Local winery serves up vintage setting

By Foy Curley,Jr.

Just a few miles southwest of Interstate 45 on the way to Galveston a unique experience awaits anyone who enjoys the taste of wine, wants to learn more about winemaking, or wants to experience a state-of-the-art winery first-hand. Hidden in the little town of Santa Fe, the Haak (pronounced ‘hack') Vineyards & Winery provides the perfect little get-away retreat for romance, a great place for gathering with friends, family and coworkers, or the perfect setting for an all day event, such as a Bluegrass or Greek festival. Upon walking through the front doors, visitors will find a wonderful gift shop offering an abundance of choices such as gourmet food items, gift baskets and boxes, wine accessories, gifts for all occa-sions, as well as wine. Looking past the gift shop into the tasting room you are greeted by smiling faces behind the tasting room bar that was designed and crafted by the Haak's son-in- law. Complimentary tastings are avail-able, as is a premium wine tasting for a small fee. The free tour of the facility is fun and informative, and makes a great holiday treat, according to Al-Nisa Bailey and Earl Phillips Jr. of Dallas, who stopped by the winery on their way to Mardi Gras. "The tour was great," Bailey said, "a real Valentine treat." In fact, the Haak tour is better than most Texas winery tours according to Leonard Pringle, culinary art & restaurant management chairman for San Jacinto College. He likes the Haak tour over other Texas wineries because it focuses area that overlooks the Haak Vineyards and also houses the largest building mural in Galveston County. The mural is locat-ed on the bandstand where various musi-cal artists perform during many of Haak's events such as parties, weddings and fes-tivals that are held throughout the year. In the summer, festivals and other events are held almost every weekend. Raymond Haak, the owner of the winery, believes these types of events are an important component to the success of the winery. Although the winery opened its doors just four years ago, Haak wines have been winning awards dating back to the fami-ly's pre-commercial status. The Haaks began growing grapes more than 30 years ago after Gladys bought her husband Raymond two grapevines from a retail store. In 1976 the Haaks established their vineyard with the first plantings of Concord grapes. Much research and experimentation with different varieties of grapes has been done since that first planting in order to deter-mine what grapes will grow in the Texas Coastal Region. Unfortunately, this region is rampant with a bacterium known as Pierces Disease, which is fatal to virtually all vitis vinifera grapevines, which include Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc, Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Zinfandel, Shiraz and Rieslings. Therefore, only two varieties of grapes are grown at Haak: Blanc du Bois (a white grape) and Black Spanish (a red grape), also known as Jacquet. Other varieties of grapes are imported from other regions in Texas and occasion-ally from California, but the winemaking from the community come out and help harvest the crop," Lowry said. Once the grapes have been harvested, they are delivered to the crush pad, which includes a stemmer/crusher machine and a bladder press. The stemmer/crusher machine has the capacity to crush and stem 8 tons an hour, much more efficient than the traditional stomping technique that most people still like to associate with winemaking. The bladder press extracts juice from the crushed grapes and can hold approximately 5,000 pounds of crushed grapes. All crushed and stemmed grapes, except for barrel fermented wines like Chardonnay, are fermented in stainless steel refrigerated tanks inside the winery. Each tank is capable of holding 1,500 gallons of wine or juice. The flavor and color of the wine is manipulated during this process. Once the fermentation process is complete the wine is trans-ferred into the bottling line, which can bottle up to 1,000 bottles an hour. Wines that need to be fermented in oak barrels are transferred directly into the barrels located in the cellar. The bar-rels in the cellar are all made of American Oak and are toasted during manufacture. Toasting helps enhance the flavor of the wines and each barrel is marked with the degree of toasting. Each barrel holds about 59 gallons, equivalent to approxi-mately 300 bottles of wine. One of the most unique features of the winery is the 1,800-square-foot wine cellar that can be found nine feet below the tasting room floor.