Visiting Jan Waltz of Waltz Vineyards

We are imposing on the kindness of others, again. This time, we went to visit Jan Waltz of Waltz Vineyards located in Manheim, PA. We met Jan last year at the Eastern Winery Exposition and he talked with us for nearly 2 hours, giving us a tip that we followed up on, which was to visit the wineries in Ontario. We believe that Jan's viticultural practices as well as tasting room experiences are ones that we would like to emulate so we had many questions which Jan answered.
The vineyard is situated on top of a rolling hill and the view of the surrounding countryside is breathtaking. We walked through Jan's vineyard, still in dormancy, but pruned and awaiting warmer weather. Jan initially grew Seyval Blanc to sell to local vineyards but switched to Merlot based on advice from a local winemaker. One of Jan's concerns in the vineyard is to take care of vigor. His vines are trellised to VSP (vertical shoot positioning) and he has found that there is no need to add fertilizers. One of the stories that Jan told us was about the year that the summer was dry and the vines began ripening the grapes. Then the rains came and tricked the vines into thinking that they should still be growing so instead of continuing to ripen the fruit, the vine's energy went into growing the shoots!

For us, seeing the layout of his case good storage area, his barrel room as well as his fermentation room gave us a very good idea of what we could do to configure our winery space. Jan's production is about 2500 cases a year. We would be smaller than Jan with a maximum of 2000 cases at our 5 year mark.

We also went to Jan's barn where he explained the various Braun equipment that he uses for maintenance within the vine row. This is an important aspect in controlling vine vigor through the use of under the trellis cover crops. Jan gave us a lot of think about and all of this information is very timely since we anticipate planting in a few weeks!