5.18 Friday
Such a beautiful day. Our hopes is that Saturday will be equally as nice.
We’ve been going by signage off the highway advertising Lakeridge; a truly nice experience.

This signage was at the foot of the driveway. As we looked ahead it was like tripping in California.

The outside temperature today was 85, just perfect. What’s hard to believe is that this vineyard began in 1988, by a CPA.

This is the tasting bar, we’ll return back here after the tour is complete and sample their products. They’ve been winning awards since almost their beginning in 1988, I think.

Our tour will begin on the upper level. Actually we’ll traverse the catwalks from above so as not to get in the way of the workers below. Picture looking down at the main level.

In the back of the picture is a 250 gallon drum for aging wines. This system is no longer used and has been replaced with stainless steel drums as we’ll soon see. This is Stuart, he’ll be our guide on this tour.

Above are the newer two-thousand gallon storage drums and below are the  even newer twenty-five thousand gallon drums.

The grapes are harvested, then thrown into these metal grinding machine where they are squished into a juice.

This is the owner of the winery, forgot his name. He started as a CPA and is now into grapes. Below is his father. As the story goes only his father enjoyed the wine that he, the father, produced, but he was the owners inspiration.

The grapes are harvested and collected and the process begins. This is a video we’re looking at showing the bottling process. We’ll see this machine again shortly.

This winery bottles over 2.5 million bottles annually.

Florida’s hot, humid weather is not conducive to using wooden kegs, therefore the stainless steel insulated and individually cooled containers.  Below is the bottling machine that does all the bottling. Just looking at the simple and small bottling machines you’d think this just a family operation. On the contrary; this is the seventh largest winery in the US.