SOUTH KINGSTOWN, R.I. — Rick Dyer had a strainer attached to a wooden pole in one hand, and a plan he wasn’t sure would work.
On a rainy Sunday this past weekend, the owner of WinterHawk Vineyards in West Kingston stood over a tall tank of crushed Petite Pearl grapes that had been fermenting for about 12 days. In past years, he drained the liquid first and then climbed in to scoop out the heavy mass of skins and seeds by hand. This year, he tried the reverse.
“We’re trying to get smarter,” Dyer said.
Press day is the once-a-year event when the winery’s estate grapes become young wine, and Dyer invites anyone curious enough over to watch. In good weather, the work happens upstairs, and the juice flows down into the winery by gravity. The lawn fills with visitors and golden retrievers, in honor of the Dyers’ work with Yankee Golden Retriever Rescue. This year, the tail end of a Nor’easter kept the crowd small.
WinterHawk sits on about 4 1/2 acres on Yawgoo Pond Road. Dyer and his wife, Athena, married on the property in 2011, and he made all the wine for the wedding. Her Greek relatives gave the review that changed his life.
“This is good. You should do this,” Dyer recalled them saying.
“Don’t listen to Greeks,” he laughed.
After decades as a home winemaker and years helping established wineries bottle their wine, Dyer went commercial about 14 years ago.
“The reason I went commercial was not because I was good at it,” he said. “I had some wine that went bad, and I was able to correct it, then I said, ‘Oh, maybe I am good at it.’”
He knew he had arrived, he said, at a seminar led by Daniel Pambianchi, author of the widely used guide “Techniques in Home Winemaking.” When an attendee asked about vacuum bottling, Pambianchi turned to him.
“Well, Rick, you do vacuum bottling,” Dyer recalled Pambianchi saying. “Why don’t you take this question?”
Wine is only one chapter of his story. Dyer has coached ski racing, founded an experimental aviation company and, for about 20 years, worked in technology for GTECH (now IGT), where he still does advanced development work. The winery, he joked, was meant to be retirement income. Asked when he retired, he laughed.
“I haven’t,” Dyer said. “Who would do that?”
That engineering mind shows up all over the winery. Many of the tools Dyer used on press day were his own designs, welded locally.
“Sometimes you have to improvise,” he said.
In July, WinterHawk became the first Rhode Island winery recognized by BetterBev, a New England sustainability program for beverage makers administered by the Department of Environmental Management. Dyer said the vineyard needed 60 points to qualify, and it earned 166. The winery composts its grape waste, utilizes reusable equipment, and controls pests without chemicals, with help from a cat named Marina, who is famous on the winery’s Instagram account.
From vine to press
Petite Pearl is a cold-hardy hybrid grape bred in Minnesota by Tom Plocher and released in 2009. Its tiny, blue-black berries grow in tight clusters and make deeply colored red wine.
Even hardy grapes have limits. A brutal winter killed 42 of Dyer’s vines, which he plans to replant in the spring. They will take two to three years to produce, and, by his rule of thumb, each vine yields about 2 1/2 bottles of wine. Still, the harvest far outpaced the year before, when a late frost left the vineyard with only about five gallons of wine.
Timing the pick took some nerve. Rain fell just before harvest, so Dyer waited for the grapes to dry, then raced to pick them before the water soaking into the roots could reach the fruit and dilute it. Friends helped bring in the crop.