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Fire sets back winery plans

While expansion now is on hold, not all was lost as 15 tanks of fermenting wine escaped the flames.

By JONNELLE MARTE
Published August 5, 2006

PLANT CITY - Joey Keel and Chase Marden looked forward to expanding their thriving winery.

But flames swallowed up 85 percent of their inventory Thursday night, putting those plans on hold.

"We were getting ready to get a lot bigger real fast, and this set us back," Marden said.

Business was great in July, and the two partners were getting ready to build a bigger wine tasting building before the fire engulfed the barn where they stored the majority of their inventory of fruit-flavored wines.

About $500,000 of wine and machinery and approximately $150,000 in furniture for the new building were reduced to a crispy pile of shattered glass and soot.

The Keel & Curley Winery is on Keel's blueberry farm at 5210 W Thonotosassa Road. The equipment used to pack berries completely disintegrated, along with most of the building.

The actual winery, to the owners' relief, was untouched. Several feet away from the rubble, 15 stainless steel, 1,000-liter tanks sat safely indoors, fermenting wine.

"A lot of my good wine is gone," said Marden. "It's a sad thing, but nobody got hurt, and I'm making more." Some of the losses were insured, the owners said.

Officials said Friday the cause of the fire was still under investigation. Several factors came into play, according to Ray Yeakley, a spokesman for Hillsborough County Fire Rescue.

The fire started shortly after a lightning storm, but an electrician had been on the property earlier in the day.

Keel and Marden joined the wine business in 2004 after Keel mastered the art of concocting blueberry wine. He needed a way to make use of the ugly berries he knew customers would never eat.

They ventured into different flavors like apple, tangerine zinfandel and peach chardonnay. The pair produced award-winning wine and earned two gold medals at the Florida State Fair International Wine Competition in 2005, before the winery was open to the public. The wines sold for between $15 and $19.

Friday, Keel and Marden were busy cleaning out what was left of the building: crumbling wooden walls under a mangled tin roof. Withered blueberry plants lined the remains of the 5,000-square-foot structure.

Holes burned in stacked boxes revealed charred bottles of wine. Some bottles are still good and the workers even had a few glasses on their break.

They salvaged whatever they could, but Keel said they would recover less than 5 percent of the 27,000 bottles they had stored. It will be months before the building and equipment are replaced.

The scent of smoke lingered over the farm, an odor the bottles will carry forever, said Keel. He anticipates a big sale.

Jonnelle Marte can be reached at 310-1145 or jmarte@sptimes.com.

[Last modified August 5, 2006, 06:12:50]