Ron and Joan Meyer have wanted to make wine on a professional basis for years. With long years of preparation and perseverance through difficult trials The Humble Hill Winery is now open for business. It’s located just north of Garretson (25219 485th Ave.) on Highway 11, right up on a hill where you can easily see everything in a picturesque panorama.
Ron admits that he came to wine later in life.
“It started for me when I was in the service,” said Ron Meyer. “I admit, I was a beer guy, didn’t know the first thing about wine. But my love of wine started when I was still in the service and did a training mission in the Napa Valley in California.”
At the retirement home and vineyard of a Lt. Coronel, he saw something very special and thought to himself… why can’t I do that too.
“I started experimenting with making wine back in 2003,” Meyer said. He and Joan lived in Brandon for ten years, and as he experimented his wines got better all the time. Then he went on a deployment to Iraq and after he returned, he and Joan saw the acreage just north of Garretson for sale.
“It had been on the marked for only about three days, but when we looked at it, we knew it was meant to be, it would be just right for starting our own vineyard.”
The property is 6.9 acres, and the Meyers currently have over a thousand vines in production and already too, one of their white wines, the Brianna, as received a silver medal from the National Wine Growers association. They’ve actually been licensed to make wine for the last two years or so, but circumstances have made that difficult. As everyone in the Garretson area will tell you, just after Jesse James days in June of 2015 were a pretty horrible time for everybody. For the Meyers it stopped their wine production cold.
“Just like all of our neighbors, we got hit pretty bad by that windstorm,” said Joan Meyer. “It crippled us. Destroyed most of our crop, equipment and knocked down buildings.”
After that disaster, they had a second major setback when their garage caught fire just this past September.
“Those to events together make opening difficult, but now we’re open or and ready for visitors out here,” said Ron Meyer.
“It was a humbling experience, but I think ultimately it will make us and our vineyard better for it,” said Joan. “We’ve been through a lot, but we didn’t get a big head about it, now we stayed humble. Hence the name, Humble Hills.”
So what kind of wine do they make? Well that’s a complicated question.
“Ron has made wine from about anything you can imagine,” said Joan Meyer. “He’s made a wide variety of Rhubarb and fruit blends. He’s made peach wine, parsley wine, green and red tomato wine and wine from lemons, limes, pineapples and beets. If you name a fruit, he’s probably tried making wine out of it.”
“Mostly of course, now we’re using the cold-hearty grapes that many wineries throughout the area have used. For example, like our friends at Tucker’s Walk, we use a Marquette, St. Croix, Pinot Noir, Brianna, Kay Grey, and Frontenac grape and several others that are staples, but we also use a variety of other grapes too, like a brand new grape called the Elvira. Most of these grapes, we of course now grow ourselves, but if we’re doing a blended wine, all of our grapes come from within a 50 mile radius. We’re also looking at making some local berry wines, such as wines from sand cherries, choke cherries, and other local berries such as the Aronia, which looks like a blueberry but, a little larger and black rather than blue.”
“They also are a super fruit, with about 4 times the antioxidants that the blueberry,” said Joan Meyer.
This in short, is what their goal is, to grow new and interesting grapes and other fruits and to make unique and interesting wines. To showcase this, they have just finished completion on their new tasting room and exterior sampling area. Their regular hours for the tasting room are Friday through Sunday, 12 noon to 6 p.m. Tours and other visitors can also make appointments by calling the vineyard at 594-2292.
“Our son found this phrase for us in Germany that we think sums up what our vineyard is all about, ‘Wine is a gift best shared with friends.”
So come up on highway 11 and see them for yourself.
Click to read Issue #29 Full Version
