NORTH STONINGTON – He’s a big city lawyer and she’s a long-time educator both with family roots in farming.
And for husband and wife, Brian and Sarah Zuro, owners of the new Greystone Winery in the rolling hills of North Stonington, it’s a long-time dream come true.
“When we were in our early twenties and newly married. We took a trip out to the West coast, and we went to Sonoma and Napa, and we were just mesmerized with everything that we saw there,” Sarah Zuro recalled.
“It was just wonderful to reconnect with agriculture as a young married couple. And shortly thereafter we connected with the Mystic area. We’d come here from the midwest, and we just fell in love with the Mystic area immediately 20 some years ago. And we had always said we want to be here. We want to figure out how we’re going to literally plant our roots here and stay here for the long haul,” said Zuro.
But as Brian Zuro told CT Examiner, the journey to become winery owners would be a decade in the making.
“It takes a unique property to sustain a winery. And it turns out there were others we looked at, they would kind of come and go. There would be reasons why it would or wouldn’t work. This one in particular was so fascinating because apparently this has been on the market since before we were married. I think I’ve heard some of the locals say maybe back until the early eighties and I think it just kind of got lost in time,” he said.
The property that finally caught their eye was a former dairy farm on Wintechog Hill Road in North Stonington, which stopped producing milk a long time ago and became overgrown and inaccessible in parts. But the family who still owned the 200 plus acres continued to lease out the land to local farmers to grow corn for their own dairy herds.
Brian said what sealed the deal was the land is on a perfect incline, “We face the south. That’s good. And everyone says, oh, you want a south facing hill that’s really good for grapes, that’s really good for what we’re doing, but you don’t want it to be exactly north, south. You actually want it on about a 20 some degree tilt, just given the way the sun comes up and down. Turns out. We have that exact tilt. It was naturally done.”
The Zuro’s aren’t planting all 200-plus acres, given that much of the land is wooded or is wetland.
But they have a 35 acre main field of which 30 acres has been planted with seven different grape varieties already, a mixture of red and white grapes, that were harvested recently and have been sent away to a winery in the Finger Lakes in New York state to begin the pressing and fermentation process. The wine will then be brought back to Greystone sometime in early 2026 when the Zuro’s hope their bottling plant will be up and running on site, so they can age and bottle their wine ready for sale around May 2026.
The Zuro’s continue to educate themselves about the wine industry and have on-staff already Dan Spurr, their vineyard manager, who has been overseeing not only the yards and yards of grapevine that has been planted but also keeping an eye on them and helping with the use of technology at the new site to help make it as efficient as possible.
“We’ve been educating ourselves through the UC Davis wine making program. We’ve also brought in a number of people from Cornell and from other places that are very successful,” said Sarah.
She also talked about the sophisticated drainage system that runs up and down all of the rows of grapes, “Grapes really don’t want to sit in water. They don’t like wet feet. And so, it runs up and down throughout the whole field.”
It’s not just the weather the grapes need protection from either, there are also miles of deer fencing as well as netting that can protect the grapes from insects and birds.
Because of the location of the main field, apart from the all-important sunlight to ripen the grapes, the hillside has a consistent breeze which helps reduce fungal disease, something Sarah said is typical in the northeast when growing grapes.
And when it comes to wine expertise in the area, they have plenty of it, with the Jonathan Edwards Winery, Stonington Vineyards and Kingdom of the Hawk Vineyard all in their immediate neighborhood.
But Brian said their neighbors don’t see them as competition, “I think of the word cooperation, right? They are definitely our friends from the farming aspect. Folks are very generous with their time, but also their knowledge and so forth. We really benefit, we help each other out. If we saw something, you know, saw this or that bug or that particular disease out in the field. Ring, ring! And we’re all on the bat line together, talking to each other. So, there’s a lot of cooperation there.”
They hope to welcome the public as well as weddings and other social events to the new winery in summer 2026 and still have a lot of work to complete with the hospitality barn yet to break ground, where visitors will be able to taste the wines, enjoy local foods and sit in front of a roaring fireplace during the cold months and look out across the rows and rows of grapevines to the Long Island Sound.
And as Sarah jokes about the lands former dairy history, “We like to say that we’re changing the liquid but keeping many of the traditions.”
You can follow the progress of Greystone Winery at their website – greystonewinery.com