As a brief overview, our soil would be classified as “sedimentary”. This means the soil is mostly compromised of solidified minerals and organic deposits from the earth, often left behind by bodies of water. In our case this would have happened during the formation of the Great Lakes. The texture of our soil is classified as a combination of silt, clay & loam. Loam is a combination of silt, sand, and clay, but throughout our vineyard we have found individual layers of these substrates.
Roots finding their way this far down through the soil begins to reveal the story about our “terroir”. In fact, the real story starts about 20-30cm below the surface. While this subterranean network of roots, meanders its way through multiple sublayers of soil, it takes up specific mineral based characteristics from all of these striations. These will eventually all become defining characteristics of the wine and help us in defining our terroir.