Every day we learn so much.”

Chet Haider

Alexis Bailey Vineyard & Winery
18200 Kirby Ave S
Hastings, MN 55033
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There is much that can be taken for granted in wine in the age of liquor stores and global shipping. From labels to capsules to the type of cork, for buyers, these details are often completely overlooked, if not dismissed outright.
That is not the case for the Chet Haider and Andrea Ruminsky, the new owners of Alexis Bailly Vineyard and Winery, Minnesota’s oldest vineyard.
Haider and Ruminsky purchased the vineyard from Nan Bailly in November 2024 and have been climbing the “vertical” learning curve ever since, said Haider.
The couple are openly not winemakers.
Both have a background in the health and fitness industry, which Haider left after 23 years, attempting to open a spa in South St. Paul. When the deal fell through, the couple found the listing for Alexis Bailly.
Despite openly not knowing much about the wine-making process, Haider described Ruminsky running out of her home office in excitement when first told about the offer.
The purchase was finalized last November and as of July, Ruminsky joined the operation full-time.
Haider describes Alexis Bailly as three separate businesses all rolled into one: a working vineyard, winemaking, and hospitality.
“That’s basically what we are: a farm,” said Haider. “We just happen to make wine out of what we grow.”
A working vineyard, like any farm, has a regular year-long cycle of what needs to be done in any given season, often dictated by external factors like the weather. That long list of duties ranges from burying grapes in the winter to pruning vines in the spring to bottling wines throughout the year.
“Every day we learn so much,” said Haider.
Bottling in particular, is a more complicated process that showcases what sets local wineries apart.
For flagship wines, the vineyard hires a mobile bottling plant that bottles, labels, and corks wines using an automated machine. Empty bottles are filled, corked, and capped from the back of what is ostensibly a trailer which is driven to the vineyard twice a year: once for reds and once for whites.
This process is a new one for the couple. When the plant came in March of this year, “it was the first time I had seen it,” laughed Haider.
When the bottling plant came most recently, rain stopped the labels from sticking to the bottles, which forced the vineyard to hand-label each bottle individually at a workbench in the basement.
For the smaller batches, like wines for the vineyard’s wine club, everything in the bottling process is done by hand.
The process plays out in the winery’s basement, a space filled with cases of wine, barrels for aging, and tanks for mixing and filtering wine. The space is multipurpose, shifting with the seasons to the task at hand be it stacked barrels for aging wine, space for testing batches, or the long assembly line of people it takes for bottling.
For small batches, the vineyard uses a 6-spigoted bottle filler that bottles are slotted into and then quickly pulled out of once filled.
“If you don’t move fast enough, wine could shoot everywhere,” said Haider.
Once removed from the bottle filler, the freshly filled bottles are handed off to be wiped clean, corked, capped and labeled, all individually and by hand.
“There’s not a bottle here, that one of us hasn’t touched,” said Haider.
For Ruminsky, it’s the community she’s most excited about.
From the army of volunteers and employees who “really run the ship,” to the regulars in and out each week, Alexis Bailly “isn’t what people expect, and that’s what we love about this place.”
Haider describes working alongside those who have long been at Alexis Bailly—including Nan Bailly who still consults with the new owners—as hanging out with the professors in college.
Currently in the winery’s basement are barrels of reds and dessert wines, waiting to be bottled in just a few weeks. It is yet another step in the year-long cadence of a vineyard.