A portion of the ancient vineyard being reestablished

About Renascent Vineyards:

    Renascent Vineyards resides in and around what we believe is the oldest continually operated winery building in the United States. Our winery was built in the early 1830's, and operated from then until the coming of fungal blights such as black rot in the mid 1850's. The winery changed hands several times between 1854 and 1863, with all production ceasing at that time.

    Tom and Kyoko Crush bought the property that now includes Renascent Vineyards in 2001. Intrigued by the unusual history, they decided to rework the property back into it's original form. This process has been ongoing for several years, and will continue for years to come. The work at Renascent Vineyards goes on every day.

Tom at work reconstructing the vineyard

    Originally, the winery had over 50 acres of winegrape vines. Today, we have 1.5 acres of winegrapes (Cabernet Franc, Norton, Riesling and Cayuga), with a similar planting planned for the Spring of 2008. Almost all of the previous winegrape acres are now heavily forested. Tom cleared the 1.5 acres of current vineyard by hand, using only a chainsaw so that the soil structure and hand laid stone terraces would be preserved. The posts for our vineyard's trellis system are of black locust and cedar harvested from the forest that was cut to enable the reestablishment of the vineyards.

    Our ancient wine cellar was quarried into the hillside almost 180 years ago, and it’s walls are of hand cut fossil rock. Our wine cellar's temperature changes only slightly over the course of the year, and we have little need for temperature control of our wine production. All of the woods in our wine cellar are old growth hardwoods taken from the aboriginal forest which used to cover Ohio. The bricks of our winery are all individuals; formed and fired by hand from clay dug out on site (hand firing bricks in this fashion results in a lot of warped and cracked bricks, which we find all the time strewn around the property).

The wine cellar under renovation

    Renascent Vineyards is not simply a vineyard and winery, it is a part of our region's history. We are proud to be a part of the rebirth of Ohio's wine industry.