Godard's Red Hen Farm/Mineral Hills Winery is located in Florence, Massachusetts. We sell honey, apples, apple cider, grape wines, mead, apple wine, blueberry wine, herbs, various beeswax products such as lip balms, hand salves and creams, and more! You can find our product list on the products page. If you have any questions please feel free to contact us! Thank you for visiting!
The Winery & Farm Store will reopen on Wed. April 4th (see store hours & winery tasting hours below)
May 1, 2012
To date, we have bottled six new wines. Overall we expect to produce about 700 cases of wine this year. We have had to adjust our plans for some wine varieties due to bunch rot problems for some grapes due to all the rain we had in the late summer/fall 2011. Our very popular Frontenac wine will again be in short supply because we were able to pick far fewer Frontenac grapes than expected and we will not have any Chambourcin sweet wine in 2012. The 2011 Frontenac is now available. We produced a different sweet red wine to replace the Chambourcin for this year (Red Hen Red). It is also now available. Also, for white we will again have Chardonnay, Seyval Blanc & Cayuga. The 2010 Cabernet Sauvignon which was oaked for 13 months was bottled in February and is now available. This wine has been very popular so far. We are glad we produced about 105 cases of it. We have added a Blush wine (NOHO Blush) to our offerings in 2012. For fruit wines we will have a 2011 Apple and Blueberry ("Wicked Blue"). We produced about 55 cases of blueberry this year. We continue to make Mead (honey wine). See the "wine makers notes" tab under "Mineral Hills Winery" on this site if you are interested in a little more detail on our wines.
So far we have bottled our 2010 Cabernet Sauvignon, Red Hen Red, Frontenac, Noho Blush, 2011 Apple wine and our Wicked Blue Blueberry wine. Our plan is to bottle our 2011 Chardonnay, 2011 Seyval Blanc, 2011 Cayuga, new Golden Harvest (oaked) Apple wine and 2011 Mead in May-June. We still have some 2010 Chardonnay, 2010 Seyval Blanc, 2010 Cayuga and 2010 Mead for you until those new wines are bottled.
We have completed pruning the apple trees and the grapes. There was no severe damage to our vines or trees as a result of the freak October snow storm. But, we have concern that we may have taken some losses due to the five nights of below freezing temps in late April. As a result of the early Spring unusually warm weather, all our apples trees were in various stages of blossom when the freezing nights occurred. The grapes were not as far along as the apples and since they have secondary and tertiary buds we don't think at this time that the grapes suffured too much damage. We shall see.
We had a nice crop of honey in 2011 from our bees at Mountainview farm in Easthampton and those in our yard. We did have a few hives in "the meadows" in Northampton destroyed in the flood from hurricane Irene. We were unable to get them out of the field before the flood and when we went to see what if any survived we found a few, very angry bees and hive bodies overturned and scattered around from the water. For some reason we took severe winter losses in our apiary this winter. We have stocked up on new bees from down south in early April and have installed those hives in April. We are getting a few more new hives going during the first week of May. It will be time soon to move the hives to their pollination locations and outyards.
This tasty sangria, is a modification of a Ruby Sangria recipe we had. Only in this version, we use our own RED HEN RED wine. Some lucky tasters got to try some first had last night, on Friday the 13th, at our tasting party. We hope everyone enjoyed it as much as we did. And based on the empty carafe, they did! If you make this, please let us know what you thought of it!
Located within Massachusetts’ pristine Pioneer Valley, Mineral Hills Winery is one of the state’s newest wineries. The winery, aptly named for the Mineral Hills located nearby, opened its doors in 2010 and is a part of Godard’s Red Hen Farm, a sprawling 60 acre farm swathed with apple trees, grape vines, and vegetable gardens.
Mineral Hills produces a wide array of French American and vinifera grape wines as well as a number of fruit wines. However, the winery's mead, also known as honey wine, may be the its most unique offering. Mineral Hills sources its honey from beehives on the farm and produces its mead in a palate-pleasing dry style.
In this video, Larry Godard, one of the owners of Mineral Hills Winery, takes us on a short tour of the winery, discusses the range of wines he produces and the process for making each, from harvest and crush to fermentation and aging. (Can’t miss section – a mammoth vat of mouthwatering blueberries undergoing an initial fermentation.)
Mineral Hills Winery is located at 592 Sylvester Rd in Florence, Mass. The winery is open April - December and wine tastings and tours are available Friday through Sunday 11 AM - 5 PM or by appointment.
Editor's note: This video segment was produced by French Oak TV and is the eighth in a series profiling the Massachusetts Farm Winery & Growers Association and each of its member wineries.
