Dan Brown doesn't have any grand illusions about his upstart Deerfoot Vineyards and Winery.
It's small in every way: square footage, staff, production.
It fits nicely into the “boutique winery” niche.
“Everything I do is small batch,” he said. “Fifty to 100 gallons.”
And he intends to keep it that way.
“We're just super-small,” Brown said. “I call it a micro-winery in some ways, because that's the term they're using in brewing: a micro-brewery or a nano-brewery. We're sort of a nano-winery.”
It's off the beaten path, yet not really all that far from anywhere, as evidenced by the fact that it's in Maidencreek Township and the Fleetwood School District, but has a Shoemakersville mailing address and a Leesport phone number.
“We're in this little corner behind Lake Ontelaunee, and it's kind of forgotten territory,” Brown said.
So much so that when he was growing up next door to the farm, his family's phone service was a party line shared with some of the neighbors. Cable TV only arrived in his senior year of high school, 1998.
The tasting room abuts Ridge Road, a country lane barely wide enough for two-way traffic that got paved back in the late '50s, a decade after Brown's grandparents, who had lost everything in the Depression, made the big move from the city (Reading) to the country and took up farming.
That paving project unearthed a pipe that ran from the summer kitchen, which now serves as the winery's tasting room, to the pasture across the street, where cows would eat the evidence (mash) from previous owner Limey Becker's Prohibition-era distillery.
“Everybody knew where Limey Becker's farm was, because they'd go there to get their moonshine,” Brown said. “It's kind of neat that 100 years later, we're using this to sell alcohol. It's kind of a neat little history.”
Off to a good start
Only four years in to making wine, Brown already has some nice hardware to show off, in the form of medals from some of the competitions he's entered, including double gold from this year's Pennsylvania Farm Show for his 2016 Blanc de Blancs sparkling wine.
Not bad for someone who didn't know a thing about wine in 2004, when he met Jaime Linn, who would later become his wife.
“She was talking to me about wine one day, and I said, ‘I don't even like wine,’ ” Brown said. “She said, ‘What do you mean you don't like wine? What are you even drinking?’ ”
Turns out he had only ever tried sweet wines made from Concord and Niagara grapes, so she introduced him to much drier, more complex Australian shiraz, and he began to see the light.
He approached his father, Dave, about growing grapes to sell to wineries, with an eye toward starting their own winery down the line.
“He's always been very supportive of trying different things,” Brown said. “The family history here is we have 100 acres, which sounds like a lot, but as farms go, it's very small. So we've always been the little guy; we've always been trying to experiment with stuff. It's sort of a family tradition to try something new.”
Early on, challenges arose.
“Once I started selling grapes I realized there is no money in selling grapes,” Brown said, “so my 10-year plan became a five-year plan. We planted our grapes in 2010. We had our first harvest in 2013. In 2014, I got my winery license. And we've been at farmers markets pretty much ever since.”
On Aug. 26, 2017, they opened their tasting room on the family farm, and signed on to the Berks County Wine Trail, which sponsors four events a year and brings new customers to their door.
“We're trying to grow organically,” Brown said. “I don't ever want this to be a big winery. We don't have that in the cards. I want to keep it local, grower-focused, family-based, because that's who we are.”
The learning curve
Despite being a relative newcomer to wine, Brown has gotten up to speed quickly.
He attended his first growers conference in 2009, earned an associate's degree in winemaking from Harrisburg Area Community College and has begun sommelier training because he wants to develop a deeper understanding of the consumer side and how to pick out the flaws.
“I'm trying to approach this systematically from all different angles,” he said.
He wants the terroir — or sense of place — to come through in his wines. And as luck would have it, he started the winery on the cusp of the locavore movement.
“I think that's important,” he said. “Things have changed a lot since we were selling sweet corn at the farmers market. People are a lot more focused on locally grown. People are more interested in knowing where their food comes from.
“That was a struggle for us when we were doing sweet corn, because that wasn't the focus. The focus was how cheap can you get your sweet corn. We were selling for $3 a dozen. You can't get sweet corn for $3 a dozen anymore, because people have realized the local stuff tastes a lot better than the stuff brought in from New Jersey on a refrigerated truck.
“The same thing applies to grapes. The further you go, the less the quality is, and you lose that sense of place.”
A twofold approach
Brown's approach combines doing what he knows he can do well with a healthy amount of experimentation, or what he calls “oddball stuff.”
“You have to experiment, because we don't have the tradition here of centuries of figuring out what works,” he said of Berks County in particular and Pennsylvania in general — latecomers to the wine world.
He knows he can bank on riesling, cayuga and cabernet franc (used in four of his wines), and he has high hopes for the fall crop of chambourcin, which he planted after the other vines. As a result, his wines veer toward roses, lighter reds and whites. The 12 varieties currently for sale range from sweet to dry.
2016 yielded an excellent crop of cayuga, so he decided to use some in the sparkling that won double gold at the Farm Show.
“That was an experiment, and it was an experiment that turned out phenomenally,” Brown said. “There were only four double golds in the state, and I got one, so it was like: ‘Alright, that feels good. Let's see where we can push this next year.’ So I'm trying to make a sparkling Riesling and that's a risk. If 10 gallons of wine goes down the drain, that's a lot of money, but it's something you just have to be willing to take on.”
Brown's pride and joy is a Bordeaux-style blend called Six Point. It's a barrel-aged dry red made from cab franc and petit verdot.
“That's as close as I'm going to be able to get to the type of wine that got me into this: the dry Australian shiraz, barrel-aged, smoky wine,” he said.
Each year, they release a collectible, single-barrel (280 bottles) experimental wine called In Season, which is white some years and red others, depending on the crop.
“There's no way I'll ever get an award for it,” Brown said, “but people drink it and they're like, ‘This stuff's really good.’ And that's cool for me. I like that as a winemaker. I love the science. I love the chemistry of winemaking. I've always been a science person. I get that from my dad.”
The 2017 In Season is a red that blends petit verdot, chambourcin and cab franc. It was actually made by Jaime, who won a blind tasting over offerings from Dan and a friend of theirs who owns a winery in Erie. Jaime chose a pink wax seal for the bottles to match her hair.
“So she beat two trained winemakers,” Dan said, laughing. “It's like beginner's luck. Whatever.”
Jaime also grows the blueberries used in the Patriot blueberry wine that will be released in September.
A place to relax
Although they have the option to expand down the road (literally and figuratively), the Browns are planning to keep things simple for the foreseeable future, with an eye toward keeping the farm sustainable for the next generation.
They simply don't have the space right now to host the types of music events that other wineries have had so much success with.
“For me and my family and what we're doing here, I think that's the wrong focus,” Dan said. “I want this to be about the growing, the winemaking, what product are we producing? Let's make sure that's the best we can do before we start trying to monetize the tourism aspect of it.
“I want this to be a place you can go, you can relax, have a glass of wine, sit out under the maple trees and watch the horses walk around, and that's it. We'll have maybe some games outside — cornhole, or Jaime wants to get box hockey, stuff like that — but no big concerts. That's the vibe I'm going for.”
For a model, he looks to one of the area's original wineries, Vynecrest, near Breinigsville, which has been going strong since 1989.
“Vynecrest is a barn with a bunch of really cool people,” he said. “That's where I'm leaning right now.”
Contact Don Botch: 610-371-5055 or dbotch@readingeagle.com.