Craig Lemoine had a concrete slab in his backyard and he didn’t know what to do with it. “It was very sad,” he said. “I like everything to be green and lush.”
When Mr. Lemoine, who is a professor of financial planning in Champaign, Ill., was discussing landscaping the backyard with his father, the conversation somehow turned to visiting wineries, something Mr. Lemoine has a passion for.
He has traveled to Milan and Versailles to taste full-bodied reds, his favorites. He has also spent time in Sonoma County, Calif., and the Pocono Mountains and Brandywine Valley of Pennsylvania. “Some of my best memories are sunset on the balcony of a vineyard in the Poconos with my family.”
With that in mind, his father, Bill Lemoine, suggested replacing the backyard slab with a backyard vineyard. “Why don’t we plant vines together?” Craig Lemoine recalled his father asking.
It isn’t clear how many backyard winemakers there are in the United States. WineAmerica, an industry group, does not have substantive data on people planting vineyards in their backyards, but novice vintners are out there. “There are some people that do grow some grapes as a hobby and maybe make wine in their garage,” said Michael Kaiser, executive vice president and director of government affairs at WineAmerica, which is based in Washington, D.C.
The process of becoming a winemaker can range from taking a trip to Costco or hiring professionals to do the work for you.
Mr. Lemoine started his project by researching which grape varieties would grow in his Illinois climate. “Most land-grant colleges have information on grapes,” he said. “YouTube is good as well.”
He bought a vine developed for Michigan at a local nursery and two concord vines from Costco. “They’re like 30 bucks,” he said.
“At first we planted five,” Mr. Lemoine said. “Five became seven, and seven became nine.” Now he has enough vines to cover a 20-by-50-foot area.
He’s learned how to prune and fertilize the vines using tips he read on the internet, including sites like Reddit. “I would say my biggest enemy has been the Japanese beetle,” he said. “I go outside with a bucket full of water and dish detergent, shake the leaves, and then they drop onto the bucket and drown.”
Last year, for the first time, his vines produced enough fruit to make jams and jellies (he learned how on ChatGPT), which he gave to family and friends. “I had to learn how to safely can,” he said. “I even have a little label maker.” Next year he wants to start making wine. “I can see there is a bigger rabbit hole waiting for me around the corner,” he said.
Even more rewarding than the final product is the peace of mind the vineyard gives him. “One of my joys is between May and August, being able to sit outside and take it all in,” Mr. Lemoine said. “It’s like a little getaway in my own backyard.”
What’s in a Name?
Erica Ritchie, 42, who runs a wholesale cabinet distributor with her husband, Brian Ritchie, 45, has a vacation house in Cutchogue, N.Y., on Long Island Sound on the North Fork, surrounded by commercial wineries. Her vineyard, 23 rows of vines in the front of her house, blends in seamlessly. “People will drive by it coming to the house, and they don’t even realize it’s ours,” she said. “It looks like a real vineyard.”
The vineyard was first planted in 2018 by her father, who bought the house and got the idea from a college friend who had vines in his yard. “My dad thought this was the coolest thing ever,” Ms. Ritchie said. “He wanted it to be a place where everyone wanted to come and hang out.” They named it Haven Vineyard.
He planted several grape varieties including merlot, pinot grigio, petit verdot, syrah, and muscat ottonel. Since 2022, Haven has produced 100 bottles of red, white, and rosé wines a year, all for friends and family.
Ms. Ritchie said the fun part was naming the wine, a project for the entire family. Names from past vintages include 23 ROWSE (a play on the word rosé, and the 23 rows of grapes at Haven, and that it was also from the 2023 harvest); the Back Porch (because that’s where they love drinking wine); and BDG (the initials of Ms. Ritchie’s father, Bruce David Guthart, who died in 2019.)
Calling in the Pros
Ms. Richie outsources the hard work of making wine to Long Island Vine Care, a company based in Jamesport, N.Y., that specializes in installing and maintaining backyard wineries.
The company was started by Stephen Scarnato and his wife, Sarah Scarnato, in 2011 after he worked at Martha Clara Vineyards on the North Fork, and found himself wanting to focus on smaller plots of land. “I would stop and just look at one vine for a long time,” he said. “I kept thinking that if I worked smaller plots, I could really focus.”
The company had 25 clients before the pandemic, and now he has over 40 clients in New York and the tristate area, but mostly on the North Fork or in the Hamptons. Their plots range from a tenth of an acre to 10 acres. Mr. Scarnato said he now turns prospective clients away to insure he can keep up with his current workload.
With a new client, he surveys the land to make sure it has enough sunlight. “I’ve had to turn people away who have too much shade in their yard,” he said. “It’s a hormonal thing. Grapes will not produce in the shade.”
He and clients try different wines and determine the grape varieties they like as well as what will grow on their plot. Factors from wind to the slope of the yard to the proximity to water all determine what kind of grapes grow well.
Over the years, he has also learned how to troubleshoot his clients’ homegrown issues. “For example, a lot of people want to spray herbicides on their lawns, and then it kills the grape vines, so it’s something I have to talk to clients about,” he said. “They have to tell their landscaper to stop spraying herbicides.”
And then there are the expectations clients have about how their wines will taste. “I have to explain to people, ‘You have your own terroir, your own place, and your own microclimate, and your wine will not taste like any other wine you’ve had,’” Mr. Scarnato said.
“We grow these beautiful grapes, and they turn into their own thing,” he added. “They won’t taste like that one wine you had with your family in Tuscany three years ago.”
There are three parts to his pricing: the installation, the management and the making of the wine. Contracts last three years, which is basically how much time is needed to install a vineyard and produce the first batch of grapes. “It comes out to about $1,000 to $2,500 a month,” he said.
Wine and Property Values
Vines of the Valley, based in San Bernardino, Calif., is another company that creates home vineyards. “We do everything,” from start-to-finish design, installation, maintenance, management to harvest, said Cesar Roldan, who co-owns the company with his wife, Audrey Roldan. “The only thing we don’t tap into is the making of the wine. There are local winemakers who can do that.”
The company began in 2021 after they began planting vines the previous year and has 12 clients throughout Southern California, ranging in size from 10 vines to five acres.
Mr. Roldan, who is also a real estate agent, said he has many clients planting vineyards to enhance their property values. “It’s a big deal to say you have mature vineyards on your land,” he said. He points to a report by the University of Redlands in California that shows vineyards can enhance a property’s value by 8 to 12 percent.
He also has clients who are selling their grapes to professional local growers. “A quarter to half an acre is big enough to turn your property into farmland,” he said.
Mr. Roland charges between $40,000 to $50,000 to install the vineyard. It then costs $45 an hour, per worker, for maintenance. “We found that this is the best way to do it because every client needs something a little different at different times of the year,” he said. “We have one client, for example, who does his own weed abatement, but he doesn’t feel comfortable doing the pruning.”
The Science of Wine
Not all of these winemakers are counting on commercial success.
Jeremy Winkie, a schoolteacher in Louisville, Ky., planted a vineyard in a local community garden. He has two 10-by-20 foot plots that each cost $10 a year. “I am a science teacher, so I like chemistry and that stuff,” he said. “I thought it would be cool to grow grapes and then I can make wine and scratch that chemistry itch.”
He started three years ago by researching and planting grapes that could grow in Kentucky. He bought two varieties of grapes, saperavi and rkatsiteli, “because I thought our climate here was similar to the Republic of Georgia,” he said, where both varieties are natives. “I bought them from an online shop named Double A Vineyards.”
This spring was the first year his vines produced grape clusters. “It was awesome,” Mr. Winkie said. It was even more rewarding because he had battled mildew and fungus all year. “I’ve lost half of my grape clusters because it’s been really rainy.”
Another battle has been training the vines to grow upward. “They want to grow in all kinds of weird directions,” he said. “You use steel or metal wire and you bundle them on a trellis.”
He keeps an eye on his grapes all summer, in part by using refractometers. “There is this $12 thing you can buy where you crush a grape on a little piece of glass, like a microscope, and you can tell how much sugar is in the grape,” he said. “You harvest when you hit 24 percent sugar.”
“You pick the grapes, add a packet of yeast, and then let them sit for two weeks,” he said. Then you pour it through a strainer and let it sit. He expects to get a maximum of 10 bottles next year that he will give to friends.
He estimates he has spent less than $100 on the project. “It’s not a terrible, terrible amount. It’s more of a time thing,” he said. “It would be cheaper to go out and buy a $10 bottle of wine, but that isn’t the point.”