Stone Hill Winery: Second Largest on Earth

Stone Hill Winery is one of the oldest wineries in the United States and was once one of the largest on earth. It was founded in eighteen forty seven by German immigrant winemakers on a hillside at the southern edge of Hermann, and within a few decades it had become something remarkable. At the turn of the twentieth century, Stone Hill was producing about one million two hundred fifty thousand gallons of wine each year, making it the second largest winery in the country and the third largest in the world.

It was winning gold medals at World's Fair competitions in cities across the globe. The vineyards on the Missouri River bluffs had gone up against the best wine regions of Europe on the same stages and won. Then came Prohibition.

The Volstead Act, which took effect in nineteen twenty, shut Stone Hill down completely. The vast underground cellars beneath the winery, hand-dug from Missouri limestone over decades, were leased to mushroom growers who found the cool, dark chambers perfect for fungi. For more than forty years the bottles went dark and the vines were cut back or pulled out.

The winery did not return until nineteen sixty five, when James and Betty Held purchased the property and began restoring it. They replanted the vineyards, reopened the cellars, and started making wine again from the same limestone hill above the town. Today Stone Hill is still family owned, still the largest winery in the state of Missouri, and still making wine.

If you walk down into the underground cellars, you are walking through chambers carved from Missouri limestone in the nineteenth century, chambers that have held wine, then mushrooms, then wine again.