Winemaker puts valley on the map

On May 2, the “closed” sign will drop from Mission Mountain Winery’s signature marker outside its tasting room in Dayton and for the 25th year, the winery will be open for business.

The annual Red Wine and Chocolate event begins the season for the winery with a room full of chocolate, paired with red wine for visitors to taste.

Traffic won’t peak until around July, owner and winemaker Tom Campbell said, but “it’s the way we always kick-off the season.” The event will begin a run from May 1-Oct. 1 when the winery is open every day from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Last week, Campbell was dusting winter off the tasting room, preparing for the upcoming opening and the milestone year.

Mission Mountain was the first winery of its kind in Montana, now offering around 12 kinds of wines each year, most of which are made from grapes grown in Montana. The well-recognized label of the lake and mountains the wine is named for was commissioned to Monte Dolack a year after the first batches were out, and has remained the trademark since 1985 when it was first used.

Campbell and a small staff run the tasting room, the vineyard and the entire winemaking production in Dayton. The wine is distributed only in Montana. Even if you don’t think of wine when you think of Montana, Mission Mountain has shown wine can be a legitimate business here.

A winery was partially his dad’s idea, Campbell said, and partially the poor economy of the 1970s that nudged him into the unlikely Montana business. He grew up in the Rattlesnake area of Missoula and came out of the University of Montana in 1976 with a degree in zoology. Resource industry jobs were scarce and the federal forestry programs were making cut backs in the tough times.

“I knew that if I wanted to stay here, I’d have to create my own job,” Campbell said.

So he signed up and was accepted at University of California-Davis, which hosts one of the nation’s premiere Viniculture and Enology programs. Campbell went through the school and started working across in the famed valleys full of vineyards in California. He got back to the Northwest with jobs in Washington, all the while experimenting within all aspects of the winemaking business.

By that time, around 1984, Tom Sr. was looking to “retire.” The family had land in Dayton, and together the father and son thought, even if no one else agreed, that “wine grapes would maybe be a possibility.”

The flat acreage skirting the lake didn’t have the soil or climate for grapes. After learning about the land through trial and error, the Campbells found that the sloped, Northern portion of the land is ideal for the mid-season grapes to grow.

While the experimenting continued, Campbell “paid the bills” with winemaking jobs around Washington, while Tom Sr. ran the business side of Mission Mountain.

The first 15 years Campbell traveled and continued to work. When he finally made it profitable, his family moved to Polson and let Tom Sr. really retire. 

“People were surprised to see us here,” Campbell said. “We still have run into some skeptical people who taste our wine.”

A walk through the processing warehouse, which is attached to the tasting room, today shows four giant climate-controlled tubs that hold the white wines where it ferments for 45 days and the red wines are patiently soaking up the oak from the barrels in the corner. The red wines ferment with the skins in the barrels for 2-3 years. The four-person bottling machine fills, corks and labels the 72,000 bottles of wine Mission Mountain produces each year sits in the corner. The cases of wine are held in the storage warehouse next to the tasting and production center.

His wine has not only convinced the consumers that Montana can make a legitimate wine, Campbell’s training and love of spreading the winemaking love, has caused a spurt of vineyards around the Flathead Valley.

The mid-seaon grapes that he can’t grow on his land, he gets from people like Dudley Page.

Page set up a small vineyard near Finley Point on the east side of the lake in the late 80s, and started working with Tom shortly after that. Page’s small vineyard grows mid-season grapes for pinot noir and a new kind this week, a leon millot grape.

He’s found one of the many warm “microclimates” located around the lake, Page said, that is off the lake and on a southwest facing slope that is warmer. The weather can still devastate an entire crop, but on good years the four acres will yield four to six tons of grapes.

A sort of network has been set up around the valley. Page said the art of growing a good grape comes from talking.

Tom has taught a lot about pruning and what he expects for good wine, Page said.

“We’ve both talked a lot about what grapes will do best here and we’ve pretty much been in agreement on that and that’s why we’ve pushed the pinot noir, it’s a mid season grape and we have it warm enough here to ripen,” he said.

Pruning, an incredibly intricate and important part of the process, takes place during the spring. Throughout the summer that vines need to be sprayed and carefully monitored. It’s labor of complete love, Page said, until harvest time in the fall when the grapes are turned over to the winemaker in Dayton.

“(Campbell) can produce a good bottle of wine and he knows how to do it. Wine is an interesting material to make. You don’t just go out and crush a bunch of grapes . . . you have to know how to control . . . how to get the most out of the sugars,” Page said. “There’s an awful lot, I’ve tried to make wine myself and I just can’t do it, It’s an art.”

There are a little more than 100 bottles of wine adorned with medals lining the tasting room. Just this winter, the 2006 Mission Mountain Winery Merlot Reserve won gold at the blind, panel judged Florida International Wine Competition. The 2006 Monster Red won the silver medal in Florida.

Campbell said that those kinds of awards were, and are, essential to his kind of business where there’s not a local standard of comparison available.

But nowadays, more and more wineries have been popping up with the vineyards. There are now eight to 10 wineries across Montana. More growth for the industry he loves is a point of satisfaction.

You’ll find a bottle of Mission Mountain wine in just about every town in Montana where there’s a cooler, Campbell said. Another point of great satisfaction. And in the next 25 years? There’ll be slow and steady progress at Mission Mountain, he said. And always good wine.