Meet Steve and Karen. Many moons ago the couple joined some of their friends in a winemaking club and it was a beautiful thing. Each couple made wine at their house or garage or wherever, and then they'd all get together to help with the racking or bottling or taste testing. (I learned many many things as a kid when these 'meetings' were held at our house.)
While still an active member in the wine club, Steve was working on his MBA. His final project (or some project, I don't really remember) was to come up with a viable business plan, so he chose a winery. After all was said and done, he kind of sat back and realized that his business plan could actually work.
Some of the other wine club members got into the winery project and they started making wine on a larger scale with Steve as the winemaker, but they eventually left. (Sometimes it's a lot more fun to spend your time touring wine regions than cleaning tanks!) When Steve got his hands into a few other projects and couldn't devote as much time to the winemaking, they hired a full time winemaker.
And Steve begat Mike, and Mike begat Josh....
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| It's not the best picture of the two of them, but it's possibly my favorite, and after a week on the river, what do you expect! |
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| Boss Man and his favorite winery duty. |
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Initially in 1999, our winemaker, Joshua Hetrick, was introduced to GPW and the art of winemaking by his mentor, Michael McVicker. Creating handcrafted wines with meticulous attention ignited his passion for winemaking. Since 2004, Josh's enthusiasm and creativity are evident in the expansion of GPW's portfolio. He introduced the popular Black and Blue and increased our selections of dry reds to include the complex Cabernet Franc and the majestic Norton. Josh also worked in concert with local bee keepers to bring the fields and forests of the Laurel Highlands to your glass with a traditional honey wine, Mountain Mead. Although Joshua utilizes modern technologies like ozone sanitation in the wine making process, he employs tratitional artisan methods of hand pressing small batches; thus his picture. This labor of love is worth it. It is the combination of a gentle touch and dedication to detail that distinguishes Glades Pike Winery's wine.
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| Josh likes nothing more than to have his picture taken. |
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Which brings us to Josh's assistant, Cory.
He's also our weekend manager, and our resident painter, and pruner, and tour guide,
and helps with the weddings ... there isn't much he doesn't have his hands in.
Which is funny because when Josh was looking for an assistant, Steve took one look at Cory's resume and tossed it in the garbage.
He was 'overqualified.'
And he is, but after exhausting the other applicants who were either underqualified or just qualified, the resume came out of the can.
I think Cory and Josh bonded pretty quickly, (I find wine helps with that) and it turns out Cory and Merle (see below) are 3rd cousins or something. Seeing as how this is a family business, and he's family in some way or another, neither he nor Steve really had a choice.
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| His hands were that color for about 2 weeks. |
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This is Merle. Merle owned and operated Thomas Feed Mill for I don't even know how long. When his son took over, most people would have retired. But Merle's not the retiring type, and since his daughter and son-in-law (Karen and Steve) needed someone to open up a shop for us outside of Seven Springs Resort, and he agreed. He's up there most weekdays when it's open, the occasional weekend, and here at the winery for almost all of the festivals or open houses we have, and many of our loyal customers expect to see him when they're in town.
Some days, when it's slow up there, you'll find him out smoking his pipe, or on the porch reading. There is a group of people from Pittsburgh that come up skiing every year who call him 'Captain,' Cory calls him 'cuz,' and at least one woman who stopped into the shop didn't call him anything. She flashed herself instead.
That day felt like more of an extended spring break than retirement I think. Although, I've never been retired, so who knows.
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And this is me, Liz. I was still a kid when they started the winery back in the barn where we used to be, but since my parents were there all of the time pressure washing floors, or cleaning stalls or tanks or whatever, I had to be there too. I was old enough to work a broom and a scrub brush, so my parents quickly realized the other reason to have kids - free labor. My brothers and I ran around out there quite a bit, sometimes helping, sometimes making the adults really happy there was wine to be had.
Like the day I had worked up quite a thirst, and grabbed a bottle of what I thought was water off of the bottling line. The adults had set up the line with wine bottles to show customers what the process looks like for one of our first open houses. After a huge gulp of sanitizer water, the winery just wasn't as cool as it used to be.
I did get over it eventually.
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Here are Steve, Josh and Cory on their somewhat annual rafting trip.
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This is Romey, Josh's dog.
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And this is Erin, who sometimes hangs out here. Her official title is "Loafer" but she does keep the shelves stocked for us.
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