our Story
ever since the beginning we’ve always approached things differently…
Ever since the beginning, we’ve always approached things differently at Cedar Rose Vineyards. Back before we ever had a name to go by, the same passion for the NJ wine industry and winemaking was always there.
The story of Cedar Rose starts way back in 2009, with Dustin taking an internship position with Dr. Dan Ward at the Rutgers Agricultural Research and Extension Center (RAREC). Even with living in NJ since birth, the idea of a NJ wine industry was nothing that he ever considered as a profession or even knew to exist. After a summer working with Dr. Ward in the vineyards, and given a fresh perspective, Dustin decided to work at RAREC again in 2010.
Steven, Dustin’s neighbor and longtime friend, also needed a job in 2010 and decided to come to RAREC to work in the vineyards as well. It was over this summer that the two had the time amongst the vines to dream and scheme, eventually igniting the spark that would grow into the flame of Cedar Rose Vineyards.
“So I bought a chainsaw…”
Upon graduating college in 2011, the two wasted no time getting started. Dustin took an internship in California to learn more about farm management and crop production, while Steven stayed at RAREC to continue to hone his skills.
About a week into Dustin’s internship, he received a call from Steven, proclaiming “I bought a chainsaw and I started to cut the woods down.” To understand this we need to go back a bit.
Steven’s mother’s property had a little over an acre of overgrown field on the side, the exact location where much of the discussion of vineyards and wineries started to take shape between the soon-to-be founders. They would walk through the overgrown wood, making plans to take the forest down and plant grapevines in its place. This was really just talking and dreaming at the time, but the phone call from Steven rooted things in hard reality.
“I started cutting the woods down” was all that Dustin needed to hear, and what once felt ethereal turned into something real. After finishing up the internship in August, Dustin returned home to find Steven and his brother Robert had recuited a team of friends and family and had cleared three-fourths of the woods.
the winter of 2011-2012 was spent logging over 300 red cedar trellis poles…
Riding on a wave of unbridled enthusiasm the group pushed on, and with the help of Steven’s father and a backhoe, were able to get the entire 1.25 acres cleared and ready for planting. They soon realized that this was truly just the beginning. Where to get trellis poles and plants? And how to pay for everything? Sweat equity was king in the early days, so solutions had to be creative, and usually full of tough work.
Lucky for us, Steven’s mother was kind enough to purchase the first round of vines, slated to be planted in Spring 2012. The varieties chosen were Cabernet Franc and Blaufränkisch, setting the tone early for wine production focused on expressing South Jersey terroir, more than merely the mainstream.
After figuring out vines, trellis poles still remained an issue. Once again Steven’s father was able to provide us with some ground to sustainable harvest Eastern Red Cedar trees for use as trellis poles. This species works great due to its abundant and resilient nature, as well as the rot-resistant heartwood at the core of the trunk. The winter of 2011-2012 was spent logging over 300 Red Cedar trellis poles, enough to build the first 1.5 trellis for the new vineyard. It was tough work, but the result is sure impressive!
there was barely a moment’s respite before we started to wonder, “so what now?
As the vines arrived in Spring 2012 it was go time! All hands were on deck at the planting, making sure that the vines were installed at the right depth, in straight lines, and anything else to keep those little ones as happy as possible. About 10 days after planting bright, green shoots begain to appear, indicating that the young vines were thriving in their new home.
At the end of the summer, after much toil in the sun, we sat back and had admired what we’d done. There was barely a moment’s respite before we all started to wonder “so what now”? We’d done what we set out to do, but it became painfully obvious that this wasn’t enough to make a living. We had a long way to go if we wanted to make our entry into the NJ wine industry as winery owners.
As the days got colder and the baby vineyard started to go dormant, we began to wake up to the fact that we had truly started something. It became more than just short-term the ambition of a few young men, and started to seem almost like a real option for a career. Heck, we’d gotten this far, and a year ago none of us would have believed it. Why not see how far we can take this thing?
In the depths of winter, working night after night, we began to piece together a strategy that would lay out the next steps and prove to anyone who was interested that we were quite serious about our young endeavor.
in a chance meeting like something out of a movie, Steven ran into sam at a local pizza spot…
Trying to determine direction when choosing from infinite paths is truly a challenge, and one we became familiar with throughout the business planning process. Where do we go from here? Do we continue to plant vineyard, grow grapes, and sell them to other wineries? Do we make wine and sell it to the public? To liquor stores and restaurants? These are the questions we tackled as we pushed through and outlined the potential ways forward.
In the end we settled on 3 distinct possibilities: we either scale the vineyard to a sustainable size and sell grapes, expand to a modest vineyard and make wine and open a tasting room, or we begin production with a focus on wholesale and move onto the hospitality end later on. It wasn’t long before these ideas were being put to the test.
In a chance meeting like something out of a movie, Steven ran into local entrepreneur Sam Pipitone at a local pizza spot, Joe’s Pizza, and was able to give him the stereotypical “elevator speech”. Steven explained to Sam the project we’d taken on, the high points of the business plan, and painted him a picture of our vision for Cedar Rose Vineyards, now officially having a name for our fledgling project.
He agreed to a meeting, and afterward they agreed to form a partnership, Cedar Rose Vineyards LLC, and started planning the expansion of 2013, a 20-acre planting of vineyards down the street from the original.
With this innovative method we ended up planting the entire 20 acres in 4 days, a feat we thought impossible just a short time earlier.
20 acres of vineyards may not sound like a lot, but looking back it may have been one of the largest single vineyard plantings ever to occur in NJ. Most people take the sane route and plant a little at a time, 5 acres here, 10 acres there, but with naievety, excess ambition, and new partnership, we had just turned something from our minds into something real and concrete, and nothing was going to stop us.
We had the fortune of access to a GPS-driven tractor owned by Sam, and this made the job more feasible. We created a plow to mark the plants, and using the GPS tractor and a tree planter we were able to install perfectly aligned rows in a fraction of the time it would normally take. With this innovative method we ended up planting the entire 20 acres in 4 days, a feat we thought impossible just a short time earlier.
This, however, was once again just the beginning (lot’s of beginnings apparently!). We still had to install the trellis poles (purchased this time), wire, and plant guards before we could count the job as complete. This doesn’t even account for the management required to keep the vines alive! To say the very least, we were way in over our heads and on a learning curve so steep we were afraid we’d fall off of it.
By the end of the summer, we managed to get the vineyard fully installed and through brute force (and multiple burnt up weedwhackers later) the vines made it to the fall and began to go dormant, foreshadowing the massive pruning job we had ahead of us the upcoming winter.