About Us

The Cream Ridge Winery

“The Art of Enology”….. the name of the company I founded 54 years ago! I called it that because I considered winemaking to be an art, and not merely the science of winemaking. It is true that if you take a bunch of ripe grapes, crush them, and leave them in an open container, in a week or so you will have wine. This phenomenon takes place in the ripe grape because it has all of the natural ingredients you need, in the almost perfect proportions, to make wine. Most grapes have the right amount of sugar, pectin, nutrients, water, acid, color (from the skins) and yeast, found on the bloom or wax of the grape, to naturally ferment those grapes into wine. It gets to be a little more complicated than that when you’re dealing with most Labrusca’s, some French-American Hybrids, few Vinifera’s, but especially difficult when you’re dealing with all fruit and berry wines. Cranberries, red raspberries and cherries tend to be the most difficult because of their high acid contents.

Let’s deal briefly with cherries, for it has earned for us the very prestigious New Jersey Governor’s Cup four times since 1991 for being a gold medal winner and the best wine/fruit wine in the state. When we buy cherries, we purchase 6,000 pounds of fresh picked New Jersey grown Mountmorency cherries from Larchmont Farms in Mount Laurel. This particular variety of cherry not only makes the best cherry pie, it also makes the best cherry wine because of its nutty, almond overtones. We label our cherry wine in Italian as Ciliegia Amabile. Ciliegia meaning cherry and Amabile being our family name, in winemaking terms means lightly sweet. So we have a cherry wine, lightly sweet. You have to try it! It tastes just like grandma’s homemade cherry pie.

Tom Amabile – Proprietor

The Art of Wine Making

Take a moment to check out our wine list and you will see that in addition to our grape wines, we also craft a good number of fruit wines. Over the years we have found our niche making these dessert wines and have immensely enjoyed doing so. These wines differ from their grape varietal counterparts in that the resulting wine tastes very much like the original fruit. You will find that when eating a Cabernet Sauvignon grape, it tastes like; you guessed it, a grape! But when Cabernet is sampled as a finished wine the one descriptor that is invariably missing, is that grape flavor you experienced when tasting the fruit. Now this phenomenon is not experienced in every grape variety, many North American varieties stay true to their original fruit flavor when made into wine, but by and large the wine does not taste like the grape. Now sample any one of our fruit wines like Cherry, Blueberry, Cranberry or Apricot. These wines retain the original flavor of the fruit. This is truly where the Art of Wine Making can be seen, or rather tasted. A winemaker can be successful making Cabernet Sauvignon that tastes different from vintage to vintage as there are numerous factors that contribute to the flavor and quality of that finished wine. Many of the same factors that contribute to a successful grape wine are also present when crafting a fruit wine; the appellation where the fruit was grown, the variety of the fruit and wine making practices are all important in producing a quality wine. But if a winemaker crafts a Blueberry wine and it tastes nothing like blueberries then he or she has failed. We’ve been successful in our fruit wine production, having won numerous awards for many different varieties. So visit us and give our wines a try for yourself, we know you’ll enjoy them!

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Cream Ridge Winery

The Art of Wine Making

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