Tell us about your 10th year anniversary coming up in October 2025.
Yeah, it's a decent milestone, ten years in business. When you first open a business you don't know whether it's going to work or not. We started off with just five wines. Now we're up to 23. We've been working on making our wines better and better every year.
I think the real thing that has gotten us to where we are today is our people. We have great people here at the winery. Nobody gives up. Everybody's competent. Everybody understands the wine. Everybody's very customer service focused and if it wasn’t for them, we wouldn't be here today.
What big changes have you made or are going to make in your 10th year of operation?
We have invested in some equipment and to be able to offer wine in a pouch to both our retail and wholesale customers. It's kind of a new trend in the wine industry where people want a small carbon footprint and less hassle. Many don't want glass. In our area particularly, we have a lot of hikers, anglers, and kayakers. They want to take wine with them, but they don't want to take a heavy bottle along. So they get a 750ml (one bottle) wine pouch from us, consume it, roll the empty pouch up, and put it in their backpacks. It makes it a lot easier and lighter to carry for them.
Very shortly we will be offering boxed wine (3L with an equivalent of 4 bottles of wine) for our restaurant and bar customers. We hope to make a good dent in the restaurant market going forward helping them bring high-quality local wine to their customers in a much more convenient and environmental way. Plus, the wine stays fresh for 6 weeks or more from the first pour to the last pour. That’s a biggie.
Another new offering in 2025 is our Private Labeling Bottling program where restaurants, retail outlets, country stores, Inns can put their own branded label on our wine. We have one restaurant in the area that is doing this very successfully. And have 3 more interested this year. We'll be starting to expand that whole part of our business this year.
Many people enjoy public events at the winery, like art classes. But can they rent the winery for private events?
Yes! I'm amazed how many events we offer each year. Easily over a 100. Besides our public events for classes and artwork classes, workshops, we host private events in our large event space and even outside. We are seeing an uptick in 2025 in bridal showers and baby showers, birthday parties, and celebrations of life. So we do a lot of those. We hope that continues to grow.
Tell us about your Wine Club.
We are very, very proud of our Wine Club membership. Really glad how well it is working and how fast it has been growing. We currently have almost 50 members who see the real value in it. They get a quarterly release of 4 curated bottles; and discounts on wine. But they can also choose the wine they want each quarter. They all come to the winery for the wine release party where everybody just seems to have a really good time. So we're going to continue to push that forward and grow it. This year we hope to grow the membership to over 100.
For anyone wanting more information, visit TheSummitWinery.com for info on upcoming workshops, to host their own event, to sign up for wine club, and sign up for our newsletter to stay updated. While we are only open 4 days a week, we are available the other days by appointment. Call first if you want to buy wine on our closed days.