Your Italian great-grandfather immigrated to the U.S. as a rose grower in the early 1900s and your first vineyard was planted in 2009. What has it been like coming from an agriculturally oriented family?
My parents never pressured my siblings and I to work in the family business; they just wanted to ensure that there was room for us to grow in our careers if we did. I remember loading mulch into people’s cars at the age of 10 or 11 and thinking, there’s no way I’m ever working in an office!
I think that for our generation the old farming model of harvesting thousands of acres of land by tractor with no connection to the end consumer and local community does not have much appeal. In our vertically integrated model, we are growing all our grapes, making all our wine, and selling all our products directly to consumers. Instead of selling to liquor stores and restaurants, we attract people to our farm to experience all aspects of the wine-making process and to appreciate the fact that wine is fundamentally an agricultural product.
Regarding American wine, one normally thinks of Napa Valley. What are the unique selling points for wine produced in New Jersey?
New Jersey is in an eastern “cool climate” region, which means that we have similar weather and precipitation patterns to the classic European winegrowing regions and receive enough natural rainfall to farm grapes without irrigation. In California, water-related challenges are the major issue for farmers, and they seem to be worsening with climate change and a growing population tapping into the existing water sources. Every wine region has its challenges, but access to water is likely to be the principal challenge that the next generation of farmers will face.
Additionally, in New Jersey we have a huge diversity of soils that extend from north to south, making our landscape well-adapted to a wide range of grape varieties. We are also smack in the middle of the thin “latitude belt” in which wine grapes are a feasible crop. Add to that the fact that New Jersey is only an hour away from New York City and Philadelphia, two of the largest wine markets in the U.S. where relatively wealthy consumers are willing to spend an extra few dollars on a product that is made locally.
Does vine-growing have any negative effects on the land? And what happens to the biomaterial you produce but do not use?
Grape growing can be a very “closed-loop” system. Instead of trucking in synthetic fertilizers, we make our own compost from discarded winemaking material called “pomace” which is made up of leftover skins, seeds, and stems. This compost is the only source of nutrients that the vines need to sustain themselves.
Vines are also perennial crops that can survive approximately 40 to 50 years without being re-planted, thereby enabling farmers to avoid issues such as soil erosion and nutrient leaching associated with annual tilling of the soil.
There is quite a delay between the moment in which you plant the vines and the point at which the wine is ready for sale. How do you deal with that lag?
Inventory-management is probably our number one challenge. We have about a seven-year lag between the time we decide we want to plant a grape variety and the time when the wine is bottled and ready to sell to consumers. Winemakers can basically give up on trying to follow wine trends, since what is popular the moment you decide to plant a crop is likely to change within the span of time it takes to produce the wine.
The issue with this wait time is that starting a wine business is extremely capital intensive at first. To grow grapes, you need to buy land and tractors, build a barn, and plant the vineyard at a cost of approximately $10,000 to $15,000 per acre. And you don’t even begin to receive a return on that investment until the first wines are ready to sell. To circumvent this “barrier for entry,” we used our existing greenhouse business to get the winery started until we were able to invest our initial cash flow in planting two or three acres of grape per year. It ended up taking us over a decade to fully plant the 25 acre vineyard that we farm today.
How much wine should we all be drinking? And is there anything coming out of your shelves that we should be looking out for soon?
We like to follow the “less, but better” philosophy here. At Beneduce Vineyards, we are trying to work toward incorporating the European cultural perspective on wine as an essential part of a meal, which is why in our tasting room we serve our wines with local cheese and wood-fire pizza. And as an alternative to mass-produced, industrial wines, our environmentally sustainable growing practices offer products that serve as a healthy part of any Mediterranean diet.
We specialize in an Austrian grape called Blaufrankisch from which we make sparkling rosé, still rosé, and red wine. This is the most exciting grape variety for me because it does an excellent job of showcasing our terroir, which essentially means our sense of place and land. I think this variety has the potential to define NJ wine for decades to come.
