Undercover Winery

There are no hidden cameras at Conneaut Cellars Winery, and you don’t need a secret handshake to get in. Even though owner Joal Wolf serves as a colonel in the U.S. Army Reserves in the military intelligence field office in Washington, D.C., the winery is as normal as can be. 

Joal howls with laughter when anyone calls him a spy. “People think I’m with the CIA or I’m like James Bond, but I just sit at a desk, look at computers and do research,” he says.

His father, Alan, also was involved in counterintelligence. In fact, Alan’s work for the U.S. State Department in Germany during the Cold War is what led to the creation of this business in Conneaut Lake, Pa. During the 1950s, while stationed in West Germany, Alan’s job was screening people who escaped to the West from behind the Iron Curtain.

“He had to prove they weren’t spies,” Joal says. “Some of those Czech and East German refugees were scientists and they needed work, so he placed the biochemists in wineries in the Ruhr Valley and elsewhere. Dad became intrigued by this, and started taking winemaking courses at the University of Würzburg and at the German Wine Institute at Geisenheim.”

The Wolf family returned to the United States in the early 1960s and settled in Pennsylvania. At that time, it was illegal in the state to run a winery that sold to the general public (the law was later repealed). Alan taught English and history at a high school and kept his winemaking love alive by experimenting with grape varieties for Cornell University and Pennsylvania State University, as well as teaching basic winemaking courses through continuing education programs at several area colleges. 

In 1982, he bought a small property on the south end of Conneaut Lake and built a 6,400-square-foot facility designed to look like a turn-of-the-century winery. The property wasn’t large enough to include planting acres of vines, so he bought grapes from neighboring farms.

Joal, then a finance major at Penn State and a member of ROTC, was terrified that his father had made a terrible mistake. “I thought, ‘Oh my God, we’re going to starve,’” he says. “What did I know about the wine business? When it came to drinking, I thought most people go to a bar for a beer and a chaser.”

After graduation, the Army sent Joal to Europe for four years. While there, he visited wineries and learned winemaking techniques that he eventually brought back to Conneaut Cellars. After his father died, Joal took over the family business.

Today, the winery buys 16 different grape varieties and produces about 8,000 cases a year. And the only thing that Joal keeps top secret is how he and Cellar Master Chuck Elliott produce their vintages, which won five bronze medals at the 2011 International-American Wine Society Competition.

While Conneaut Cellars offers specialty ice wines, its bread and butter are traditional table wines like the semi-dry Rhine-influenced Riesling ($12.95) with hints of apple, peach and orange peels, and the robust Cabernet Sauvignon ($17.95), with bittersweet chocolate, green peppers, black currant and raspberry aromas.  

“Our winemaking philosophy is to stick to table wines,” Joal says. “We’re a blue-collar, workingman’s winery. Our tasting room is a quaint, quiet place where people can come in and relax. Special events are nice to host, but our job is to sell a bottle of wine.” 
Info to Go
Conneaut Cellars Winery
12005 Conneaut Lake Road
Conneaut Lake, Pa.
877-229-9463
ccw-wine.com