The Frogtown winery is specifically designed to produce high quality wine from Frogtown grapes and, at the same time, to make the most of our rolling terrain.
Constructed on a hillside overlooking the vineyards, the Frogtown winery is an underground, tri-level, gravity-flow winemaking facility. Using gravity in place of pumps allows for gentle vinification and treatment of our grape must, juice and wine from start to finish. In addition, the special design of the winery gives us tremendous flexibility in making our wines. We are able to treat every wine grape in an individual manner and develop a style of wines that is uniquely Frogtown.
The Three Levels of Frogtown Winery
The first and highest level of the Frogtown Winery is the wine grape processing area or the “crush pad,” as we call it. During the fall, as soon as the grapes are harvested, they are brought to this level of the winery and processed in one of two ways. Red grapes are destemmed and the “must,” the resulting grapes, berries and juice, is transferred to stainless steel tanks in the second level of the winery by gravity flow. White grapes are whole cluster pressed and the resulting grape juice is similarly gravity fed into tanks residing below on the second level.
The second level of the winery, the tank room, is where fermentation in steel occurs. After fermentation, red wines are racked out of tank, again using gravity flow, into barrels in the third and lowest level of the winery. Depending on the style of white wine being made, some white wines are fermented and briefly aged in barrel, others are kept solely in stainless steel.
The third and lowest level of the winery is the barrel room. Being the furthest underground, this level is the coolest, quietest place in which to age our wines.
