A wine passport can pay off for more than just wine
Last year, the Garden State Wine Growers Association sent two New Jersey wine lovers from Cherry Hill to the Willamette Valley in Oregon. They were driven from local winery to local winery during the day and spent their evenings at a beautiful resort with its own vineyard.
The lucky couple who won that trip visited every winery on the New Jersey wine trail, all 45 of them, and completed their Wine Passport.
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The passport is a program that the GSWGA created to encourage local residents to hit the wine trail throughout the year. Previous winners have been sent to wine regions abroad in countries like Spain, Austria, Hungary and Portugal, all countries that I would love to visit and drink all the wine.
There are two ways to participate in the New Jersey Wine Passport program. The first is to grab a physical paper passport book when you’re at a local winery or one of the wine festivals that happen throughout the year. Once you get your passport, you need to register it online at newjerseywines.com.
In addition to being a potential ticket to a respected wine region once its completed, the passport is a mini intro to each of the state’s wineries. On each page, there’s a short history of the winery along with its address, phone number and web address.
When you visit a winery, make sure to have its page stamped. Once you have a stamp on each winery’s page, send the passport to the address on the back of the book. You have a few years to fill it before you have to send it in. The passport that I have is the 2015 passport, and it says in the back that it can be entered in the 2016, 2017 or 2018 drawings. If you grabbed the current 2017 passport, you’d need to have it in for the 2020 drawing.
A fully completed passport has to arrive by May 15 of the year to be eligible for the drawing of the year’s grand prize. The grand prize winner (chosen from all of the eligible passports received in the past year) takes place at the GSWGA festival that takes place each Memorial Day Weekend.
There are a few rules. You have to be over 21 years old to get a stamp in a passport. They’re stamped at winery tasting rooms only, and each person can only have one passport stamped per visit.
There’s a higher tech way to use the passport, too. Download the Garden State Wine Growers Association Wine Trails Passport app from the Apple app store or Google Play, and use it to check in to wineries when you visit.
The app has some features that the paper passport can’t have, like locating events at various wineries and sending text messages about upcoming news and events. It also gives you directions to the nearest winery.
Whether you use the paper passport or the app, and whether or not you actually hit every single winery, the idea here is to have adventures in New Jersey wine country. Try new wines. Sample all the Cabernet Franc, one of the grapes that shine in New Jersey. Spend some time with people you love following the wine trail, nibbling on cheese, drinking good wine, having a fabulous time.
I usually don’t make it a habit to put items on other people’s bucket lists, but I’m taking the liberty to put this on yours.
Visit every winery in New Jersey. Take your time. Enjoy yourself. And maybe, just maybe, you’ll find yourself on an all-expense-paid trip to another wonderful wine region. Even if you don’t win the grand prize, you won’t be worry you spent time in New Jersey wine country.
Robin Shreeves is the food and drinks writer for the environmental news site Mother Nature Network, and a frequent contributor to Edible Jersey Magazine and Drink Philly. She's also the co-author of “The One Year Women in Christian History’’ (Tyndale, 2014). On the Wine Trail is a weekly look at New Jersey's wineries, wines and wine enthusiasts, trends and news.