The photos are courtesy of Fridays Creek Winery. They include (clockwise from above) a waterfall in front of the building; the remodeled portion of the original tobacco barn; grapes on the vine; the tasting room (bar); and vines and the winery building.
Frank Cleary of Fridays Creek Winery in Owings, Md., has had about two years to see first-hand all that's involved in running a winery. Fridays Creek opened in August 2006.
One are the rules that wineries in Maryland live by. "I am just amazed at what a tangled
web [it is]," he said of the state's wine laws during an interview Thursday. "Maryland wine laws are just as royal mess, I dont know how else to say it, and it really needs to be something that is looked at from a consumers standpoint."
Much of what Cleary was refering to was covered in this Baltimore Sun piece that was published March 31, 2008.
"I'm [also] really just flabbergasted at which the speed of the new hybrids are coming about," Cleary said.
One thing that Cleary doesn't expect to see is the state's capacity ever catch up with its demand for grapes, an issue covered in this Capital News Service story. "There will never in my opinion, ever be excess capacity [of grapes] in the state of Maryland," he said. "California and New York have excess capacity of grapes to winemakers; but both of those, of course, Califronia is 100, 150 years old in its grapegrowing and New York, I”d say, is 75 or so years old in their grapegrowing capacity. That’s not something I can see in the foreseeable future as far as excess capacity."
