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Florida's Grape Escape
 Janis McKnight (left) and Kelly Johnson pick grapes at the Strong Tower Vineyards near Brooksville. [Photo: Tom Hagerty] |
Muscadines Florida’s Varieties Weather is a handicap, but our sandy soil is a boon, and Spaniards made America’s first wine here almost 500 years ago. They and their 21st-century successors use grapes carefully bred by a grape brain trust at the University of Florida and Florida A&M. First and most common are the native muscadines, the thick-skinned Southern favorite that can be green, black or bronze, taste like jelly and smell like bubble gum. But not in the hands of skilled winemakers. For Janis and Terry McKnight, the Ison strain of muscadine makes a rosy blush, a crisp light red like Chianti, an aged wine toasty with oak, a sweet summer wine and a rich port. The others are French-American hybrids. Blanc du Bois, Suwanee and Stover are common Florida whites; Conquistador is a red hybrid specifically for Florida, but the McKnights and others like the Norton for richer reds with smoke and spice. |
You will at Strong Tower Vineyards and Winery, just off the Suncoast Parkway outside Brooksville. The dozen wines — white, red, dry, sweet and sparkling — that Janis McKnight pours are from grapes she’s grown. Husband Terry, a chiropractor who traded his white coat for a dusty sun helmet, now pilots a small tractor through the vines. In harvest season, Janis McKnight will send you out to fill your bags at $1.25 a pound for jelly or enlist you to pick the last Carlos and Ison grapes for the next wine crush.
It’s not Napa or Burgundy or the forgettable Florida wine of old, thickly sweet citrus squeezings dyed neon orange and priced at $5 in souvenir stands. It’s now on mainstream shelves and will cost $10 to $25 a bottle to discover how sweet it isn’t.
Their 11 acres of vines (and a half-acre blackberry patch) make only 1,000 to 3,000 cases, yet Strong Tower is a serious endeavor. The McKnights carefully sought this land, planted in 2002, and built their home in 2004 to be a winery. That pleasant two-story may look like other new country houses, but the door opens to a tasting room filled with bottles, glasses, wine books and gifts. In the back is a sterile 62-degree wine room that serves as laboratory, bottling line and cellar with five 1,000-liter stainless steel tanks. Living quarters are squeezed in-between and upstairs.
The small scale and newness is an accurate picture of Florida winemaking, vintage 2009. Green highway signs from Defuniak Springs and Fernandina Beach to?Homestead now point to almost 20 farm wineries, each with more than 10 acres of fruit.
Follow them on a weekend road trip to winemakers who are as diligent and artisanal as small holders anywhere in Europe, ?the kind of vintners the French call garagistes. (Even in California, most wineries are very small; two-thirds of Napa’s make less than 5,000 cases.)
| For a directory of Florida wineries, visit the Florida Grape Growers Association’s website, fgga.org. |
Lakeridge, the pioneer winery, has 80 rolling acres of vines outside Clermont, vineyards in the Panhandle and a second winery and tasting room, San Sebastian, in St. Augustine. The two draw almost 250,000 wine tasters a year and produce 150,000 cases a year, two to three times what labels like Charles Krug or Heitz Cellars produce.
| Florida-Style Winery Non-grape wineries come with the same good times as grape wineries. Schnebly Redland’s Winery, a Homestead fruit grower that grew into a winery, now has a new tasting center as tropical as a tiki lodge, complete with waterfalls, happy hours, regular concerts and three locations for weddings and private parties.  Schnebly Redland’s tasting room |
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