Visiting Our Wineries

According to the Department of Agriculture, New Jersey is the seventh largest wine producing state in the country with 1.5 million gallons produced annually. A good portion of those 1.5 million gallons is produced and enjoyed right here in Cape May County.
“Our wineries are a great tourism draw,” said Freeholder Will Morey. “They do a number of things really well. Although we are the Garden State, I think to some extent, wine in New Jersey was a contradiction in terms in years past. In reality, we’ve come to learn that there really is a great opportunity to have very well respected wines coming out of this district. We’re seeing some really earnest efforts by the people who have developed an expertise in viticulture.
“And you know, doing all those enjoyable activities at the shore is great, but if the wine is so-so, then it’s a lot harder to relax,” Morey joked.
Tim Hilsey, a parts and service director at a Cadillac dealership in Philadelphia, also owns a home in Villas and is a wine enthusiast. Though he says he is not a ‘wine expert,’ Hilsey knows good wine when he drinks it. “I try to hit a different winery every week,” Hilsey said. “There’s a lot of good wine coming out of the Cape May region. They’re really impressive. It’s been my experience that as you go farther north in Jersey, you can almost taste the pine trees in the wine. Cape May wines don’t have that. You really have some fabulous wine down there. They’re comparable to European wines.”
Hilsey admitted that when he first started going to wineries with his wife, he didn’t know much of what was out there. “We just sort of drove around looking for them and eventually I did my research and decided to create my own website dedicated to Cape May wineries.”
In 2013, Hilsey launched www.capemaywineries.com. “All the Cape May County wineries have a very relaxed atmosphere,” he said. “None of them give off a snobby vibe. That welcoming beach atmosphere spills over into the wineries and the people who work there – they really take the time to educate you and talk to you, no matter how much or how little you may know about wine.”
Carole Mattessich, the economic development coordinator for the county, expressed her feelings of why Cape May County wineries are a good tourism draw. “People love to be sitting by the grapes,” Mattessich said. “They love to be in tasting rooms where the winemaker is talking about their trade. They just love to be a part of the entire process.”
With the idea to include readers in the Cape May County wineries’ experience, the Herald went to each one and spoke with the folks who devote their lives to the goal of making good wine and sharing it with their patrons.
Turdo Vineyards & Winery
3911 Bayshore Road
North Cape May
Luca Turdo
Owner/Winemaker
Back when we opened, wine buyers in New Jersey were mostly looking for sweet wine. Now, Jersey, the East Coast and really America as a whole is more educated and tend to lean toward the Old World, dryer-style wines. There are a lot of people that do still like the sweet wines and there are other vineyards in the county that tailor to those, but we try to do everything all dry.
Both my parents are from Sicily. My father, Sal, came to New Jersey when he was 14. He bought the land here when he retired with the intention of growing a vineyard. He wanted to keep it small and figured if it didn’t take off, that would be fine, it would be his little hobby.
My father knew how to make wine but he just had to learn how to make it here, in this climate. A long growing season and good drainage are necessary in South Jersey. California is hotter and dryer in the summer and that’s a great climate for grapes. For us, we have humidity and rain so we have to spray a lot more to prevent against rot and mildew. The grapes here mature a bit slower. That’s why we need the extended growing season.
Over the past seven years, we’ve sold out every year. We open in April and by September it’s all gone. Our customer base is 90 percent tourist. Probably 75 percent of our customers are repeat customers. We sell about 30 percent of our stock every year on pre-orders alone, before we even open our doors.
My favorite wine we make here is our Sangiovese. We’re also the only vineyard in the state that can have Nebbiolo reach peak maturity, just because of the location. If you come in, try our Persara wine. It’s named after my mother. Persara is elegant, like all of our wines. None of them are heavy, fruity, or chewy. They all have little nuances and aromas and flavors. Persara was made to be a reflection of my mother. It’s elegant and gets better with age.
We don’t do any live bands or have any extraordinary events. If you go to Europe, you don’t have any of that stuff. That’s an American thing. If you go to Italy, it’s just the winemaker, his wife, and maybe the kids running around in the yard. They give you a plate of food and some wine and they’re drinking with you. That’s our mentality anyway. We try to just keep it about the wine; keep it simple. We try to make the best wine possible. That’s our business model.
Cape May Winery
711 Town Bank Road
Cape May
Darren Hesington
Winemaker
Cape May Winery started in early 1990s when Joan and Bill Hayes started the winery in their garage. Toby Craig and the Craig family bought it in 2003 and we’ve been growing ever since. The original owners were growing about 2,600 gallons a year; this year we’ve got 26,000.
We have 26 acres of grape vines planted in four vineyards. When you plant your vine you won’t see any fruit for three years. In the fourth year, you’ll start harvesting a little fruit. In the fifth year you start to get the really ripe fruit. It’s a long-term process but the vines are gonna last you 50-75 years if you take care of them properly.
East Coast weather is difficult. It’s easy to grow grapes in California and Washington because they don’t get the humidity and rain that we get. You have to plant the right varieties suited to your soil. We have different viticulture practices here than in Italy too, because of the humidity and dampness mostly. It’s a little bit of a disadvantage but a lot more rewarding.
Luckily, we’re on the peninsula of Cape May where we’re moderated by the ocean and the bay. We have a slow warm up in the spring. Sometimes the weather fluctuates, the bottom drops out and you hope the frosts come later.
If you go 20 miles north, they may be having their first frost in late October. With late frosts, your vines can crack and you can get bud damage. Here, in April, we’re pretty much frost free. We have a nice moderate temperature and cool air in the spring. And we don’t really get a frost here until around Thanksgiving. All of that allows for our vines to grow better; the fruit hangs a little longer for ripening.
We’re open to the public year round and we have a lot of support from locals in the off-season. When you walk around our vineyard or the winery, you see we have the total package here. Our wine’s good, there are lots of comfort areas. I think we’ve built up a good local draw in the last decade. They know we’re consistently good and a nice place to visit. We’re very quality driven. They know when they come here, they can just sort of relax and maybe forget about where they are. When you’re sitting up on the deck or up on the patio you can very easily get lost and feel like you’re in Napa or Sonoma. We want you to come for the full experience. We try to focus on the wine but we do host a few events here and there as an added bonus for our customers.
I always say that winemakers are nothing more than babysitters for good grapes. The wine is made in the field. There’s no magic pill for winemaking. If the fruit’s good you’re gonna have an good wine.
Willow Creek Winery
168 Stevens Street
West Cape May
Darlene Chavis
Administrative Assistant to the Winemaker
Willow Creek Winery is just beautiful. The moment I first stepped on the grounds, I knew that this was where I belonged. Everyone that works here cares about the community and they also care about the environment. Willow Creek is eco-friendly. We don’t use pesticides and try to keep everything as natural as possible.
The vineyard itself is 50 acres; 24 are planted. The first planting was in 2004 and we grow 13 varieties of grapes. The winery opened to the public in 2012 and business has been excellent. Word is spreading. We give great 45-minute tours that give the history of the 200-year-old farm (which started out as a lima bean farm), and the wine is great.
Everyone who works here has a passion not just for wine but also for the vineyard and the business. All of us do everything onsite from crushing and pressing the grapes to bottling, foiling and labeling. There are 26 employees and most work full time, year-round. There is also an event staff that comes in and does private wine events.
The locals tend to visit us during the offseason. They are not the ones that usually do the tours because they already know a lot about the vineyard and the farm. But they do know when a new wine is coming out and they like to be here to get those.
The tourists love to learn about our wines. Our wine educators are awesome. They are all very knowledgeable. Kevin Celli, the farm director and winemaker and Michael Lazaro, the assistant winemaker and manager come up with all the technical chemistry and tend to the vineyard. They are out there in the vineyard every day, checking to make sure the vines are fine. They all grow differently but they take excellent care of them. Our climate here in Cape May mirrors the climate in Bordeaux, France. We have the perfect cross breeze between the ocean and the bay, which creates a nice dry canopy and our grapes love that.
Wineries in general have become very popular and there is definitely a draw to Cape May County because of the various wineries down here. There are wine enthusiasts that come here and then there are also people who come just for fun. A lot of people like to go on the wine trails and take the tours. Some will rent a limo or a tour company and go to each winery in southern New Jersey. But it’s definitely drawing people to the county, which is good for everyone. Naturally, those coming down here for the wineries will go out to eat and do some shopping as well.
Everyone is falling in love with our apple wine right now. It’s really a nice treat for a summer afternoon. We also have 36 different flavors of sangria! We try to rotate the flavors weekly so people can keep coming back and trying them all.
Hawk Haven
600 South Railroad Ave
Rio Grande
Todd Wuerker
Owner
My grandfather came here from Germany and bought the property in 1940. We started growing grapes in 1997 and began selling wine commercially in 2007. I was doing research on making wine and growing grapes before I even turned 21.
We’ve got a great area here in Cape May County to grow grapes and a great market to sell them in. Business is very good. It goes up every year since we’ve opened up. Our customers are both locals and tourists, depending on the season. Once we hit the shoulder seasons is when we get most of the return locals.
We also ship our wine but are restricted because of licensing purposes. Right now, we are legally only allowed to ship to New Jersey and Florida. Our client base in Florida is good because we have elderly customers who live down there in the wintertime and visit Cape May County in the summertime. So they’ll call or email us during the off-season and we gladly ship to them.
It costs so much to ship to other states, though. For instance, Connecticut is somewhere in neighborhood of $1,000 to $2,000 for a permit and then an additional $500 per wine to ship. So it makes it almost impossible to ship to Connecticut from a small producer standpoint. But we do get repeat customers that come visit us from far away too – good customers from places like Connecticut that will drive all the way down here to pick up wine.
People come to Cape May County specifically for the wineries, absolutely, especially with the number of great wineries that are down here; it’s becoming a destination. Where before it was the beach and boardwalks, now you have a very big additional attraction with all the six wineries being open.
We work with ‘Tastings and Tours,’ which is a bus company that picks people up and brings them to each winery. All the wineries work with them and we support each other as well.
We sell Hawk Haven wine in a number of restaurants around the county: The Red Store in Cape May Point, Cape May Fish Market on the Washington Mall, Quahog’s Seafood Shack in Stone Harbor, Blue Rose Inn and Restaurant in Cape May. Once our license goes through at Blue Rose Inn we’ll be doing wine pairing dinners there.
Here at the vineyard, we have Sangria Sundays. That’s something we do that provides a little more casual atmosphere around the wine. It makes the wine tastings more approachable for the novice wine drinker.
One of our primary goals is to educate people on wine, everything from the taste and perceptions of wine to how we grow and make it.
Jessie Creek Winery
1 North Delsea Drive
Court House
Art Reale
Owner
We’ve had the farm for seven years. When we bought it, it was a single-family home with a vineyard and we converted it to a bed and breakfast and winery. We put on a good deal of weddings and special events. But we put more effort into the winery than anything else. We got four medals this year from the State of New Jersey wine competition. We’ve received nine medals in a little over two years.
We opened our doors to the public in 2012. Since then we’ve been truly blessed. We’re extremely busy and work hard to keep up with the demand. We don’t sell to any outside vendors. The only place to buy Jessie Creek wine is at Jessie Creek Winery.
We have five acres and five different grapes: Chardonnay, Pinot, Chambourcin, Merlot and Cab. Everything is grown and bottled here. We bring in four fruits for our sweet wines: cranberries, blueberries, concord grapes and apples. But everything is processed and bottled here. The sweet wines are unbelievable. They sell three to one over our non-sweet wines. When we first opened, we only had only five wines, all dry. Natali Vineyards down the street was selling sweet wines; so when people went there and then came here next, they asked to try our sweet wines and we didn’t have any! So we changed that and started doing a concord and a cranberry and they just took off like crazy.
We get people in here from all over. I’ve noticed this year that people are planning their vacations around the wineries themselves. The difference between here and Napa Valley is, if you go to Napa, all you have is wineries. You come to Cape May County, you’ve got the beaches, the boardwalks, amusement piers, all those restaurants in Cape May, there’s miniature golf and golf courses everywhere, Atlantic City’s right up the street… there’s so much more here to offer a family than anywhere else in the world, really. This is such a unique area.
We’re kid friendly and pet friendly. We have picnic tables out back and families can bring food and have picnics here. They can bring their dogs, whatever they want. Everything here is very laid back. We give free tours every day. Anyone that comes here can walk around the vineyard and make themselves at home. We were pressing cranberries here last week and we had customers who were here just watching us do it. We pressed two tons of cranberries. That makes about 350 gallons of wine.
It’s all about the fruit and it’s all about the quality of the product. If you take time and have pride in what you do, you’re gonna have a good product. If our product’s not right, we throw it away. But the wine here, we lucked out, the guy who planted the vineyard before we bought it was extremely talented. The way he planted, with the angles and the relation to the sun and everything else – he did a phenomenal job.
Wineries in the county are a big draw and are going to get even bigger in the next five years. It’s growing so fast and people all over are starting to realize the quality for all the wines at all the wineries here. There’s just a lot of talent down here.
Every Friday night from 5 to 8:30 p.m., we have Sunset Over the Vineyard. We have food, music, entertainment, sometimes a bonfire; it’s a lot of fun, and low key. Everyone loves it.
I treat people the way I want to be treated. And I’ll tell you what, it’s been working extremely well for us since we’ve opened.
Natali Vineyard
221 North Delsea Drive
Court House
Ray Pensari
Owner
My business partner Al Natali bought the vineyard in 2000. When he got started, he took a soil sample and sent it to Rutgers. They came back and said that there were nematodes in the ground. A nematode is a little worm no thicker than the nail of your thumb. I can’t even tell you how many were in the ground – millions probably. So he had to get rid of those. He could have used chemicals but he chose an environmentally friendly alternative. He planted the whole field with broccoli rabe and when it came up, it killed all the nematodes. The next year, he started planting grapes. Chardonnays, sauvignon blanc, pinot grigios and they all took. And then he went in with the reds and they all took. In 2005, Al started picking grapes and making the wine. The whites were ready by 2006 and the reds were still in the barrels. I came in as Al’s partner in 2006.
Wineries are becoming huge in New Jersey. It’s a hard job. You need a lot of money to do this kind of thing. You can’t just go in with two nickels and hope for the best. Each vine costs you about $5, and that’s after you’ve had expenses from buying the land and turning the soil over.
We get a lot of locals during the off-season. They keep us alive. The locals also come in with the tourists during the summer, mostly on Mondays when we have an event called “Music in the Vines” or on Wednesdays when we have “Wine it Down Wednesday.”
We have 23 acres and seven and a half are planted, so far. We’ve got 20 different varieties of wine and 90 percent of that is grown right here on this land. The other 10 percent is a Riesling that we bring in from Washington State. That’s a German grape and it needs cold weather to grow. We bring the grape here and we crush it and process it.
We also have a port wine. The port we make here is on the light side. We fortify it with brandy. A lot of women like it because it is on the sweet side.
We’re the only winery in Cape May County that makes banana wine. How do you make banana wine, you ask? Out of bananas. We’re also the only winery in the world that makes a beach plum wine. We’ve got about 250 trees out front. That wine comes out the week after Thanksgiving and it usually gets sold out by Christmas.
Wine is, of course, the number one reason people are attracted to wineries but they also just like to see the farm and see how the wine is made. We try to make it a family type atmosphere here. Customers are allowed to bring their kids and their dogs. People are absolutely encouraged to bring food with them: cheese plates, picnic baskets, whatever they like. We allow everyone to just walk through the vineyard and enjoy the day. We do tours, too.
We definitely believe in Cape May County. We try to buy everything we can in the county. We’re invested. Everybody here helps us and we try to help everybody else in whatever ways we can.
I like everything about the winery. I was a builder by trade. I came here to put houses up and after talking to Al Natali, I changed my focus and now I’m here. It’s beautiful. It’s better than building houses.
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