Page 4 - BusinessWest July 24, 2023

Vintage Years
Glendale Ridge Vineyard Matures into a True Destination
EBY GEORGE O’BRIEN
d Hamel acknowledged that, while all entrepreneurial ven- tures start with an idea, most then follow a business plan that details how to take that idea and transform it into a
successful, profitable operation.
It is with a large dose of ... well,
let’s call it pride, because that’s what
it sounds like, that Hamel says he and his wife, Mary, essentially skipped that business-plan part.
“We’re just following where this thing takes us, and we’re having a lot of fun doing it,” he said, adding that this ‘thing’ is the Glendale Ridge Vineyard in Southampton, a concept that has grown into an intriguing and, yes, successful business.
Actually, three businesses, as Mary likes to say.
There’s the vineyard, where, at pres- ent, six main varieties of grapes are grown, from Reisling to Chardonnay to Cabernet Franc. There’s also a winery, where a broad mix of labels are made and bottled. And there’s a tasting room and what could be called an events division.
Indeed, the vineyard has been the site of a few weddings and regularly hosts retirement and birthday parties and many other types of functions, as well as concerts large and small — there’s an ABBA tribute band scheduled to play on Aug. 4, and Mary is expecting north of 400 people (much more on all that later).
All three of these businesses involved steep learning curves, said both Ed and Mary, who, in previous lives, worked as a general contractor and dental hygien- ist, respectively, before they purchased the Sankey dairy farm in 1992 with
only some vague ideas about what
they might do with it. And the learn- ing process continues — on everything from which grapes to grow (and how) to which wines makes the best blends, to what kinds of music to book for the weekly Sunset Series, which is just what it sounds like: concerts as the sun goes down, with some drop-dead gor-
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JULY 24, 2023
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Mary and Ed Hamel