Our Projects
Kindling Box Project:
Wood chips are gathered by tree service companies and by Pennington public works department and brought to the vineyard . A first selection is made to separate chips in mounds of similar material . Finer and less homogenous material is piled, conditioned, and composted for mulching grape rows. The most suitable material is transferred into bins and taken to the processing location where it is screened using our special machine, designed to remove dust and dirt from the chips and to dry the material for final packaging in recycled paper boxes. The A team is responsible for cleaning the material, drying and packaging the final product. A rubber stamp will indicate the individual responsible for preparing each box. The kindling box can be used as a hole to build a fire as a starting log, or individual chips can be added to revive the flame in a fireplace, grill, or pizza oven.
Poplar Tree Project:
This spring our project began with planting two hundred cuttings (about three inches long) of hybrid poplars under plastic much and irrigation to control weeds and supply a controlled amount of water to the small tree. Also the soil was tilled and mix with leaf compost.
By the end of the first season the trees were over 6 feet tall! Hybrid poplars are among the fastest-growing trees in North America and well suited for our weather conditions. They grow 8 times faster on average than similar species and therefore constitute a great promise for producing green energy in the years to come.
This coming winter, our A team will harvest four hundred cuttings from existing branches of last year’s planting and keep them in the freezer to maintain dormancy until the spring.
In April the first year’s trees will be transplanted in plastic pots and will be available for sale. The 400 cuttings will be planted, mulched, and irrigated and then the cycle will repeat itself.
Building Wine Boxes:
This is the one of the first project we instituted at Hopewell Valley Vineyards. Wine boxes come in different sizes, and shapes depending on the number and size of bottles to be packaged. We also package a Bag in a Box style wine. The boxes come flat on pallets. The A team is responsible for assembling the boxes, gluing the bottom, and placing the inserts in each box. The box are then piled and store ready for use during the. bottling phase.
Autism Pinot Grigio, Solicino Pinot Grigio and special donation collar:
Hopewell Valley Vineyards has been producing its Pinot Grigio under “Support Autism” label for some years. The profits from the sale of the wine has been used to benefit autism research and intervention programs. In an effort to expand this program to a larger audience HVV has created a new Pinot Grigio label called Solicino (see figure a). The wine used for this project is imported from Italy and then cellared and bottle on premise. This label will be available in wine stores and restaurants around Mercer County and New Jersey first and eventually across the nation. Due to the unlimited supply of Pinot Grigio available in Northern Italy, this program has no limits for growth.
A special autism collar has also been created to solicit additional donations as it has become common in many stores nowadays. The collar (see figure b) has a bar code that can be laser scanned at the check out point of participating stores for make additional donations.