145 Route 539, P.O. Box 98
Cream Ridge, NJ 08514-0098
609-259-9797
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Hours: Monday - Saturday 11 am - 6 pm and Sundays 11 am - 5 pm

"The Art of Enology ..... the name of the company I founded some 30 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. That is that it has the right amount of sugar, pectin, nutrients, water, acid, color (from the skins) and yeast, found on the bloom or wax of the grape. 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, but especially with cranberries, red raspberries and cherries 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 three times in the past seven years for being a gold medal winner and the best 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.

I mentioned earlier that the grape has all of the natural ingredients you need to make wine. The most important ingredient however is sugar. The grape has what I call a "magic level" of about 22% sugar. When any crushed fruit, grapes or other, has a starting level of 22% sugar, when that fruit is fermented to dryness it will have an alcohol content by volume of about 11%. The reason for this is that all of the sugar in the "must", (crushed fruit being used to make wine), is converted into two things, alcohol and carbon dioxide, in almost equal proportion's. So, if you start with 22% sugar, your wine will be 11%; 24% start will give you 12% and so on. We have to add lots of sugar to cherries, which have about 12% natural sugar in them, to bring them up to the magic level of 22%, and all the other missing ingredients-, pectin, nutrients, yeast etc. Now, because we have to add sugar, we could put enough in to raise the starting level to 30%, resulting in a wine of 15% alcohol. If we were to do that, the alcohol in the finished wine would be so high that it would over power the delicate taste of the fruit that we're looking for. We strive to make all of our fruit and berry wines taste just like the fruit that is picked off the vine, bush, tree or shrub.

We call our cherry wine "Ciliegia Amabile". Ciliegia is Italian for cherry, and Amabile, 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.

Cream Ridge Winery – 609.259.9797
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Revised: September 17, 2007.

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