. The impressive structure is comprised of a sealed series of 35,000-pound concrete archways normally used in the construction of bridges. The result is a high humidity, watertight storage area with a consistent temperature ideal for wine.
“It is much easier and cheaper to put up a pole barn to store your wine, but this is better for the quality,” Skvarla said. “And, part of our secret here is that you get this feeling of being out in the country. If I put up another building for storage it would take away from that.”
The hot humid weather and harsh winters in southern Ohio require a lot of care for the vinifera grape,s including regular spraying in the summer months and extensive pruning starting in February. Pests are also a concern. Deer are controlled with peanut butter on foil wrapped around electric wires. Raccoons are repelled with talk radio, and birds are controlled with netting.
It all adds up to a lot of hours spent on this labor of love, but the results are well worth the effort for a couple of seasoned nurses.
“I am passionate about the wine, which you have to be or a vineyard will eat you alive. It is a lot of work,” he said. “And we enjoy having the people here. Instead of my job as an ER nurse, where I am seeing people at their worst, here I am seeing them at their best — enjoying a glass of wine.”
