From cherries in the basement to AI
By Paige Grzenia
Contributing Writer
ALGOMA – Von Stiehl Winery was opened in May of 1967 by Dr. Charles Stiehl, also known as Doc Stiehl, who was a physician in Oconomowoc.
“He’d been making cherry wine in his basement for a couple years, and he had bought a hobby farm up in Maplewood, which was a cherry orchard. At the time, the cherries cost seven cents a pound to grow, and the market was paying four cents a pound. So, he had a little bit of a problem with that, and was playing around with cherry wine, so he decided to open a winery,” said co-owner Brad Schmiling.
Doc Stiehl was issued the first winery license in Wisconsin after writing to the state to see if they would pass a law allowing the state to issue winery licenses since there weren’t any wineries in Wisconsin at that time.
Bill and Sandy Schmiling bought the winery from Doc Stiehl in 1981 and “developed it a little bit further, started adding some grape wines, started growing the business to be open year-round, just developed distribution to other accounts and then grew it with some grape wines,” said Schmiling.
Then in 2003, Bill and Sandy sold the winery to their two sons, Brad and Aric Schmiling who have been co-owners of von Stiehl Winery since.
“I’ve just been growing it and developing more grape wines, more California style vinifera wines, your traditional Chardonnay, Pinot Grigio, Cabernet Sauvignon, things like that,” said Schmiling.
When Doc Stiehl was the owner of the winery, it only produced cherry and apple wine.
Now, the winery has moved into also producing hard ciders and dry wines as well.
In 2009, von Stiehl Winery came out with a wine called Cherry Bounce to honor Doc Stiehl, which is made up of cherry brandy and the original von Stiehl cherry wine recipe.
This wine is Brad and Aric Schmiling’s favorite wine, as “it is the only wine that we produce in a giant cask in our cellar. So, it has its own category, kind of. It was an idea that went back and forth between my brother and I, wheremy brother, he developed like a way to make cherry wine that was different than what we were doing, and then that wine would be taken to Great Lakes Distilling, and they would distill that wine into brandy, bring the brandy back, and add it to more special style cherry wine,” explained Schmiling.
Recently, Brad and Aric Schmiling have been working on creating wine with the help of artificial intelligence (AI).
The idea started last winter when Brad was having dinner with his friend, Chad Luberger who owns the Plum Bottom Gallery in Door County.
Luberger brought up how he had spent time with AI and thought it was going to be something really big.
“So, [Luberger] just planted that seed in my mind, and we’ve had a couple conversations since, and we had some conversations with a consultant, just about AI in general, not about AI wine. And I said, I wonder if you could trademark artificial intelligence for wine…so I reached out to our trademark attorney and [they] said, we see no reason why not, so I said, let’s go for it. And that was the start. It was that concept of, well, let’s trademark it first,” said Schmiling.
The first version of their AI wine, made up of a blend of what they had available to them at the time, was released summer of 2023.
After talking with AI themselves, Brad and Aric realized that the AI should help with the process of making the wine.
“Well, how do you do that? You know, a computer can’t taste wine,” said Schmiling.
They came up with the idea of having people leave a review on their product page on their website after they tasted their wines.
“And we can take all those reviews, and we can feed them to an AI, and let it figure out what we should do next,” said Brad Schmiling.
They hope to feed the reviews into AI by the end of next January and then release the 2.0 version in April.