Field Stone puts best fruit forward

By Adelle Ellis, Times Reporter

The award winning and locally owned and operated Field Stone Fruit Wines has delivered the goods once again after winning three gold medals and various other awards at three of the biggest best-in-class wine competitions this year.
This year’s victories are twice as sweet, as Field Stone owners Elaine and Marvin Gill are celebrating 20 years in the orchard business. They planted their fruit orchard south of Strathmore in 1998.
Field Stone Fruit Wines wasn’t officially opened until 2005 after they became the first business to be granted a licence under the Government of Alberta’s estate winery regulations, once provincial legislation for owning a winery in Alberta was introduced. Field Stone has been a front-runner at best in class competitions ever since and has taken home wine awards every year since opening.
“There are the three big competitions that we enter yearly,” said Marvin Gill. “We don’t really enter anything else, it’s not necessary. We win enough medals to prove that our product is as good as we say it is and we get enough affirmation to the quality of our wine and so we’re quite satisfied with that.”
This year, Field Stone monopolized at the 23rd annual North West Wine Summit in Port Hood, Ore. by winning three bronze medals with their Bumbleberry Fruit Wine, Raspberry Fruit Wine and Raspberry Dessert Wine; a silver medal with their Cherry Fruit Wine; and gold medals with their Strawberry-Rhubarb Fruit Wine and Black Currant Fruit Wine. Their Strawberry-Rhubarb Fruit Wine also took home the Crystal Rose Award for the best fruit wine at the competition and the Mount Columbia Award for best of region. Their Black Currant Fruit Wine earned them the Jerry Mead Best Value Award.
Out of 1,850 wines from 257 wineries at the National Wine Awards of Canada, Field Stone was awarded a bronze medal for their Raspberry Fruit Wine in the fruit wines and mead category.
At the Alberta Beverage Awards, for the fourth year in a row, Field Stone was awarded the Best in Class distinction for the best fruit wine in the competition with their Cherry Fruit Wine. At this competition, their Raspberry Fruit Wine and Strawberry-Rhubarb Fruit Wine were also awarded the Judge’s Selection as top performers in the fruit wine category.
Gill attributes the high quality of Field Stone Fruit Wines to his refined palate and dedication to ensuring every batch of wine is finished to its highest possible quality through attention to detail, and taste testing every batch to make sure the recipe is just right and that each bottle tastes just as good as the bottle that came before it.
“Maybe it’s just that my palate is very in tune to what it needs to taste like … I definitely have a certain taste that I look for in our wines,” he noted. “I think maybe perhaps I’m just able to tap into that exact right palate for fruit wines and hang onto it.”
Gill added that the finishing stage of wine making is the most important in terms of how to balance the sugar and acid levels to create the perfect flavour.
Because fruit, like other grown foods, varies year to year in terms of size, taste and components due to weather pattern changes, the formula and recipe for creating Field Stone’s wines varies from year to year and batch to batch. Each batch of wine is uniquely created through adaptive measures depending on how the fruit tastes that year, and each bottle is created with expert hands and in-tune tongues.
“You’ve really just got to know when the balance is right and that can only happen on your tongue … you have to taste it to know that it’s absolutely where you want it to be and that’s always the final test,” said Gill.
In a market dominated by grape wines, Field Stone has found a way to rise above the crowd and introduce a variety of sweeter fruit wines and drier table wines.
“There are many fruit wines that are dry and have a much wider range of use than they did when we first started this … the whole marketplace has evolved. The palate of your typical wine drinker has become more educated as far as what fruit wines are usable for and the different styles of fruit wines out there,” said Gill, who added there are many benefits to producing a fruit wine, such as not having any grape tannins in the wine for people who are allergic to tannin.
Field Stone also has an advantage in terms of production compared to a grape winery that needs to ferment grapes as soon as they are off the vine. Field Stone picks all their fruit in the summer while also freezing some of it so that they may make any size batch of wine they need to throughout the whole year and they aren’t limited by how much fruit or space they have. On average, they make 25,000 litres of wine per year.
Field Stone as an estate winery grows 75 per cent of their product’s fruit on their own property including saskatoons, raspberries, strawberries and chokecherries.
This year, the company also attended a record number of farmer’s markets across Alberta, averaging about 21 markets per week, to tell new customers about their fruit wines, how to enjoy them and how to mix them up into recipes.
Field Stone’s fruit wines are available in over 100 stores across Alberta and through a direct shipping option available on their website, fieldstonefruitwines.com.
For now, Field Stone is looking at finishing off another busy season on a high note and Gill is excited for what the future will bring as the winery enters its 14th year of operation next year.
“We did win medals right from the beginning and that’s just increased as we’ve refined our products to an even higher level,” said Gill.