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Award-winning Kansas winery plans to expand

By By Anne Weltmer (Contact)

Wednesday, April 5, 2006

Hidden just off K-10, six miles east of Lawrence near Eudora, rests the Davenport Winery — a small winery, vineyard and orchard with an award-winning selection of wines.

The Davenport Winery and Orchard opened in 1960 when C.W. Davenport and his wife Mary bought the farm in the Kaw Bottoms east of Lawrence. They planted 74 acres of peaches and six acres of apples to start an orchard.

Davenport’s grandson, Greg, took over the operation after Davenport’s health kept him from working. At the suggestion of Greg’s wife, Charlee, he added to the orchard and started a winery. They went commercial in 1997 and are now one of 12 wineries in Kansas.

“We’ve been running ragged just to keep up,” Greg said.

Winning Wines

In the nine years of commercial wine-making, the Davenports have won awards from two prestigious wine competitions for some of their 31 wines. The awards didn’t come without constant hard work — either in the fields taking care of the grapes, inside making the wine and keeping up shop or experimenting with new wines.

They have won silver and bronze metals in the Indy International Wine Competition in Indianapolis. It’s the largest wine competition outside of California in the United States, with around 3,600 entries from 41 states and 17 countries in 2004. The winners are determined by a panel of 75 judges, according to the competition’s Web site.

The Davenports enter one or two wines each year by mail because the competition happens in mid-summer, when they are too busy with harvest to travel.

Charlee said they’d won silver and bronze medals, but no golds yet. They also enter their dry wines in the International Eastern Competition in Cornell, N.Y., although they’ve been too busy lately to enter into that competition much, Greg said.

The process of making wine is grueling. It requires year-round work and literally no vacation time. The Davenports can’t leave their vineyard for more than a few days, Charlee said. She also works as an acquisition librarian at the Lawrence Public Library, and the only vacation she gets is “out there to prune” the grape vines.

“It’s a pretty intensive bit,” she said.

Science of wine

When they’re not working in the vineyard, they’re trying to keep up the shop and experiment with new grapes.

The process of making wine starts with good grapes, so the Davenports only grow the best varieties and care for them intensively.

“You can’t make good wine out of bad grapes,” Greg said.

They crush then ferment red grapes with the skins and seeds to make red wine. Then they use a wine press to remove the skins and seeds, and then bottle the wine. Green grapes are rarely fermented with the skins and seeds, Greg said, because those wines are not popular except in Eastern Europe. For blush and white wines, the grapes are pressed first and then fermented without the skins and seeds. Their blush wines are made from red grapes, and their whites are made from green grapes, although they can be made with red grapes.

Greg said all wines are made dry. They just add sugar to make a sweeter wine. He said vineyards in California sweetened their wines with juice concentrate, but a small farm like his was not able to make the concentrate.

To get a farm winery license in Kansas, 60 percent of the final product must be made from Kansas products. Greg said that his wine is made from 100 percent Kansas products.

Innovation and improvement

Charlee said they often collaborated with Kansas State University’s agricultural research programs. Right now they are the guinea pig for testing a delicate French grape variety called Vinifera. In the past, the grapes had not been able to survive harsh weather conditions like those in Kansas, but Kansas State University has found that when researchers attach the plant to a hardier root stock, the Vinifera grapes take on the characteristics of the stock and become hardier. The research project uses the Davenport’s vineyard as its testing area. The Davenports are excited about the possibility of new wines. They are constantly learning more about the history of wine and how to make it, which, Greg said, is the most exciting part. He has taken an online chemistry class from University of California-Davis, many wine classes and studied wine history. He said he thought it was fascinating.

“It’s kind of like art. The more you get into, it the more you want to do it,” he said.

Charlee said that with each new wine takes time to get commercially ready. The Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau has to approve each label the design for their wines. Each has to have certain warnings, font sizes and other specifications.

Booming Business

Greg said the wine had been selling itself, and they rarely needed to advertise. He said 80 percent or more of their customers were repeat customers, which motivated him to keep expanding.

The Davenport’s vineyard does not have the capability to sell its wine to restaurants in the area in bulk because there wouldn’t be enough to keep up with restaurants’ demands, but they hope to change that soon, Charlee said.

They are expanding rapidly, adding a few more varieties of grapes to their 15 this spring. They fed volunteers lunch in exchange for help picking 18,000 pounds of grapes last year in August and September.

Greg said friends, community members and even KU students came out for picking. Charlee said they sold the wine out of the shop at the winery to individuals, and an Iola restaurant came up specifically to buy Davenport wine for their business.

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