Business Spotlight: Vynecrest Winery

When Jan Landis was editing books for Rodale Inc. in Emmaus during theearly 1970s, she never worried about stink bugs, hail storms or rose bushes.

But she and husband, John, a chemical engineer at Air Products and
Chemicals in Trexlertown, then purchased a five-acre farm in Breinigsville in 1973 and they became wine makers.

They opened the doors of in 1989.

“How to have a small fortune?” laughed Landis, who handles marketing for the farm. “Start with a large fortune and open a winery.”

Vynecrest today produces 12,000 gallons a of wine a year, with a goal to reach 20,000 gallons in the near future, she said. The farm is open seven days a week to tourists, and attracts about 300 people each weekend  for wine tasting and entertainment.

Located nearby on the Lehigh Valley Wine Trail are Clover Hill in
Breinigsville, Pinnacle Ridge in Kutztown and Blue Mountain in New Tripoli, Landis said.

Landis is one of four partners in the operation, which includes husband
John, son Sam and computer specialist Malachi Duffy.
They are also the only full-time employees.

“People will come in here and say they’re thinking about starting a
winery,” Landis said. “This takes a lot of money and work.
“It’s $10,000 to plant an acre of grapes. You need the land and the wire and the posts and the plants themselves and the plumbing and the fertilizer and the spray. We spray as little as we can.”

And that brought up the stink bugs.

“The stink bugs have been bad,“ she said. “If you get stink bugs when
you‘re pressing the grapes, you get stink bugs in there. They can taint
your whole crop. We have been lucky, I have only seen a few in my farm house in the windows. In the spring, they were worse.”

And last spring, Vynecrest had a close encouter with hail -- baseball-sized ice hit nearby Fogelsville, banging dents on cars and forcing homeowners to get new roofs.

“That storm could have been devastating,’’ Landis said. “Hail at certain
times of the year can be very deadly. It just went north of us.
“A couple of years ago,  Franklin Hill Winery near Bangor got hit by hail and it took their crop out for the year.

“Hurricanes can always be trouble, too. People have crop insurance. When you‘re a farmer, you always have disasters.”

The health of rose bushes, planted at the end of the rows of vines, tell a farmer if the grapes are diseased, Landis said.

"You have to watch them carefully," she said.

The Landis’ path into winemaking began in 1972, when Landis was editing a book for Rodale called "Homesteading."  Finding the concept interesting, they purchased a 5-acre farm in Upper Macungie Township a year later.

Extensive research into soil and weather conditions led them to plant their first 50 vines in 1974. John used his chemical engineering background and took courses in the subject.

In 1994, the Landis' purchased an additional 23 acres of land adjacent to the existing vineyard and began planting the first of many separate
vineyard blocks.

When the new vines started producing grapes in 1998, John retired from Air Products to concentrate on growing the winery.

With the acquisition of an additional 40 acres of outstanding grape growing land in 2007, Vynecrest has enough land to continue further expansion, Landis said.

They hire part-time people to operate the tasting room and sales and they hire more part-timers to prune in the spring and pick in the fall, she said.

“We have two kinds of customers,” she said. “Locals use us like a
wine-spirit shop, rather than a Pennsylvania State Store. And then we have tourists who over from I-78 on their way to places such as Hersheypark."