Our Story
Antietam Creek Vineyards began as an abandoned 55-acre dairy farm adjacent to the Antietam National Battlefield. After buying the land in 2010, our owners spent months carefully cultivating the land, testing soil microclimates, and building a deer fence to keep curious antlered friends at bay. In 2011, we began planting the first of our 4.5 acres currently under cultivation.
Our area is known for its karst, or limestone, formations. If you talk to local farmers whose families have tilled the soils for generations, they will tell you, "It ain’t Washington County if you don’t hit rock." In preparing for our plantings, we removed some rocks the size of refrigerators and left others that were simply too huge to move. That same limestone is a tremendous asset for winemaking — it keeps our soils at a perfect 7.0 pH, or neutral acidity. In doing so, it imparts "terroir," or place-specific taste elements, to our wine.
In 2015, after many years of hard work, and with the vines reaching full production capacity, we sought out skilled craftsmen from the local area and retrofitted our hundred-year-old barn into our tasting room. We wanted to maintain the rough beauty of its soaring heights and hand-hewn chestnut beams for visitors, while introducing the most modern and high-quality equipment possible into the cool limestone cellar where we process and age the wines. Late in 2016, we began selling wine out of a tent on our property, and the tasting room itself was completed in 2018.
