Western Pa. wine, cheesemakers take top honors at 2026 PA Farm Show
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Tribune-Review - Couples planning for Valentine’s Day could have themselves quite a fancy evening dining solely on some local wine and cheese, which has been judged among the best in Pennsylvania.
Western Pennsylvania wine and cheesemakers once again came home with a good deal of accolades from the annual Pennsylvania Farm Show, held this month in Harrisburg.
“I brought eight wines, and they all ended up with medals,” said a happy Frank Mazzotta, owner of Mazzotta Winery in Richland.
Mazzotta’s boutique winery has made regular, multiple appearances on the farm show’s awards list the past few years.
“We do it the old-fashioned way, taking fruit, fermenting it and making it into wine,” he said. “There’s no additives, no flavor enhancers. It tastes like what it’s supposed to taste like — juice that’s alcoholic.”
Mazzotta’s 2024 peach wine earned not just a silver medal but a “best fruit wine” designation. He also brought home two silver and five bronze medals.
Just a few miles northeast of Mazzotta, La Vigneta Winery owner Francesca Howden is celebrating another good year at the farm show. Her wines came home with four silver medals and a bronze.
“We definitely take the competition very seriously,” she said. “My team works really hard to make sure our wines are produced to the highest standard.”
And if you’d care for some cheese to pair with those wines?
Look no further than Indiana Township’s Goat Rodeo Farm & Dairy, whose Wild Rosemary took the silver medal in the best of show category. It also earned a first-place finish in the mixed milk category, and the farm’s Cowboy Coffee cheese took third place in the same category. Finally, Goat Rodeo’s chevre cheese took first place in the goat’s milk category.
Mazzotta and Howden said they use feedback from the show in a variety of ways.
“We use those results to determine how much of these wines we want to produce,” Mazzotta said. “We use the awards to know which ones people will like when we go to an off-premise sale. It’s kind of guidance for a winemaker in terms of how much to make.”
Howden said La Vigneta also makes some of its plans for the coming year based on feedback from the farm show.
“For example, when we won the Governor’s Cup in 2023 for our blush, that let us know we needed to produce more of that particular wine,” she said. “But we also get feedback throughout the year on what customers like and what’s popular. That really helps us tweak and refine our wines. The farm show just validates a lot of that and shows whether you’ve produced wine that the public likes and the judges can recognize.”
Howden said she also uses the results to do some research.
“I want to see and taste the wine that won this year’s Governor’s Cup,” she said. “We look at the awards other wineries win, taste each other’s wines and that’s helpful as well, to see what struck the judges’ interest this year.”