D. Berardinis Winery

On Fridays the Polson Farmers Market sets up across Main Street from No. 220, and part of its crowd crosses over to the Bickford Building and the tasting room of D. Berardinis Winery. Dana Berardinis, owner and winemaker, has put that crowd at about 30 percent of her tasting room sales. The Lake County Leader described the room in 2019 as cool after the street. It is hung with her own paintings and holds barrels of fermenting fruit, an old-fashioned press, and stacked cases of wine. The labels on the bottles are her artwork as well.

Pours come by the glass or as a flight of four varieties, and can be taken on the outdoor patio. A light menu goes with them: a charcuterie board of locally sourced cheeses and meats and smoked salmon crostini. In September 2026 the winery’s posts also listed goat cheese on the crostini, spanakopita bites with tzatziki, and a sweet dessert. The 2026 season opened Friday, May 15, which was also Ladies Night on Main Street. That day the room opened for the market in the morning and again for the evening. By September the winery was posting “Fall is harvest season in Montana” and pouring Fridays and Saturdays. Private tastings are by reservation, and wine is sold by the bottle or the case.

Fruit from around the lake

Every wine on the list is made from Montana fruit, hand-harvested. Berardinis described her method to the Legislature in 2023: she crushes the fruit, ferments it on the skins, then presses it and ages it in barrels for 10 months to 2 years. A listing with Abundant Montana states that the winery grows its own fruit organically, without certification, and that the farms and orchards it harvests from grow organically too.

The orchards along Flathead Lake supply most of the list:

• Flathead Cherry, a red, and a Flathead Cherry Port, both from Lambert and Lapin cherries
• Bartlett Pear, served chilled
• Italian Plum, a blush
• Apricot, a dry white
• Apple, from Macintosh apples, which the menu calls a “Classic Homestead Variety”
• Pie Cherry, an off-dry rosé, and Blueberry Pear, both new; the blueberries come from Ellers Blueberry Farm in Trout Creek

Other wines draw from farther afield:

• Black Currant Apple, with currants from Fresh Roots Farm in Polson
• Raspberry and Golden Raspberry, from Columbia Falls at the base of Columbia Mountain
• Peach, from Forbidden Fruits Orchard in Paradise
• Elderberry, gathered along the lake and in the Mission Valley
• Huckleberry, from berries picked at high elevation in the Montana mountains; at $40 it is the most expensive bottle on a list where most sell for $25

The Strawberry Rhubarb combines strawberries from Fresh Roots Farm in the Mission Valley with rhubarb that the menu places at a farm on the Rocky Mountain Front. In 2019 the Leader named the rhubarb growers as Hutterites from the Choteau area who sold at the Polson market. That year the paper also listed the orchards behind the list:

• cherries from Glacier Fresh Orchard in Yellow Bay
• Bartlett pears from Gannon’s on Finley Point
• Italian plums from Getman’s Orchard in Yellow Bay
• apricots from Best Orchard, an old orchard on the east shore

“It’s been fun meeting the people growing these fruits. It’s a great relationship,” Berardinis told the paper.

A cabin orchard and a five-gallon bucket

Her winemaking traces to a great-grandfather in the Abruzzo region of central Italy, who grew and made his own wine in the early 1900s. MTN News, in a separate report, called him her grandfather. According to the Leader, he brought the habit with him when he moved his family to the United States during Prohibition, and it put him on the wrong side of the federal authorities. “Hearing the stories about that is such a big part of my family,” she said.

Berardinis grew up in Ohio and took a fine arts degree in painting at the Cleveland Institute of Art. She then came to Montana to explore and paint, and spent several years as a river guide on the Middle Fork of the Flathead. In 2007 she was renting a cabin surrounded by an old orchard on the east shore of Flathead Lake. She began fermenting its fruit in small batches in a five-gallon bucket, working out her own recipes. “I really fell in love with the process,” she said.

In 2013 she licensed the winery at 220 Main Street and started it with cherries in a 55-gallon drum. “I wanted a way to incorporate my art and the wine, to bring both of my passions together,” she told the Leader. The first time she sent wines to the Finger Lakes International Wine Competition, they took bronze medals. By 2019, five of her six wines had won bronze there: the cherry, pear, apricot, Italian plum, and strawberry rhubarb. “I wasn’t expecting to win any award the first time I sent my wines in,” she said. “I just thought, well, we’ll see how it goes.”

Marquette from Finley Point and Yellow Bay

When she opened, Berardinis did not know grapes were being grown nearby. Then Ken Pitt and Eileen Neill of Spotted Bear Vineyard on Finley Point, and Rick Hartman of Yellow Bay, came in and asked whether she wanted to experiment with Marquette. The menu now describes the grape as a cold-hardy hybrid of Pinot Noir. She made 10 experimental gallons the first year. The next year she bought both growers’ whole harvests. “I was the first person to buy the Marquette from both of them,” she said.

Through the Montana Grape and Winery Association she then learned of a large Marquette vineyard at Big Fork. Its owners had been selling to Flathead Lake Winery, which had moved to Bozeman. She bought the whole harvest of all three vineyards in 2015, 2016, and 2017. The 2017 harvest came to about 3,000 pounds from Van Dyck Vineyards in Big Fork, almost 2,000 from Spotted Bear, and a small amount from Bear Dance Vineyard in Yellow Bay. In 2019 much of that fruit had already spent two years in oak barrels in the winery’s basement. She planned to bottle the 2017 vintage that winter and expected it to be “my best vintage of that grape. That was a really great year, the vines have matured, the sugars were perfect.” She gave MTN News her own tasting note: “A little bit of a higher acidity to it, but kind of a smooth finish too.”

Winters at the easel

There were years, she told the Leader, when she questioned “whether it’s really going to work.” By 2019 she was making 2,000 to 4,000 bottles a year, sold in stores from Whitefish to Missoula. Summers went to the wine. Winters went to painting, shown at Dana Gallery on Higgins in Missoula and on her labels. “It’s definitely a surprise to people when I tell them I make wine and have a little winery,” she said to MTN News. That report noted that two-thirds of Montana’s 17 wineries used fruit from other states.

In November 2023 she sent written comment to the Legislature’s Economic Affairs interim committee in support of allowing Montana-grown wine at farmers markets. She wrote that she had long wanted to sell at the Missoula and Whitefish markets, and that “finding grapes to purchase is a real challenge.” Of her own move west, she had told the Leader: “Montana is where I always belonged, and it’s been amazing.”