sales & marketing PACKAGE DESIGN SPOTLIGHT New York Winery Engineered for Efficiency

Clover Pond Vineyards

Altamont, N.Y.

cloverpondvineyard.com

Annual Case Production: 1,500

Avg. Bottle Price: $24

The label of Clover Pond Vineyard’s Premiére series of wines features a painting inspired by winery founders Jim and Joyce Besha tending to their 16-acre vineyard located outside of the city of Albany, N.Y. The couple’s daughter-in-law, Susan Thomas, thought the pair looked like “little farmers” and Clover Pond is a small, family-owned, and operated winery.

Entered into the Classic category of the 2022 Pack Design Awards contest, the label (which judges praised for its “folksy, personal appeal”) conveys a wine produced at a DIY, family-run estate but Clover Pond is hardly a hobby vineyard. Jim Besha is also the owner of Albany Engineering Corp., which designs, builds, and maintains hydroelectric energy generation systems. The winery is situated on the shore of Watervliet Reservoir where Besha’s firm operates a plant, and in an interview with Wine Business Monthly he said he soon hopes to power his family-owned winery with energy generated by the family’s other business.

Besha has applied his more than three decades of experience as an engineer to other aspects of grapegrowing and winemaking to create what he describes as one of the most mechanized small wineries in New York if not the United States. The winery produces around 1,500 cases a year but with another 8 acres of estate vines expected to bear fruit this year, Besha figures that will grow to 3,500 cases or more in a year or two. “We’ve tried to mechanize as much as we can because labor is so hard to come by and we think it’s the best way to do things,” he said.

The couple planted their first vines in 2015 and the entire vineyard is planted with cold-hardy hybrid varieties that Besha said have thrived and have produced yields of around 4 to 4.5 tons per acre. The 2022 harvest yielded 30% more than the previous vintage. Nearly all vineyard work is done by machine, and Besha purchased a new

Packaging Vendors

Designer: Susan Thomas

Bottle Vendor: Waterloo Container

Closure Vendor: Waterloo Container

Label Vendor: Niagara Label tractor that can operate autonomously guided by GPS. Ripening grapes are also protected with a laser bird deterrence system. Grapes are harvested with a vintage, Vectur grape harvester that Besha originally purchased for its parts. “I had visions of actually building my own harvester and I bought the old one thinking I could learn from it and adapt it,” he said. When harvest arrived after Besha had purchased the machine, he had a crew of employees from the engineering firm ready and waiting to pick when they decided to fire up the old harvester “just for the hell of it.” The machine started up just fine and Besha said after he and his crew watched it pick one full row in mere minutes followed by another row, they all decided to just let the machine keep going. Besha said the machine picks clean as well as quickly. “We’re shocked at this old harvester,” he said. “For what we have, it’s wonderful.”

The production area of the 9,000-square-foot winery was completed in 2021 with the tasting room finished in 2022. The crushpad equipment was purchased new from Prospero, and the small winery lab includes a spectrophotometer and everything else needed for full-panel wine analysis. Wine ferments and ages in stainless steel tanks with oak alternatives and micro-ox as needed.

Clover Pond produces four whites and three to four reds, most of which are blends, and everything is sold out of the tasting room. The winery is also equipped with a cross flow filter from Scott Laboratories and all bottling is done in house. Besha said he decided to buy his own automated bottling line following the onset of COVID-19 as didn’t want a crew bottling everything by hand in proximity. He found a used GAI line with a labeler and rebuilt it himself. He said it had been used for bottling spring water so getting it ready for winery work didn’t require too much retrofitting. “I’m an engineer and I like the predictability of things,” Besha said.

“Winemaking is an awful lot of science and I like to be able to predict and have consistency.” WBM