EASTON, Pa. — A popular Easton winery and tasing room will have to shut its doors, at least until their location can be gutted.
Clever Girl Winery announced its Easton location at 116 Northampton St., on the first level of the Residences at the Commodore, was damaged due to a sprinkler system set off by work being done on the floor above.
Clever Girl owner Don Andreas said no one was in the store at the time the sprinklers went off, though upon alert, he raced down to evaluate what had happened.
Andreas said the space was “pretty flooded,” sharing a photo on Facebook of a wine glass-shaped tip jar that holds four and a half bottles of wine filled with water from the sprinklers.
“The code department was here, and they said this would have to be a total gut,” Andreas said.
The business will be closed indefinitely, though Clever Girl will still remain a presence in the Lehigh Valley, and especially in Easton, Andreas said.
"I don't really know what the immediate future holds.”Don Andreas, Clever Girl Winery owner
“Usually on the weekends, I'm under a tent somewhere at events," he said. "Tomorrow I’m at the Nazareth Fall Festival, for example. Bacon Fest is coming up in November, and we'll probably set something up here in front of our shop, which is usually where they set us up now.”
“And I've got a few more events coming up. But other than that, I don't really know what the immediate future holds.”
Clever Girl was set to be a stop on the Easton Zombie Pub Crawl on Saturday, but will not be able to participate.
The concept behind Clever Girl began to take shape in 2018, when Andreas’s wife Pamela suggested her husband take on a new hobby in light of their daughter’s graduation.
As the pair had enjoyed visiting wineries on the weekends to relax, winemaking seemed like an option.
In summer 2018, Andreas purchased a basic home wine-making kit, and making his own wine via concentrate kits. His interest grew, searching out new information for the process, and eventually Andrea joined the Northampton Community College wine specialist program.
Andreas advanced his skills through the class, learning about wine blending, back sweetening, and sterile filtering. He also shifted from those concentrate kits to producing wine via grape juice, a tactic used by most commercial wineries.
After earning rave reviews from his fellow classmates for seven wines he produced, Andreas opted to enter them into Winemaker Magazine’s International Amateur Wine Making Competition.
Among 2,300 entries, Andreas’s wines scored him four amateur medals, including one gold, one silver, and two bronze.
The family decided that this was a sign, and decided after the conclusion of the Wine Specialist program in July 2019 to convert their cellar into a licensed commercial wine production facility.
Andreas closed their longtime Bangor location due to slowing business in July 2024, though they were able to open their Easton tasting room just a month later.
