tongue river winery

Thanks for the positive words. We've teamed up with several local organizations to help with their fundraising efforts, and if it's good for them, it's always good for us. We're glad you enjoyed the wines you tasted, and we'll be tickled to see you come back!

What can we say, we enjoy our guests! The conversations we have about wine with our guests is designed to help them understand what they are tasting. We like to remind them that all of our wines come exclusively from fruits from the Northern Plains (no California or 'import' fruit in our winery!)We're glad you had a good time, and look forward to your return. We've got at least 4 new wines since you were here!

We're glad to ship wine to people and wish we could do so for every state. So far we ship to Montana, North Dakota and California residents. Email us if you are interested!

Our sweet Cherry Pie wine is an "up and comer" for the winery and may even catch up to our number one best seller, Rhubarb. These cherries in this wine are mostly Carmine Jewel cherries, which grow on a bush or small tree, are hardy to -50°F and don't mind the alkaline soil common in North Dakota and Montana. 2015 should be a year with a huge harvest increase as 150 new cherry plants begin to bear!

Great hospitality is all about passion, and we are passionate about not only producing great wines, but producing great wines that represent our region. We only use fruit from Montana or adjacent states to give our wines the "genuinely Montanan" stamp of approval. Look for our unusual fruit wines made with haskap and cherry plants imported from Canada, aronia from North Dakota and even rose hips from time to time.

The vast majority of our customer base like sweet or semi-sweet wines. But we pride ourselves on full-bodied dry red and white wines too. Tongue Tied is a robust, French oak barrel-aged wine with plenty of tannin and deep red color reminiscent of Malbec, that craves red meat. Sabrevois is a fruit-forward lightly oaked red wine that loves lasagna and other marinara dishes. Frontenac Gris is a crisp white done in the style of chardonnay and pairs well with fish and fowl. All three have won medals across the US and continue to improve with each vintage.

Many midwest wineries make Rhubarb wine, and we pride ourselves in making a wine that is unapologetically just plain rhubarb. This wine continues to outsell everything else we produce, and is made entirely from rhubarb within 25 miles of Miles City, MT.

We make more cherry wines than any others, including the above mentioned Sand Cherry Kiss grown in our vineyard, Cherry Pie (a sweet wine made from pie cherries) a semi-sweet chokecherry, Oaky Choke (barrel-aged dry chokecherry) and occasionally Prairie & Peaks Cherry (a blend of chokecherry, sand cherry and Flathead cherry). Who doesn't like cherries?!

I've "dabbled" in wine since I was 18 years old in college, and am now "beyond Medicare eligible!" To be successful in any endeavor requires passion for the cause, and winemaking has been my most enduring passion for almost 50 years. It's easy to be excited about something you truly love doing. Every year, every variety of fruit, every style of wine is different and keeps the fascination bubbling and the mind exploring. I hope I can do this until I simply drop over at age 95 with the taste of wine on my lips and a smile on my face!

We never planned to "break new ground", but were simply eager to grow grapes that would survive and produce good wines for our own use at retirement. But often passion drives one to excess, which hit home when we realized we were producing more fruit than we could drink up ourselves. So we took the big leap and went commercial, never intending to be pioneers in vineyarding in eastern Montana, but realized that's what we are. We've also broken new ground in coordinating the importation of cherry and haskap (honeyberry) plants from Canada, and were the first and only US winery to make commercial haskap wine in 2011. Our motto could well be, "If it looks like a fruit and tastes good, we'll ferment it!"