When COVID-19 struck last year, Gloria Priam wondered if her farm winery in Colchester would survive, but the business boomed. As people grew fearful of being indoors, Priam Vineyards moved its operations outdoors, with tents pitched all over the property.
But the pandemic took its toll.
Her mother died from COVID-19, and Priam realized painfully that she wished she had spent more time with her. The isolation of the pandemic further brought into focus Priam’s lack of family ties in Connecticut, with all her relatives being in the Pittsburgh area.
The pandemic also piled on more work that came on top of six years of a robust, but exhausting expansion with her current business partner, Jim Melillo, leading them to a difficult decision. They have concluded that now is the time to sell.
“It’s incredibly hard,” Gloria Priam said, walking along a row of grape vines now shriveled and dormant, awaiting a spring rebirth. “It’s been 22 years of my life. There are so many things that you could do with this property that need to happen. I just don’t have the energy anymore. I was a lot younger when I started this. I was chief cook and bottle washer.”
Now, she said she wants to see her family more — something running the vineyard does not allow enough time to do.
The 40-acre farm winery on Shailor Hill Road is now on the market for $3.2 million and comes along with a thriving wedding and event business — “agro-tainment,” Melillo calls it — that Melillo said he believes is now essential in the winery business.
“We’ve done as much as we can, and it’s time for the next generation, new blood,” Melillo, 71, said, standing next to Priam and pointing across a field. “As an example, there are 12 acres over there, a beautiful, flat field. It’s growing hay and weeds. It could grow more vines. It could grow marijuana.”
A contemporary farmhouse on the property could become a bed-and-breakfast, and the property is zoned for a restaurant, they said.
Strong sales
Gloria Priam and her ex-husband built the farm winery together from the ground up, starting in 1998, learning the business as they planted their first vines.
Today, there are 10,000 grape vines on the property and the winery turns out 40,000 bottles of wine each year. There are a dozen different kinds, ranging from riesling and rosé to chardonnay and gewurztraminer.
Farm wineries in Connecticut got their start in the 1970s. In the late 1990s, Priam Vineyard was only the seventh. Today, there are 50 licensed farm wineries in the state — a designation that requires at least 25% of the grapes be grown on the farm or locally in Connecticut.
A 2017 study by the University of Connecticut on the state’s agricultural industry found that wineries enjoyed rapid growth between 2007 and 2015. The growth was driven by “increased demand for local wines, which in turn has increased derived demand for local grapes,” the study said.
Sales in the same period soared form $30 million to $85.8 million. The industry in Connecticut employed nearly 1,000 at the time of the UConn study.
Bryan Hurlburt, the state’s agriculture commissioner, said growth in the state’s winery industry has certainly continued to grow since the UConn report was issued.
“You don’t have to fly somewhere to visit a winery and have some great wines,” Hurlburt said. “People are recognizing that Connecticut has some great farms and some great wines.”
The Connecticut Wine Trail is one of many promotions that call attention to the state’s growing winemaking industry.
At Priam, Melillo said, sales have grown 15% annually in the past six years or so since he became partner, investing over a million dollars in the vineyard, effectively jump-starting a business that had reached a plateau.
The sales growth, Melillo said, compares with an average of 3% or 4% annual growth for the industry. The sales at Priam include both wine sales and event revenue, he said.
Melillo said he had just sold a global management company when he became at partner in Priam. He jokes that being Italian, he was around wine all his life — but admits to a steep learning curve.
“There’s being around wine and then there’s being around wine,” Melillo said.
Melillo’s investment doubled the size of the tasting room and wine production area, adding Italian-made fermentation tanks. Priam launched an online wine club that now has over 300 members and ships all over the country.
In 2020, Priam drew $1 million in revenue and cleared $300,000 in operating profit, according to an online real estate posting for the property.
Rare opportunity
It is relatively rare for a vineyard to come up for sale in Connecticut. But just this year, the Haight-Brown Vineyard in Litchfield, the state’s oldest farm winery, also came under new ownership.
Competition is more fierce than it was in the 1990s. But farm wineries now can also offer craft beer as long as it brewed in Connecticut. Priam recently started offering Alvarium beer produced in New Britain.
Priam and Melillo attribute the success of their wines — they’ve won multiple gold medals at competitions in Germany and New York City — to the minerals in the soil.
“To be simple, I call it a gravel pit with 300 years of cow pies on top of it,” Priam said. “It brings a lot of crispness, clear crispness — the balance of acidity to mineral is beautifully done.”
The partners believe that Connecticut and the Northeast region of the country will continue to gain a higher profile in winemaking should climate change make the growing season longer and winters milder. A longer growing season gives more time for the sugars to get into the grape, Melillo said, balancing off crispness.
“I knew, at some point, the East Coast was going to be premiere because the West Coast was going to get too hot, and that’s actually what’s happening,” Priam said.
The decision to sell the vineyard is intensely personal for Priam and not only because she was there at the beginning. Her paternal grandfather owned a vineyard near Budapest, Hungary, before he was driven out of the country during the Russian Revolution. The Colchester vineyard is named for him.
Priam said she hopes the next owner of the vineyard will see what she saw in the land and the potential for further growth she has often dreamed about.
If the vineyard is sold, Priam said she knows she will no longer have a say in how the land is used, and “I just have to let go.”
Kenneth R. Gosselin can be reached at kgosselin@courant.com.
