Our Facility
White Owl Winery/Purgatory Cellars is housed in
what was once a 15,000 square feet turkey barn, located
on the family farm. Work began on the building conversion
in 1999 and W.O.W. opened to over 3,000 customers in
the autumn of 2000.
Our winery is located on a picturesque four acres of
woodland about a mile west of the Wabash River. When
you arrive at the winery, you will enter our updated tasting room from the large, airy front porch. Notice the wooden ceiling in the tasting room. It’s made from spaulded
sycamore. The walls are made from hard maple and the
bar is made from walnut with inlaid tile on the top. All of
the wood came from the family farm where the winery is located. It is here that you may sample any of our wines before you buy. There is no charge for tasting.
Once inside the main winery, you will notice the white
metal walls and ceiling, and the concrete floor. This is to
aid in quick clean ups in our manufacturing area. White
Owl Winery is a state-of-the-art winemaking facility. We currently have almost two dozen tanks for wine
fermentation, including several jacketed tanks connected
to a glycol system to keep the wines extremely cold during
the process. All of our wines are fermented in stainless
steel to help maintain the true flavors and crisp character of
fruit and grape wines. We have racks of French oak casks, which are used for aging our dessert wines, the Persimmon Solera and Old Blue Port.
The W.O.W. lab is the heart of the winemaking process.
It is here, in our fully equipped lab, that every wine is
tested and crafted to be the absolute best. Many long
hours and late nights are spent in this room, getting a wine ready for its debut. Our wine maker, Brian Neighbors,
and his assistants are perfectionists, as our almost 200
awards will attest to.
Our computer-operated bottling line is Italian-made
and can bottle almost 2,500 bottles per hour. That's
almost 42 bottles per minute! And, this line is fully
automated. Once the box of empty bottles is placed on
the track, the bottles are washed and dried before going
to the filler and corker machine. From there, capsules are
put on with a heat-shrinking machine and bottles are
labeled before rolling out to be placed into boxes for sale
and distribution throughout Indiana and Illinois.
White Owl Winery/Purgatory Cellars is known throughout
the Midwest for our exceptional wines. Plan a visit today
to see why we are – White Owl Winery, “Quality Wines, Great Times!”