Story and photo by Greg Booth

Laporte, Minn. — Just a loon’s call from the western shore of Kabekona Lake, at the edge of the aspen and pine forest, Paul and Sharon Shuster are fermenting a batch of rhubarb wine. The golden liquid glows like a northern sunset in the glass carboy.

“This is quiet, peaceful work,” says Sharon, the wine technician. “You can go away and let the yeast do the job,” adds Paul.

Here at Forestedge Winery, tucked between Minnesota Highway 64 and the Paul Bunyan State Forest, the Shusters and partner John Wildmo are growing, fermenting and bottling fruit wines — rhubarb, blueberry, strawberry, raspberry, chokecherry and sumac. After just a year and a half in business, they are preparing to open the winery to the public in August.

A northern jewel

High ceilings, earth-colored tiles and spacious, well-lit rooms — the barn-like winery is set amid curving rows of red-green rhubarb and the lush trees and gardens of the Shuster farm.

Much of the rhubarb for wine comes from the farm’s 1,000 plants, all offshoots of a single plant from the old farmstead.

Sharon calls Forestedge a “perfect stopping place for tourists,” and hopes customers will admire the garden setting as well as the wine. They plan to have a retail area where people can sample wine varieties, pick up a bottle or two, and perhaps buy some local crafts. Area artists’ work will adorn the winery’s gallery area. Customers may also peek into the production area, where 55-gallon barrels line the walls, aging a rich blue batch of blueberry wine or a bright red vat of strawberry.

Italian winemaking equipment adds to the atmosphere — a wood-slatted press that operates on hydraulic pressure, a stainless steel filtering machine, a corker and a plastic capper that wraps the bottle top with a protective cover. A bottling machine fills six bottles at a time.

“All this equipment we just bought will allow us to make a whole lot more wine,” Sharon says. Todd Sisson, AURI lab coordinator in Crookston, helped the team locate the equipment and provided technical help.

Michael Sparby and Lane Loeslie of AURI’s Crookston field office helped the Shusters with marketing research and funding, along with the Small Business Development Center in Brainerd. A marketing study “allowed us to refine what we had planned,” Paul says.

The demographic findings were extremely helpful, Sparby says, especially for packaging and pricing the wines. The research showed the Shusters “aren’t selling a wine, but an experience.”

Good wine takes its time

A dozen years ago, the Shusters began making small batches of wine in their basement. When Wildmo — the auto shop manager who keeps their fleet of aging Volkswagens running — became interested in their winemaking, the three built Forestedge Winery together.

In 1999, the team produced 1,000 gallons of rhubarb wine from about 4,000 pounds of the tart red stalks. They plan to double that this year, hoping for a peak production of 4,000 bottles of rhubarb wine and 3,000 to 4,000 gallons of nine other varieties in the near future. Part of the winemaking art, Paul says, is to blend varietals together to get good flavor and color.

“It’s a challenge to make fruit wines that taste good,” Sharon says. “This is so different from the other work we do. It’s kind of exotic.”

For Paul and Sharon — whose parents were teetotalers — the winemaking business is a natural extension of their successful wooden cooking utensil business, begun in the early 1970s. It’s a homegrown product using the fruits of Minnesota soils, and they can market it themselves. “To start with, we’re going to do everything right here,” Sharon says.

It intrigues Paul that many traditional grape wines are described and praised in terms of other fruits. Although homemade wine often relies on berries and other fruit, there are few commercial wineries built around those wines. “We’re different from most other wineries in Minnesota,” Paul says.

One hurdle for Forestedge was licensing and approval from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. “Our license is a farm winery from the State of Minnesota,” Paul says. They filed “two inches of paperwork with the ATF. The building had to be measured to tenths of a foot.” In addition, each varietal blend designed by the Shusters must be approved by ATF before it can be sold.

For a state farm winery license, 51 percent of the wine’s ingredients must be grown in Minnesota. “We’ve taken that a bit farther — and 80 percent of the products we use are Minnesota-grown.” Paul says. “It’s right out of the garden and into the press,” adds Sharon. Last year, when they brought in and pressed fresh strawberries, people remarked they could smell strawberries before entering the driveway, Paul says.

Additional funding from the Northwest Minnesota Foundation will allow Forestedge to buy more fruit from local growers and boost production. By supporting local growers, the Shusters say, the wine will not only taste better, it will be better for the local farm economy.

Into the sunset

Paul says he and Sharon both grew up in gardening families, “where you did things yourselves.” That formed the foundation for their love of gardening and their back-to-the-land lifestyle, Sharon says. The pair sees winemaking as an extension of that self-reliance. “It will be a nice business that, well past retirement age, a couple people could continue to run,” Paul says.

Just before sunset, Sharon and Paul walk through the giant rhubarb patch. Paul snaps off a rhubarb stalk and offers it like a glass of fine wine. It’s tart, fresh and slightly sweet. Just like a good 1999 vintage Forestedge rhubarb.

To contact Forestedge, e-mail shusters@paulbunyan.net or call (218) 224-2668. The winery is located on Minn. Hwy. 64, three miles south of Minn. Hwy. 200 in Hubbard County.