Vines & Rushes Winery

Vines & Rushes Winery features 2,500 grape vines, and it produces 20 wine varieties as well as ciders and ports.

Ryan Prellwitz, owner of Vines & Rushes, grew up on his parents’ corn, soybean and strawberry farm near Rush Lake. Although he enjoyed the daily grind of a working farm, Prellwitz found himself drawn to computer technology and coding in high school. 

“For almost 15 years, I worked in IT and even ran a small support business,” he says. “But in my late 20s I wanted to start a new business — something that would bring value to the family farm. I started researching what would be a viable option and my dad suggested grapes.”

Prellwitz is creating wines that reflect his pride in farming and the history of the place he calls home. The wine itself is a good story, but it’s in the naming and labeling that Prellwitz can have fun telling stories of the Ripon area. 

“Take The Catt Lady, a sweet white wine honoring Carrie Chapman Catt, who was a political strategist, suffragist and peace activist born in Ripon,” he says. “Or our Ceresco dry white giving a nod to the utopian society established in 1844 adjacent to the city of Ripon. No one else has these stories.”

Vines & Rushes began in 2012 with 50 grape vines planted on a small plot. The next year, it added 200, and the following year, another 500 took root. Today, the winery has 2,500 vines flourishing across its landscape.

Vines & Rushes grapes

"It's not easy to grow grapes in Wisconsin’s climate, but doing so is a labor of love," Vines & Rushes Winery owner Ryan Prellwitz says.

“Our grapes make up 10% of our wine production,” Prellwitz says. “To supplement, I work with dozens of growers throughout Wisconsin to be sure all the grapes we use are 100% Wisconsin grown. Last year we processed 100 tons of grapes, and I feel good about supporting those farmers.”

Like his other Wisconsin suppliers, Prellwitz plants grape varieties specific to Wisconsin, including St. Pepin, Petite Pearl, Marquette and Verona. Vines & Rushes produces 20 wines along with ciders and ports.

For Prellwitz, being a vintner is a nonstop annual cycle of harvesting and processing, fermenting and transferring, filtering and bottling. 

Each season is a trickle to a flood to a trickle again, he says. During his harvest he also has other growers’ grapes coming in and is managing more than 30 batches of grapes at any given time. Once he puts the wines to bed in October, work settles down for a bit, only to become a flood when the spring growing and bottling season begins. He projects that in 2022, Vines & Rushes will bottle 20,000 gallons of wine. 

While the popular wines are enough to bring people in, Prellwitz says he wanted to create a destination that he himself would like to visit. For him, this included music, food and community. 

“I am a small business owner in a small town. What would I want to do to have fun? I try to do those things,” he says.

Over the last eight years Prellwitz has expanded his original retail and tasting space to include additions for food service, events, and production and storage. Vines & Rushes hosted 200 events and 90 live music shows last year. For many of these events, Prellwitz partnered with local nonprofit organizations that shared in the proceeds.

Prellwitz adds that another tenet of his business philosophy is environmental responsibility. The winery has 120 solar panels on its buildings and produces an average of 65% of its own electricity.

“I wouldn’t want to continue growing my business without sustainability as a cornerstone,” he says. “My goal is to be the good you want in the community and to get people out here to enjoy a piece of heaven.”

vinesandrushes.com