Bar Harbor Winery, Mount Desert Island, Maine. Recorded on Zoom, November 3, 2026.
In 2022 Kyle Hesington’s girlfriend, an organic farmer, asked whether he wanted to come live in Bar Harbor for six months. He wasn’t about to say no to that. Then he went looking for a winery nearby, without much hope, since this was Maine, and found one two and a half miles from their apartment. He handed the owners his whole résumé, wine experience and all, told them he was only there for the summer and needed a job, and they hired him as their landscaper.
Plenty of people have taken a summer job somewhere beautiful and found, come September, that they didn’t want to leave. Kyle stayed. The winery sits on Route 3 just outside Bar Harbor, in a barn built in the 1860s with traditional joinery, on land that was once a farm called Sweet Pea after the farmer’s cow. The owners who hired him, Doug and Barbara, had made it a place for the community, and in March 2025, at twenty-seven, Kyle bought it from them and renamed it Bar Harbor Winery. He kept almost everything they built, he says, and added what he knows about winemaking and a little more openness about how the wine gets made.
Most of what he makes comes from fruit he brings in, from New Jersey, California and Washington, and now from an organic grower in Portugal, alongside the wild Maine blueberries that go into the wine the winery is best known for. A restaurant called Sweet Pea shares the courtyard, and people who have lived on the island their whole lives, he told me, know the restaurant and still don’t know there’s a winery behind it.
I was one of them, in a way. When I took my wife to Acadia in the fall of 2024 to show her my old haunts, we drove Route 3 into Bar Harbor right past the barn. Kyle was already running the cellar there, and I never knew it.
Near the end of our conversation I asked him what climate change looks like from where he stands. The droughts and wild weather hitting the vineyards he buys from are making good fruit harder to get, with more sugar and less flavor. The same warming, he said, is letting growers farther north than ever plant the classic European grapes, which thirty years ago they couldn’t.
These are his answers to the twenty questions every winemaker in this series is asked.
1.Who taught you?
I’m a second-generation winemaker. My father taught me, starting back in 2020. I was managing vineyards at the time, and he’d taught me viticulture too, from the time I was fifteen. Then COVID threw everything into upheaval. Everything fell through the cracks, I needed a job, and he said, “Hey, you can grow grapes now. Let me teach you how to make wine.” I said, “As long as you pay me, I’m in.”
2.Who have you taught? Where are they now?
A couple, nothing too deep. When I branched out on my own after my apprenticeship, a friend of mine named Najee came to work for me. He wanted to get into the alcohol industry, and wine was an easy way in. I taught him the foundations: the basics of fermentation, keeping your equipment clean, which I think is the biggest thing, and a little viticulture. We were working at Jessie Creek Winery together and managing a five-acre vineyard. Afterward he took what he’d learned into brewing, and he’s now a brewer at Slack Tide Brewing Company.
3.Which vintages do you date your life by?
I’d have to say 2020. That was the pivotal time. Having seen my father in the industry growing up, I never wanted to get into wine. I fought him on it tooth and nail, all the way until COVID. It was my senior year of college, and I had a job lined up in Vermont as a stream ecologist. My background is in ecology and biology. With COVID, that position fell through. Student loans were pretty rough, I needed money, and I had the viticulture experience, so he offered to take me under his wing as an apprentice, really more as a cellar hand. I’d spent the better part of a decade studying to go into stream ecology, and within about three weeks in the industry that completely changed.
I remember I was sitting in my office in March, doing labs, titrations for total acidity, with a glass of wine in my hand, and I had an epiphany: this is a really good job. We were working in a giant peach packing plant we’d converted into a winery, with no heat, so we were sitting at a little plastic picnic table with a space heater next to us. I went and told my dad, “This is kind of a cool job.” He said, “I’m glad you finally realized that after twenty-one years of living.” I said, “Okay, you’re making a point.”
“I’m glad you finally realized that after twenty-one years of living.”
4.What has changed in the trade since you started that a new hire would walk right past?
Maybe the time that’s spent. A lot of people getting into the industry now see it the way I did starting out, as a way of making money and having a job. I feel like people walking in now are moving too fast instead of taking the steps. Slow down, really focus on the craft instead of just cranking out wines, and focus on the quality overall.
5.Walk me through a day at the peak of harvest, hour by hour.
Our harvest is super small. We only have about two hundred vines, about a quarter acre, so it’s just me. I don’t have a harvest crew. On a typical harvest day I come in around 7 a.m. We push harvest as late as possible, because we usually don’t get bud break until around mid-June up here, so I’m pretty much riding the line until a frost threat comes in, and then I try to harvest just before the frost. I come in, inspect the grapes, walk through the field, collect random samples, and test for sugar and total acidity, and I use those numbers to decide whether it’s the right time to pick.
This year got completely thrown off by that nor’easter. We’ve been rehabbing this vineyard for about four years, and I would have had five or six hundred pounds of fruit, but the rain got us just before, and we lost most of the harvest to rot. I did get eleven bottles of estate wine, which was fun.
We grow Chambourcin, Vidal, Marquette, and Cayuga, and we bring in bulk juice or whole fruit. Our big thing in Maine is blueberry wine. We make about three times as much of that as anything else, and we source the blueberries locally. Other than that, I make single-batch varietals of traditional vinifera from fruit I bring in from New Jersey, California, and partners in Washington State. And we’ve just partnered with a thirty-acre organic grower in Portugal for whole fruit.
6.What decision do you make that you cannot fully explain to somebody else?
Determining when a wine is truly ready. Sure, I judge based on completed fermentations, ideal profiles for the varietal, post-settlement and so on, but I can never give an exact time for when a wine is at its absolute best. Sometimes a wine has to be bottled out of necessity. For others, I’ll keep working with it for months or years in tank or barrel, waiting for an “Ahaa” moment. Some wines improve with age, and others don’t age as well. It takes patience and open-mindedness more than cold arithmetic and predictability.
7.Tell me about a harvest that went wrong. Start at the beginning.
This one, definitely, and I take the blame for it. I tried to escape for a little bit and take some time. I thought I had enough time to go visit some friends in upstate New York, and that was the weekend the nor’easter came in and hit us. I tried to escape, but I mistimed it.
8.Who is the legend around here? Somebody people tell stories about.
The only one I could truly say is my father, Darren Hesington. He’s been big in the New Jersey wine game, and for wine growers in the Mid-Atlantic in general. Through the state’s winegrowers association, he was a big part of getting New Jersey’s wineries able to export their wine, and he’s helped so many other winemakers in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and New York get established and set up. So I have a local legend with a family tie.
9.Is there something that happens at the end of crush every year? Same thing, same way.
At some of the other places I’ve worked, typically a sit-down dinner. Here there’s really nothing, because it’s just me. I go home, take a hot shower, and relax.
10.What do people outside the trade always get wrong about this work?
There’s a lot of stigma around winemakers and winemaking in general. A lot of people picture a winemaker as more elegant, and maybe more well versed than we necessarily are. Being so young, my knowledge of wines internationally is minimal. I still have a lot to experience, but I can make wine very well. People will ask me about different vintages or varietals I’m not familiar with, and I have to say, I’m sorry, I just don’t know yet. I think people assume a winemaker has all the answers, and that might not be the case.
11.What’s the first thing you got wrong, and who caught it?
My father caught it, when I was apprenticing. We were making a fortified wine. We’d just harvested a bunch of Chambourcin, and the acidity was a little high, so it was going to be perfect for a ruby-style port, which you can’t call port. I had a barrel of brandy, about forty-eight gallons, and I was arresting the fermentation, so I dumped it into the fermenting vat. My dad comes through and says, “Did you add the brandy to the Chambourcin yet?” I said yes and took him over to the tank, and he said, “That’s the wrong tank.” I’d put it into some West Coast Merlot we’d gotten from a private vineyard out there. He wasn’t upset, because he said it was going to make an excellent fortified wine. But now we had to figure out something else to do with the Chambourcin.
12.Is there something you still do the way you were taught, even though you know a faster way exists?
Inoculations, the bucket method. When I’m rehydrating yeast, I use five-gallon buckets and the same juice I’m inoculating, to give the yeast the nutrients to start up. It takes a while, and there are definitely better technologies out there now, and additives to get the yeast rolling. But I stick with that.
13.What were you taught that you’ve since stopped doing?
Step-down filtration, for finishing wines. If I’m going to filter a wine, I was taught to step it down. Now I’ll usually do a coarse filtration and go straight to a really fine one, and skip a couple of filtrations in between.
14.Is there a tank or a piece of equipment around here that has a name?
No, not for us right now. We’re still growing, so we’re trading our equipment out pretty regularly to expand and get something new. There’s no attachment to anything yet.
15.Somebody walks in knowing nothing about wine. What do they already know that you can build on?
The first thing I ask when someone steps into the tasting room is just, what do you like? I think that’s the most important question. I don’t necessarily have the experience to know every varietal out there, so if I get stumped, I’ll ask them to describe it for me. Is it dry? Is it sweet? What’s the acidity like? What are the notes and the profile? From that, I can give them a tasting they’ll typically enjoy. Everybody has a different perception, different taste buds, a different palate, and that’s always an important thing to ask to make sure they have a good experience.
16.Whoever pours this wine for a stranger, what do they need to know that isn’t in the tasting notes?
What’s in the tasting notes isn’t necessarily what they’re going to experience. Their own experience is entirely unique to them.
17.What would someone have to watch you do to understand this wine?
They’d have to come in and watch the entire production process, everything I put into all the wines I make. It’s hard to describe the care I take to make sure everything is done thoroughly and smoothly. The wines are really cared for, loved in a way, and that’s hard to describe to somebody coming into the tasting room. All the work that goes into making a simple glass of wine.
18.What’s your favorite wine that you don’t make?
Sparkling comes to mind, whether it’s Champagne or Prosecco or sparkling wine here in the United States. I really enjoy sparkling wines. We don’t have the equipment yet to do it properly. We could do a pét-nat style, but I like a really nice filtered, clean, dry, crisp sparkling wine.
19.When you make a great one, do you know right away?
Generally, I’d say ninety percent of the time. There’s a period I think a lot of winemakers would agree on. We call it the teenage years of wine. It’s just as your ferment is about to run to completion, the yeast is starting to autolyze, and there are a bunch of really funky flavors in it. But when you taste it at that point, you have a feeling for what it’s going to become. It’s developing, and you can see what it’s going to be later on. Generally, at that point, I can tell whether I’m going to have a great wine or one that needs a little more intervention.
20.One pour, one stranger. Which wine, and what do you say before they taste it?
Again, I’d always have to ask the first question and find out a little more about their palate. Then, from their description, I’d pick the wine I think would best agree with it, and go from there.
One more: What does this work take away from you that people don’t see?
Time. A considerable amount of time. My mistake this year, trying to get away to see my friends, cost me a harvest. I don’t regret going to see them, but from August through the end of November, for four or five months, you really are on. You’re a hundred percent dedicated, and if you aren’t, you lose a lot. There are experiences with friends and family I haven’t been able to have, because I’m fully involved with the industry, finishing harvest and ferments and finishing the wine.
Recorded on Zoom on November 3, 2026, and edited lightly for length and clarity. Kyle answered question six in writing afterward. He reviewed the piece before publication. Background on the winery and its barn is drawn from Bar Harbor Winery and the Wild Blueberry Association of North America.
Patrick R. Dunn trained in narrative at the University of Maine under Stephen King and folklorist Edward "Sandy" Ives, and spent thirty years leading global crisis management and operational resilience teams across four continents, through 9/11, Katrina, and Sandy. He spent more than a decade as a National Park Service interpretive ranger and is WSET Level 3 certified. Through his practice, Vianarra, he works with winery owners, boutique hotels, and restaurants on how they tell their story. He writes about wine and hospitality every week at newsletter.vianarra.com.