When people come to Rusty Tractor Vineyards, I want them to first of all, look and see how beautiful it is.

We want them to think, man, this is cool.

You know, this is, it's not Napa, but it's like Napa in Little Rock.

We can literally drive 5 or 10 miles from downtown, have really good homemade Arkansas wine that they take a sip and they go, man, we didn't know we could.

We could have this good of wine made in Arkansas.

And whenever we hear that, it just makes us smile because it's kind of rewarding for all the hard work you put in.

I'm Sherry Meyer and this is my husband, Doug Meyer.

Doug had a tractor dealership, capital equipment was driving by this property 30 years ago and saw an old sign called the agent and bought the property.

It was an old dairy farm, used to be called the Kenzel Dairy.

We wanted a unique label and so tractor business, old forts and tractor.

It's like a 1918.

So we said let's do Rusty Tractor Vineyards and it's kind of stuck and people like the label.

Our first wine label was a piece of duct tape.

Yeah, it worked.

Neither one of us had any aspirations of having a winery.

We just started planting the grapes and we planted so many that we realized we had to have help.

And so we said, well, let's just start a winery here in Little Rock and it's been a labor of love.

It's just been a great, great trip.

It is definitely A-Team effort.

We have a great team of people that work on the vineyard, work at the venue.

If farming has taught me one thing, it's that you have to start somewhere and you chip away at it every single day and you eventually get through right on time.

This will be my 12th year winemaking, so I started at Chateau Ozark in 2011.

I did my internship in the field there for my horticulture degree, and I lived there on property and helped with the harvest that year.

And yeah, kind of baptism by fire.

If you would have told me when I was in school that I'd be doing chemistry for a living, I would not have believed you.

So I just measured out my enzymes and essentially they helped me extract as much juice as possible.

It helps break down the cell walls and the grapes.

So my love of wine came from growing plants and being outside.

I did not want an office desk job.

I absolutely love being outside.

I love the fact that no matter what you do, there's always going to be more to learn about these plants.

Wine is kind of like an art form, and the fact that you put your work out for the public to critique and criticize, and whenever you get good feedback, it feels incredible.

These are our AQW Awardwinning wines, which is the Arkansas Quality Wine Competition.

And what that does is that sets a standard for winemaking in Arkansas.

For someone to grow grapes and make wine in Arkansas, it's much, much more difficult than it is in Napa.

Here we have humidity, night and day temperatures, rainfall.

There's just so many other factors that they don't have to deal with in California that we do here.

So we plant hybrid grapes.

And what they do is they take the wine characteristics of Old World grapes and the disease resistance of New World grapes and they breed them together and they do that in Clarksville, They do that at the Cornell, they do that in California and they create great breeding programs.

So what we're harvesting today is Tremonet, which is a hybrid variety.

The University of Arkansas has a fruit breeding substation in Clarksville and they have released at least four wine grapes that I'm aware of.

Opportunity, Enchantment, Dazzle and indulgence.

We grow dazzle and indulgence.

It feels phenomenal to have gone to school where the grapes that I'm growing originated from.

I mean they, they put in all that hard work and we get to enjoy the fruits of their labor.

We live on a beautiful piece of property.

We're on 80 acres, but we back up to several 1000 acres.

We are technically in the county, but the city limits is directly across the street.

I think it is a big impact on Little Rock just because whenever people hear a vineyard, they think, oh, I don't want to go all the way out there.

And then it's 15 minutes door to door downtown and it's kind of country living with city access.

We wanted a winery in Central Arkansas and we wanted to have events.

We're close to, you know, the state capitol.

We're close to the city center, so it's easier for tourists to come here.

So I'm going to pour these.

I'm also pouring these into our retal glasses.

You know, we take pride in the wine that we make here, so we want to make sure that we're serving it in a glass that amplifies the wine that's actually in the bottle as well.

There we go.

When you get your glass of wine, you're going to hold your glass up and you're going to give it a swirl.

You're going to take a look at it.

You want to know what's going on in there.

You want to make sure there's no impurities, which we're looking at looks beautiful in there.

The higher the alcohol content, the more of the leg you're going to get to see there.

And then after that you're going to get it with your nose.

So you want to taste from the top and the bottom of your glass.

So you're going to stick your nose up here.

If I gave you this in a plastic cup, you weren't going to get any of those noses at all.

So crazy how much wine in the glass interact with each other.

So cheers you guys.

Let's take a sip.

I tell you it's very rewarding.

You know, I I grew up on a farm.

So, you know you're used to seeing from the time you plant it to you see it grow.

It's very labor intensive.

It's perennial.

So I mean every year, you know you just get to see the the beauty of the grapes coming on in the winter time.

You prune it way back and then you see in the spring, you see it start to bloom and then you see the bunches of grapes coming on.

Arkansas is really pushing agritourism.

It's getting to be bigger and bigger and we're trying to do more agricultural related events here all the time.

They'll have people come out and enjoy our beauty.

The deer are our main problem.

They eat our crop, they eat the berries, they break the wood for next year's harvest.

We have to preserve the aesthetics of the vineyard because of our Event Center, the weddings and all the corporate events and all of the open the public days.

Whenever litterite comes out to see us, we want them to be able to see a clean shot of the vineyard, right?

And if we put a fence on there to block out the deer, it would kind of go against the grain to what we're trying to achieve out here.

It's very disappointing whenever you have worked all year for this harvest only to see it eaten by wild animals.

It is hard work, but you know the people that want to work hard and produce something like this.

It's a passion you have to have really.

I feel like we are able to provide the community with a wonderful venue, with wonderful wine.

We have an amazing team that works great.

I'm very grateful.

I'm very proud.

It just means everything, both of us.

We hear the same thing over and over again.

Oh my God.

We can't believe this place is in Arkansas.

We can't believe it's in Little Rock.

It's just so cool and to see how happy they are.

It makes us happy and proud of of what we put together.

We want to just make the best wine we can in Arkansas with the grapes we can produce.

This segment of good roots is made possible by support from Acre Trader.