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Wine & Spir s

Wine-making pioneers guide Bartlett Winery & Distillery into its 38th year

By Kate Shaffer

Phot s courtesy of Bartle Winery

On an August evening sometime in the early 1980s, Bob Bartlett was sipping a glass of wine at a
Blaine House reception.
It was his wine, crafted from Maine-grown fruits at his fledgling winery in Gouldsboro, and as identifiable to him as an infant would
be to any parent. But when asked by a fellow guest which of his varieties they were sampling, he was embarrassed to admit that he
could not identify it.

“I knew it was mine,” Bob recounts, “but I just couldn’t put my finger on which one.”
“At the time, the state was trying to promote Maine agriculture,” Bob explains. Bob and his wife Kathe had just opened their winery,
and Gov. Joseph Brennan invited them down to the Blaine House – the residence for Maine’s governors – for a special reception where
their wines would be served.

On a hunch, Bob wandered back into the kitchen and discovered that the catering staff had decanted the wine into pitchers – separated
not by varietal, but by color; all the reds into one pitcher, and all the whites into another.

Bob laughed it off. “It was early days in Maine,” he says.

Bob, a native of Detroit, had spent summers in Midcoast Maine as a child and always wanted to come back to the state to live. By the
early ‘70s, Bob had built a successful career as both a glass artist and in environmental design, but was ready for a change. After going
back to school for wine making, he and his wife Kathe started exploring the idea of moving to Maine and starting a winery.
In 1975, the couple did just that.

“At first, we tried growing grapes,” Bob says. But when that didn’t work, the couple decided to try making high quality dry fruit
wines from fruits that were already growing well in Maine.

“It was a stupid business idea,” Bob says, explaining that there was zero demand for fruit wine at the time. There were no other com-
mercial wineries in Maine, and it wasn’t even legal to operate a tasting room. But the Bartletts were determined to build a life for
themselves in the state they loved. So, they started experimenting with fruit that was literally right outside their door: wild Maine
blueberries.
Meanwhile, Bob began to design, and then to build, the winery
and tasting room. After all, he thought, if they were going to try
to make and sell fruit wines, they would first need a way of get-
ting people to try them.

“I actually wrote the legislation that made tasting room legal,”
Bob says. And when the bill became law in 1983, Bartlett Winery
was ready with their first bottles.

They opened their tasting room doors that same year with 600 gal-
lons of five different wines, made from blueberries, apples, and
pears. And they sold out in two weeks.
The next year, they doubled production, and every year after that.
At the winery’s most productive period, they were making about
8,000 to10,000 cases – or 19,000 to 24,000 gallons – annually.
Beginning their journey, Kathe spreads freshly harvested wild Maine blue-
berries onto the sorting belt.
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