Our Wine
+ Where is our wine made?
All of our wine is crushed, pressed, processed, aged, and bottled on property. We use state of the art stainless steel equipment and tanks coupled with decades of wine making experience to ensure the highest quality possible.
+ Where do you source your grapes?
100% of our grapes are grown in Pennsylvania. We grow two varieties of grapes on property; Vidal Blanc and Frontenac. However, these grapes only make up about 3% of all the grapes we use. Everything else comes from the North East region of Erie. We use grapes-not pre crushed grape juice- to make our wines. Using fresh grapes to make our wines increases the quality and gives us more control over the finished product.
+ How much wine do you produce each year?
We produce approximately 40,000 gallons or 200,000 bottles of wine a year.
+ What is ABV?
ABV stands for Alcohol By Volume. It is a measure of how much alcohol is contained in an alcoholic beverage expressed as a percentage of total volume. If a bottle of wine has a ABV of 12%, it means that 12% of the bottle is pure ethanol. Wines typically range from 9%-16%.
+ What are Sulfites?
Sulfites are chemical compounds that are widely used as food preservatives. They are also often used in wine making as a way to preserve wine and prevent oxidation. Sulfites occur naturally in all wines so no wine is truly sulfite free yet the amount sulfites present in different wines can vary greatly. Narcisi Wines contain approximately 1/10th of the sulfites allowable by law- approximately 35ppm (parts per million) as compared to 350ppm.
+ Are our wines Vegan, and Gluten Free?
All our wines are Vegan, and Gluten Free.
Fining (in wine) is a process that removes unwanted elements, such as proteins, plant compounds, and yeast, to ensure wine is clear rather than cloudy and smells and tastes good. Fining agents bind to unwanted elements, which then drop to the bottom of the wine and can easily be filtered out.
Instead of Egg Whites(used mostly for a do-it-at-home kind of wine-making), Casein (a milk protein) or Isinglass (a collagen extracted from fish bladders), for the clarification and fining of our wines we use Bentonite, a food grade vegan-friendly volcanic clay.The negative ions in the Bentonite clay bond with positively charged particles floating around in the wine causing haziness. Eventually, because of the density, these bond particles precipitate to the bottom of the tank.Even though no Bentonite is present in the wine at the end of this process a final sterile filtration is performed before the wine is bottled.
Gluten itself can be used for fining, but it’s rare and in our case never used.