The summer may be endless for avid surfer Gary Roberts. But the life span of his Endless Summer wine brand has come to a close.
The popular surf-themed winery and one of the area’s largest outdoor music venues is changing its name to Summer Crush.
Roberts’ own crush on the new name has lasted longer than a summer, but like the subject of other crushes, the name belonged to another man. Finally, this year, Roberts learned the trademark hadn’t been renewed.
“It’s the name I’ve wanted all along,” he told a crowd gathered at the winery for the big reveal.
The announcement came on a day that should have been endless rain; the winery – a short drive south of the Indian River County line – had been in the middle of a tangle of projections for the storm known as Invest 99-L, the precursor to Hurricane Hermine. Roberts’ own band, Southern Vine, played in honor of the winery’s fourth anniversary but it was to a smaller audience than it normally draws, especially in season, when 500 or more turn out for touring tribute bands and music-themed events.
From the start, the public thronged to the peaceful outdoor venue, a large covered area with a bar, surrounding by 100 acres of vineyards. The first Sunday event at the winery drew 800 people, when Roberts was able to snag the California-based Surfaris – who did the famous “Wipe Out” – when he emailed the band and they happened to be headed to Fort Lauderdale and were happy to make a stop at the vineyard.
“I said, Man, let’s do it. That was our first concert.”
Last summer a Beatles tribute band drew 600. The “Red White and Bluegrass” festival in July drew 500. The day before the reveal party was the Winestock festival. Next Saturday, Sept. 24, there’s a surf festival with three surf bands and a car show – a frequent feature; this time, the cars are dune buggies and Woodies.
“There are so many good musicians around here, I had no idea,” he says. “I get approached every week by multiple bands to play here and they’re from all over.”
A number of bands want to add the stop to their tour of Orlando and South Florida venues.
“So many people say our winery is the funnest, most relaxing, different place they’ve ever been,” he says. “Every Sunday, somebody comes up to me and says ‘Thank you for making this. It’s so relaxing. It makes all of our stress disappear.’”
It is all that, indisputably. Looking out over what Roberts says are 6 miles of trellises, the young vines, some now in their eighth year, are beginning to form a vista of leafy green. They surround the open-air shelter housing the stage, a bar, and a sea of tables made from surf boards. Those boards were part of Roberts’ collection of 140 surfboards, accrued since 1972, he says. The tables are his “beaters,” he says.
The Endless Summer brand and its surfing connotations became the motif of the vineyard through a licensing agreement with the man who produced the 1964 surf film, “The Endless Summer.”
“Originally I was going in the direction of a sophisticated winery, and call it Indrio Oaks,” he says. Then he hired a winery consultant from Missouri. “Before I did anything he came down and looked around and said, ‘You really need to plant these palm trees all over the place. The most important thing you can do is have your winery represent the vibe of the geographical area it’s in.’
“I thought, yeah, that makes sense. When you visit other wineries, you want that local feel. You want people to have a good idea of who you are. They have to feel like they’ve met you, even if they haven’t. Well, I’m an old Florida surfer, I’m not a sophisticated wine guy. So I decided to break all the rules and go for a Florida sun and surf winery – just climb out on a limb and go for it.”
“I had been to so many wineries, and they all started to run together. I decided to try to do everything so different that people wouldn’t forget it. The names of our wines, the surf tables – the whole experience.”
From that concept, it wasn’t much of a leap to incorporate music.
Roberts put himself through Indian River Community College with the help of a music scholarship – he played trombone. (He plays bass in his band, but didn’t pick that up until years later.)
Along with music, surfing was “a huge part of my life,” he says. Roberts grew up surfing at the Fort Pierce jetty, near his home on South Beach.
“Archie’s was my bus stop,” he says, recalling what was once a rough-edged biker bar that now draws crowds from all spheres.
In 1979, he started a wholesale landscaping business, selling plants from two locations. In 1998 he bought a third, a 10-acre tract on Johnston Road north of Fort Pierce.
Then came the housing industry collapse in 2007, when construction slowed to a crawl – and landscaping plants weren’t worth the plastic pots they were growing in.
“We were hemorrhaging,” says Roberts. “We had 10 acres we needed to something with and I couldn’t sell the plants I had.”
It was enough to turn a man to drink. Five years earlier, Roberts and his wife Susan had visited Sonoma, California’s wine country. He chalked it up to too much wine-tasting when friends suggested he plant vineyards in Florida. Now that his business was dead in the water, he heard the same sober suggestion from St. Lucie County extension agent Ed Skvarch, a specialist in commercial horticulture.
“I can’t do a winery,” Roberts said.
“Why not?” replied Skvarch.
“That was the beginning of a long trail of research. I visited every muscadine winery I could find.”
Soon he had turned the potting shed into a wine cellar, and over the course of five years, built the trellises, planted the vines and erected what he calls “the festival area.”
Florida wineries are booming, but not all make wine from grapes. Wine made of everything from avocados to lychees can be found in the state’s tourist-driven tasting rooms. The largest and best-known vineyard is Lakeridge in Clermont, which grows muscadines like Roberts.
Muscadine styles, both red and white, range from sweet to semi-sweet. Served chilled, they have a lot of body and a summery appeal, in the way sweet tea suits a picnic; one white reminded me of a Vouvray – until I saw the name, “Webejammin’.” All nine wines have unserious names, but here are plenty of awards gracing Roberts’ tasting room and he takes great pride in his wine-making.
Roberts hand-harvests his grapes. Once the 50-pound bags are full, the grapes are crushed, pressed and frozen. “It’s kind of like an ice wine.”
The juice ferments when it is removed in a big frozen block and left at above-freezing temperatures for about a week.
The wines are bottled with corks for the sake of tradition, Roberts says. “There’s a level of romance involved in hearing that pop,” he says.
