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Factoid: Owl Creek Vineyard is open from noon to 5 p.m. Wednesday through Sunday. The Pomona Winery is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Saturday and noon to 5 p.m. on Sunday.
Candy North casually smiled as she was presented a bottle of 2001 water valley white wine at the Owl Creek Vineyard in Cobden.
"Will we drink it if I get it?" she asked her friends.
"I'll help you drink it if you do," replied Penny Basler with a laugh.
Skip North of Crystal Lake, Candy and Basler had spent some time tasting the nine varieties of wine Wednesday afternoon at the locally owned winery. Skip and Candy had finally found their poisons and were anxious to give them a try.
For Candy, it was a semi-sweet blend of Niagara grapes; for Skip, it was a much sweeter "dessert wine."
The summer may not be the busiest time for local wineries, but they still do a fair share of business through June, July and August, according to Jeff Bean, sales and marketing director of the Owl Creek Vineyard, and George Majka of the Pomona Winery.
Bean said Owl Creek sees about 50 customers on an average weekday, and up to 150 for the weekends. By 2 p.m. Wednesday, having only been open for about two hours, Bean had already assisted about 12 visitors in finding a suitable wine.
"The summer is better; it really picks up in the summer, and the big push is in October," he said. "January and February are absolutely dead."
Majka, who owns and operates the fruit winery on the Shawnee Wine trails, said the summer brings about one-fourth to one-third of his 7,000 customers annually, due mainly to tourism. Though, October would probably be his busiest time of year.
"During the week, it is so irregular," he said. "We may have four customers, or we may have 40 - there's no way to predict. And we average between 100 and 150 for the weekend."
But customers aren't the only things keeping him on his toes at this time of year.
The Pomona Winery, which only uses fruits grown in Southern Illinois, purchases strawberries, peaches, blueberries and apples from all over the state, most of which are harvested in early or late summer.
"We make fruit wines - we make batches throughout the summer," Majka said.
He said strawberries were harvested in June, the blueberries were picked up about three weeks ago, the peaches will be ready in August and the apples, which are the base for the majority of his wines, will be juiced in September.
Majka said that once the fruit is harvested, it is only a matter of days before it is juiced, though it may be more than a year before it is bottled.
"The strawberry wine will be ready in a matter of weeks - in six to eight weeks it will be ready to bottle, but we'll wait until September," he said. "The apple will set for one to two years. We haven't bottled the 2002 harvest yet."
Bean said that although the grapes at the Owl Creek Vineyard will not be ready to harvest until fall, he and the other staff stay busy keeping the grapes, which are among the most difficult plants to tend, healthy.
He said two other full-time staff have to shoot-position the vines, which means pulling down the shoots, which naturally grow straight up, thinning the clusters throughout the summer, and spraying the crop with fungicide every few weeks to ensure a good harvest.
They will even bottle the 2002 Domaine Des Sage, which combines pineapple and apple flavors to the grape melody, Friday.
"And we still get to cut the grass, weed - we have to do the basic gardening chores," Bean said, which gives his normal workdays a lot of variety.
Owl Creek Vineyard and Pomona Winery are both part of the Shawnee wine trails, which include the Alto Vineyards, the largest in the area, in Alto Pass; Von Jakob Vineyard in Pomona; and Winghill Vineyard in Cobden.
Bean said that cooperation between the wineries has been essential to their success and has helped boost tourism to the Southern Illinois region.
"No one is going to drive 500 miles to go to one small winery in the middle of nowhere," Bean said. "But they will for four or five small wineries in the middle of nowhere."
