DUNGENESS — This land just grew a great deal juicier.
Inside of two hours last Saturday, Pam and Dennis Dundas plus a flock of friends picked 3,700 pounds of grapes — and not just any old fruit.
These are the luscious Madeleine Angevine varietal, a German grape with a French name and the spine to thrive on the North Olympic Peninsula, of all places.
A sun-splashed summer produced a bumper crop, a harvest as prodigious as last year’s was meager.
2008 “was awful and cold,” said Pam Dundas, but 2009 just might go down in history as a new chapter in the Dungeness Valley agricultural story.
Pam, a nurse at Olympic Medical Center in Port Angeles and Dennis, a retired plastic surgeon, are among the writers of that chapter.
Dennis took courses in viticulture at the University of California at Davis and learned of local grape-growing from Tom Miller, who owns the Dungeness Bay Vineyard off Lotzgesell Road.
The Dundases bought a former dairy farm off Cays Road nearly five years ago, and waited just a few months before planting their vineyard on three-quarters of an acre.
This month, it all came to fruition.
Grapes to wine
With help from about 25 volunteer pickers from OMC, the pair loaded nearly two tons of bright-green grapes into trucks bound for Olympic Cellars just east of Port Angeles.
Winemaker Benoit Murat and owner Kathy Charlton were waiting there, eager to begin the process of creating the 2009 Olympic Cellars Puget Sound appellation Madeleine Angevine.
“We have crushed [the grapes] and we’re racking them today,” a breathless Charlton said Monday afternoon. The result will be some 300 gallons of wine, as in 1,620 bottles.
“This is three times what we’ve had in the past,” Charlton said. “I am so excited. This is a more mature vineyard, and we’ve had a great summer.”
In previous years, Olympic Cellars has used grapes from Miller’s Dungeness Bay Vineyard to make the Melange Nouveau, or new blend.
The 2008 harvest yielded just 42 cases, and they sold out fast.
The much-larger Madeleine Angevine harvest from the Dundas vineyard will be bottled next May, Charlton said. Local-wine enthusiasts will have access to it by early summer.
This white wine “has grapefruit on the nose,” she said. “It’s citrusy and delicate, a cool-weather varietal.”
On harvest Saturday, Pam Dundas’ granddaughter conducted a preliminary tasting.
She nibbled on one grape, and pronounced it “tart.”
Another crop
Meanwhile, on the other side of Sequim-Dungeness Way, another vineyard has produced a good crop of Madeleine Angevine and Siegerrebe, a varietal that can also grow in Dungeness Valley conditions, for a second local winery.
Graysmarsh, the Woodcock Road farm famous for its blue-, black-, straw- and raspberries, has been cultivating wine grapes sine 2004.
Last week, farm manager Arturo Flores furnished about 2,500 pounds of fruit for Harbinger Winery west of Port Angeles, where winemaker Sara Gagnon will bottle her brand locally grown beverages.
Flores, however, is a little less sanguine about Peninsula grape-growing.
“On a small, hobby scale, [wine grapes] are fine. Madeleine Angevine is the most promising,” he said. But “we’ve got too many issues with the weather.”
The Graysmarsh grower added that he’s also sold lots of berries to Harbinger in recent years, and enjoys the resulting blackberry and raspberry wines.
Charlton, for her part, isn’t letting anyone rain on her enthusiasm for local wine grapes.
A few years ago she and the Olympic Cellars crew planted a small vineyard, called “La Petite,” behind the winery’s converted dairy barn at 255410 U.S. Highway 101.
Though a viable harvest is not on the near horizon, “we do have grapes,” she said.
Pumpkins in the grapes
So during the Dungeness Crab and Seafood Festival winery tour this Saturday and Sunday, Charlton will invite visitors into the rows.
“We’re going to have pumpkins out there, and a new vineyard angel-scarecrow,” she promised.
The vineyard angel sculpture that’s been behind the winery for years needed “a face-lift and a little body work,” so Charlton is having some surgery done on it later in the week.
Visitors can walk through the vineyard and taste the grapes — which are, of course, Madeleine Angevine.
And in doing so, they may also sample a facet of the future.
It’s been two years since the completion of a microclimate study in which Greg Jones of Southern Oregon University declared Clallam County to be brimming with potential for wine-grape growing, Charlton noted.
Now, she believes, “the vision is coming true.”
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Sequim-Dungeness Valley reporter Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-681-2391 or at diane.urbani@peninsuladailynews.com.
