Winehaven maven Kyle Peterson is a nice a guy as you’d want to meet, friendly, earnest and soft-spoken, with an easy smile. But he tends to be serious when talking about wine, or at least his wines.

“We just could not be more pleased about this,” the attorney-cum-winemaker told me a few months ago, after Winehaven was awarded a patent for a grape it had developed called Chisago (after the winery’s home base). It became one of only 120 grapevines patented in this country, and was the culmination of 15 years’ worth of research and development.

Grapevines that work in these parts need to be cold-hardy down to about 40 below zero; cabebet and chardonnay would perish about 10 times over in an average Minnesota winter. So the Peterson clan — Winehaven is truly a family operation — has been “mating” European vitis vinifera varieties such as pinot noir with the cold-hardy native vitus lambrusca grapes, through many multiples of iterations.

That’s how the U of M has developed its grapes, not to mention the redoubtable Elmer Swenson.

The Petersons have been using the Chisago grape to make their Deer Garden wine, which won several medals in competitions on both coasts. It’s also part of a red ice-wine they just started making called Slippery Slope. (The white Slippery Slope is absolutely delicious, maybe the best dessert wine made in Minnesota.)

Anyway, there’s a great opportunity to taste all the Winehaven juice this weekend at the winery’s  11th Annual Raspberries and Wine Festival. It runs from 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Saturday and noon-5 p.m Sunday. The winery’s just off Hwy. 8 at 9757 292nd St. Call 651-257-1017 for more info.

For what it’s worth, the scenery and the wines are both worth the drive to Chisago City — if anyone needs an excuse for such a trek on a gorgeous Minnesota summer weekend.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 7th, 2009 at 10:56 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.