Hermann Visitors Guide

3 / 40

Hermann Area Visitor, Fall Edition, 2015 - Page 3
Vintage Charm Timeless Beauty
VisitHermann.com • 800.932.8687
Getaway
Hermann Heritage Days | Sept 19-20
Featuring Civil War reenactors from around the state
BarBQ & Brats Festival | Sept 25-26
Kansas City BarBQ Society-sanctioned event
Oktoberfest | First four Oct weekends
Hermann’s most popular festival
Holiday Fare Wine Trail
Festive wine & food pairings at seven wineries
Christmastime in Hermann
Kristkindl Markets rst two weekends of December
Say Cheese Wine Trail | December 12-13
Cheese-inspired wine & food pairings at seven wineries
to missouri wine country
The re-birth of Stone Hill Winery
Held family legacy
Stone Hill Winery is a success story, that we
know. But looking back at the beginning, it's those
personal little remembrances that make Jim and
Betty Held smile at where it all started. They
formed a family bond at their Hermann winery-
-pressing grapes and bottling wine by hand--while
their youngest child was sleeping in a crib, watched
by a sibling just a few years older.
Stone Hill Wine Co. was a shining star in the
business well before Prohibition, with Michael
Poeschel's founding in 1847, but then wine-making
had to be jump-started in the old cellars in the mid-
1960s by a couple who grew the winery one case at
time. Under the name Stone Hill Winery, a family
has built its own legacy.
Now in their late 70s and early 80s, the Helds
have had another memorable year. It was an his-
toric one, too. In July, Stone Hill bottled its 2 mil-
lionth case of wine, and a couple weeks later the
winery was awarded another high honor when its
2011 Estate Bottled Norton won the Governor's
Cup. It's the coveted award given to the highest
scoring wine in the Missouri competition.
Jim and Betty Held are pretty sure the first case
of wine they produced was probably a Concord or
Catawba grape variety. That's mostly what they
were bottling in 1966, the year after they bought
the mushroom plant in Hermann from Bill and
Mary Harrison.
The Harrisons started growing mushrooms under
the name of Stone Hill Farms after Prohibition
ended winemaking of the Stone Hill Wine Co., the
famous Hermann winery founded by German immi-
grants.
The Helds had a couple acres of Virginia Seedling
that were harvested off the old Paul Rauch farm
when they started their winery. Stone Hill now
owns that vineyard, and more than 180 acres of
vineyards.
But there was only 4 1/2 acres of vineyards when
the Helds embarked on commercial wine-making.
"We made the wine in the fall of 1965, and bot-
tled it in May of 1966," said Jim Held of Stone Hill's
first case of wine. "We sold it at Maifest (the third
weekend in May), that's how I remember it."
Oh, how they remember those early bottling
days.
Jim remembers with a grin, what he calls their
first "filling machine" and how they bottled wine. It
was much like the way old-timers made wine in
their basements.
"We had a store bought hose with a bellows on
top, and a valve, that you had to squeeze to get the
wine in the hose," recalls Jim. "It had a spring-
loaded valve and we bottled by hand with that
hose."
The Helds bottled a modest 1,500 gallons of wine
that first year, a far cry from the 250,000 gallons
that Stone Hill produces today.
It was a labor of love that developed after the
Harrisons came to the small town of Pershing in
Gasconade County to visit Jim and Betty Held one
Sunday afternoon.
"They knew the writing was on the wall for pro-
ducing domestic mushrooms, and they were looking
to retire," said Jim. "The Harrisons were very much
into preservation, and wanted somebody to take
over their buildings; keep them the way they were.
They talked about wine-making and we listened."
Jim remembers, too, the Harrisons suggested
that they start their winery small, for if it would fail,
the fall wouldn't be so hard.