When it comes to making wine, Purdue faculty and staff members (left to right) Rado Gazo, Eva Haviarova, Cindy Nakatsu and Peter Hirst pool their efforts as a way to keep social ties across different departments. Indiana vintners rose to the top of world-class winemaking, winning more than 178 medals at the Indy International Wine Competition this summer.

Winemaking just plum fun for campus friends

What do you get when you cross four College of Agriculture faculty and staff with an excess of fruit? There's no punch line here — the answer is you get a team of amateur winemakers with several award-winning entries at the annual Indy International Wine Competition.

Winemaking might not be the first thing that comes to mind when most people think of professors they know — but for this group, making wine together has become a way to keep up social ties across different departments on campus.

The group consists of Eva Haviarova, manager of the forestry department's Wood Research Laboratory, Peter Hirst, associate professor of horticulture, Cindy Nakatsu, professor of agronomy, and Rado Gazo, associate professor of wood science. They have been making various fruit and grape wines together since 1998. In that time, they've entered 12 wines in the Indy International Wine Competition and have won 10 silver and bronze medals. This year, they brought home bronze medals for both of the wines they entered.

“The gold medal still eludes us, but I think next year's our year,” says Hirst, whose basement is home to Cherry Lane Cellars, the amateur label under which he and the other ag faculty bottle their wine.

Their winemaking tradition began in 1998 when Hirst was faced with a bumper crop of plums at the university's Horticulture Farm. “There were tons of plums at the Hort Farm that year,” Haviarova recalls. “Peter sold and gave away as many as he could, and then a wonderful idea occurred to him — to take the excess plums and make wine from them.”

A few of the faculty had some experience in winemaking before coming to Purdue. Nakatsu, for example, made wine during her days as a post-doctoral researcher at Michigan State University, and Haviarova's family, who live in the Slovak Republic, made their own wine when she was younger. For advice with the wines they make today, however, the group turns to Ellie Harkness, Purdue University's wine technologist.

“Ellie's been a great resource to us,” Nakatsu says. “She really knows her stuff.” As a wine technologist, Harkness experiments with different techniques for making wines with grapes grown throughout Indiana. She also serves as an educational resource both on campus and for Indiana's commercial wineries.

While Harkness has played an important role with Cherry Lane Cellars, the diverse backgrounds of the faculty also contribute to the success of their wines. As a microbiologist, Nakatsu serves as the quality control agent for the group, ensuring that all their equipment is sterilized. “Keeping it clean is the number one thing,” she says. Hirst's background in fruit production is an asset to the group as well, and Haviarova and Gazo, who both have backgrounds in wood science, provide insight when the time comes to include wood in the wineaging process. “We've worked out a little division of labor,” Haviarova says. “When we get together, everybody knows what to do — over time, it's developed into something very nice.”