Page 26 - BusinessWest September 4, 2023

Grape Expectations
As they talked about their venture, Modestow and Kersberger were joined first by sibling cats Chardonnay, or ‘Chard’ for short, and Pinot, and later by Burmese mountain dogs Yogi and Simka, who have become part of the team, if you will, at Black Birch, a vision that first started coming into focus when the two business owners met while attending UMass Amherst in the mid-’90s.
Later, during their college journey, they traveled to the Nether- lands to visit some of Kersberger’s family and took a side trip to the Loire Valley in France, famous for its wine production.
“Being poor college students, we had to camp, and we would camp at farms, and many of them were vineyards — mom-and-pop operations,” she explained. “It sparked our interest, and any time
retired from that profes- Black Birch
sion — and he and Kers- Continued on page 43
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we traveled after that, we always made sure we visited any vineyards or wineries in the region, and our love of the culture grew from there. Everything about wine and winemaking and the community and the social aspect of it ... it was always a draw for us.”
Modestow concurred. “When we traveled, we went to wine-growing areas — Burgundy, Champagne, California, Washington, Spain, even Canada and Texas.”
This interest, and burgeoning passion for wine and making wine, stayed with them as they lived in Amsterdam for a year while Ian attended school there for archaeology, and later, as they started their professional careers, with Modestow launching a dental practice in Northampton and Kersberger essentially man- aging that practice.
In 2011, this interest in wine started morph- ing into a business, with Modestow and Kers- berger partnering with Mary and Ed Hamel in a venture that would become Black Birch Vine- yard in Southampton. In the spring of 2017, they would take that name and their experi-
ence, equipment, and burgeoning entrepreneurial spirit to a former onion farm in Hatfield and put down some roots — figuratively, but also quite literally.
Indeed, they would move twice in two months, first to a storage facility and then to the farm in Hatfield, and eventually plant more than 12 acres with roughly 19,000 vines of several different cool- climate varietals, from Chardonnay to Riesling; Pinot Noir to Tromi- nette. They also opened a tasting room (a transformed former onion barn) and launched a wine club.
Over time, Modestow would ease out of his dental practice — he is now all but officially
“We have a lot of repeat customers, and those customers bring new customers, and it grows from there; there’s a lot of word-of-mouth advertising.”
26 SEPTEMBER 4, 2023 << WINERIES & BREWERIES >>
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