Mountain Brook Vineyards, owned by Dennis Lanahan and wife Miriam, has received the gold and bronze medals for their wines at the 36th annual San Francisco International Wine Competition.

The competition was held in June and featured more than 4,600 wines that were blind tasted by a panel of more than 50 judges, according to Lanahan. Lanahan received a gold award for Mountain Brook’s 2013 Chardonnay Reserve Sur Lie and a bronze award for its 2013 Petit Verdot.

“This wine is special because of its history,” Lanahan said. “The year was a very wet year here in Polk County, and because of that our crop yield was reduced to one barrel.”

Only a few more bottles of this wine are left at Mountain Brook Vineyards, located at 731 Phillips Dairy Road near the Tryon International Equestrian Center. The vineyards have seven acres of red, white and small green grapes, which were first planted in 2002 according to Lanahan, for what would become Mountain Brook Vineyards, a private distributor of wines to the Biltmore up until 2011.

“For the first nine years up until 2011, we would make wines for Biltmore,” Lanahan said. “In 2011, that’s when we started making wines for ourselves and, in 2012, we converted our barn into a winery.” In 2013, Lanahan opened the vineyard to the public.

A conversation with the vineyard manager of Biltmore in the late 1990s lead Lanahan to purchase the land in the Pea Ridge Road area in 2001. Lanahan said he got his start in the winemaking business when he began hanging out at a small vineyard in Virginia every Saturday for three years.

“That was the beginning of my so-called fatal disease, the need to go plant grapes,” Lanahan said. “I just couldn’t resist. It’s a fascinating process.”

The winery has more than 60 oak barrels, and Lanahan said each barrel is either made out of American or French oak depending on the kind of wine stored in them. A tasting room is also on the property and Lanahan said it is converted from his old apartment.

“The type of wood used in these barrels makes a lot of difference in making the wine, and it’s all in the details,” Lanahan explained. “The wood gives each wine a different toast, aroma, flavor or softens it depending on how we need to change it.”

Lanahan said he took a winemaking class in Virginia and quoted his instructor as saying “make what you like, don’t follow the crowd.” He also conducts all of the “chemistries” behind making each wine by using a 150-page catalog on yeasts and enzymes used to ferment the wine in production.

“When you’re trained in various schools, you’re taught to follow the formula and it becomes homogenized and feels the same as you go along,” Lanahan said. “Each wine here has its own personality.”

One of the most important things according to Lanahan when picking the grapes for wine is to pick them according to the pH, or acidity, of the grapes. Lanahan explained the colors of the grapes determine how acidic they will be going forward.

“These plants start producing fruits in the spring,” Lanahan said. “A flower will appear first before the cluster of grapes do, and then it takes about 120 days for the grapes to ripen.”

At this point when the grapes become ripe, Lanahan said he has had issues with deer roaming into the vineyards. Netting has been put up around his grapes to combat the invading deer.

“The grapes ripen between July and August, and if we’ve had a lot of rain we want to pick them as soon as we can,” Lanahan said. “If it’s been hot and sunny, we let the fruit hang for a while longer to get more sugars out.”

Each grape is handpicked by Lanahan’s friends and a group of people he hires during the summer, and then they’re taken to the winery to be de-stemmed and fermented in buckets referred to as “lugs.”

Because Mountain Brook Vineyards is a small vineyard, Lanahan said he does not have the space to host parties or weddings at the site. He does, however, host wine tastings and cooking classes.

“We had an event three weeks ago that was really fun where we invited guests to do barrel tastings,” Lanahan said. “We pulled barrels from 2011 to 2015 and had the guests taste each one to see how it tastes as the wine progresses. We like to try things and sometimes get surprised when something turns out really good.”

Lanahan said he has been fortunate enough to not have to throw out any wine in his tenure with the vineyards. Instead, he just amends the wine and continues to age it.

“Something a lot of people do not know is that there have been grapes in the county for 100 years,” Lanahan said. “There are other wineries around here like Overmountain Vineyards, Parker-Binns and Russian White Chapel and we all work together and we’re fairly new. People seem to be enjoying the company here and the wines.”

Visiting hours are from 1-6 p.m. on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays.