It’s all in a day’s work for J&D winemakers
On Sundays, J&D Cellars offers entertainment on the winery's front patio. Guests can taste wine, purchase a bottle and sit outside and relax while listening to live music.
J&D Cellars offers a variety of white and red wines of varying degrees of sweetness. The winery is open from noon to 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday and noon to 6 p.m. Sunday.
Dot Harvison and John Husk are the owners of J&D Cellars Winery and Vineyard in Eighty Four.
Editor’s note: This is the second in a series featuring several local winemakers who are participating in the Observer-Reporter’s Corks & Kegs event Aug. 22 and 23 at The Meadows Casino.
EIGHTY FOUR – After hosting 60-some winery guests the day before, John Husk and Dot Harvison are back at work early this mid-July Monday morning.
Fortunately, the owners of J&D Cellars Winery and Vineyard don’t have a long commute. A flight of stairs is all that separates the couple from work and home.
“We’re down here every day from the time we wake up until we go to bed at night, stocking shelves, blending and bottling wine,” John said, referring to the small tasting room in the basement of the couple’s log house. “The cat’s got the house to herself,” he added with a chuckle.
The tasting room is closed Monday through Thursday, but that doesn’t mean time off for the winery owners.
Dot, who recently quit a full-time job in tech support for ANSYS, manages the winery and sells their wine at farmers markets in Washington, Peters Township, Bethel Park, Mt. Lebanon and Upper St. Clair. Her husband, who is on summer break from his teaching position at Trinity High School, is serving as contractor for a new building under construction near the entrance to their property that eventually will house the winery’s production facility and expanded tasting room. On weekends, they oversee J&D’s tasting room.
The winery and tasting room were opened just two years ago on the couple’s 16-acre tract of land along Roupe Road in rural Washington County, and already has outgrown its space.
“We just took off so much faster than we expected, and now we’re trying to catch up,” John said.
The small garage off the tasting room is filled with wine-making equipment, and a small storage building next to their home is packed with stainless-steel tanks, barrels and bottles. Bottling is done Mondays in the tasting room. “We will have bottles lined up on the counter here later,” he said. “It’s all done by hand. This place will be packed.”
The couple decided to start making wine in 2005, after a weekend wine-tasting trip to the Finger Lakes in upstate New York.
“We came home with about $500 worth of wine, and I said, ‘This is getting kind of expensive,'” John recalled. “I started talking to some friends who made wine, and they took me under wing and showed me how to do it.”
Eventually, the same people who helped John get his start in enology began turning to him for advice.
“I did a lot of research, read a lot of books and started growing grapes,” he said, “and they started calling me with questions.”
Pretty soon, the group was making wine by the barrel, and friends began telling John he should start his own winery.
“I’m thinking, ‘I’m making 10 barrels a year. I might as well,'” he said.
J&D Cellars was born.
Licensed in 2012, the winemakers lacked a permanent site where they could sell their wine, so they took their products to area farmers markets and festivals. About a year later, the tasting room was opened.
The couple now make 30 to 35 varieties of wine from grapes and other fruit ranging from dry to sweet. Not every variety is available all the time.
“We’re small. We may run out of something, and it may be a little while before we can bottle it,” John said. “Our problem is storage. We bottle what we need for two weeks at a time.”
Some of their wines, such as the Chocolate Raspberry – a Valentine’s Day favorite – are offered seasonally. Summertime selections include ice wine and basil wine – an unusual sweet concoction that “you either hate or love,” said John.
Added Dot, “We wanted something that’s unique.”
The couple’s small vineyard provides grapes for some of their sweet wines, such as the Concord and Diamond, and they supplement with grapes from Erie. Their dry wines are made with grapes from Suisun Valley, just southeast of Napa, Calif.
Two of the wines – the Petite Syrah and Cabernet Sauvignon – made from those California grapes have won medals at international wine competitions, including a prestigious double gold for the Petite Syrah at the 2015 Tasters Guild International Wine Competition in Michigan.
“When we do events, people say, ‘You have the best red wine here,'” John said. “Well, we’re buying the best red grapes we can get, and are still able to put it in a $22 bottle of wine. We’re doing small batches. We’ll do eight barrels of Cabernet Sauvignon, and we’ll spend more time, instead of making a big silo of Cab, and give it a little more personal attention.”
In addition to weekend tastings, J&D hosts Sunday afternoons on the winery’s front patio, where guests can sip wine and enjoy live music performed by a variety of local musicians on the hay wagon stage. They host a variety of private events there, as well.
John said it’s important for winemakers to be visible at tastings and events.
“That’s why people come here,” John said. “When they come here to buy a bottle of wine, they’re buying from the owner and the winemaker. They get to talk to us and give us their opinion.”
And both are happy to chat about wine-making, routinely fielding questions ranging from why Cabernet Sauvignon pairs well with steak to why some red wines are deep red and others aren’t.
“People like it because we’re out here talking to them,” John said. “They know this is our house, and we’re giving up our house so they can sit and listen to music on a Sunday afternoon. People really appreciate that.”
The couple started a wine-making club about eight years ago, and recently formed a local chapter of the American Wine Society, a national organization for wine enthusiasts. The group meets at the winery the first Thursday of every month to talk about making wine.
Oh, and why are some wines redder than others?
In a nutshell, John explained: Red wine grapes are red; white wine grapes are green. Squeeze a red grape and the juice runs pink or clear. To achieve that dark-red color, the juice has to remain in contact with the skins, where the color lies, while it’s fermenting. Temperature during fermentation also plays a role in hue, he said.
For John and Dot, it’s all in a day’s work.
For more information and directions to J&D Cellars, visit jndcellars.com. For more information on the Washington County Chapter of the American Wine Society, call 724-579-9897 or email jdcellars84@gmail.com.