Meet the family behind

BENEDUCE VINEYARDS

Family-Owned

Sustainably Farmed

Handcrafted Wines

Beneduce vineyards just after planting season with small plants emerging.

Planting the Seed

As fourth-generation farmers, we can thank our ancestors for our innate craving to sink our hands into the dirt. Emigrating from Italy in the early 1900s, they settled in Madison, NJ and began growing roses for the NYC farm markets. Their greenhouses grew through the decades, eventually morphing into the family business that we still operate today at Great Swamp Greenhouses, growing and selling plants to families across New Jersey.

Mike, Justin, and Kevin as children make wine with their family.

It was also common among immigrant families to make homemade wine for their own enjoyment — a tradition we were lucky enough to grow up with as kids. Some of our earliest memories are of skipping school to help our Dad with the annual grape crush or bottling days in the garage, returning home to Mom at the end of the day with wine-stained clothes and big grins.

Making Hunterdon County Home

Mike Beneduce Sr. and his business partner and wife, Casey, originally purchased our 50-acre Pittstown farm as a production facility for the garden center in 2000, but quickly realized that the sunny hillsides were ideally suited for wine grapes. In 2009, the first vines were planted, and since then owner and winemaker, Mike Beneduce has made it his life's mission to "put New Jersey wine on the map."

Siblings Justen and Kevin Beneduce run Great Swamp Greenhouses, the family garden center, offering customers a wealth of knowledge and an expanding list of ornamental plants and landscape materials. Our last name “Beneduce” means “Good Leader” in Italian, and we have our sights set on becoming leaders of today's agricultural reawakening in New Jersey and beyond.

Mike Beneduce

Owner & Winemaker

In 2010, owner and winemaker Mike Beneduce graduated Magna Cum Laude from Cornell University with a double major in Plant Sciences and Viticulture/Enology. The major was new at the time, and focused on techniques specific to cool climate grape growing and winemaking being utilized in the Finger Lakes region. He is a Certified Sommelier under the Court of Master Sommeliers, and remains an active professional member of the international gastronomic society, the Chaîne des Rôtisseurs.

Mike also volunteers on the Board of Trustees for America’s Grow-A-Row, a nonprofit farm dedicated to sustainably growing and donating fresh produce to people in need. He has served as Chairman of the Garden State Winegrowers Association and continues to push for an increase in the quality of wine made in New Jersey through his founding role in the Winemaker's Co-Op. In 2017, Mike was named Edible Jersey’s Beverage Artisan of the Year and he was recently named New Jersey’s 2022 Outstanding Young Farmer of the Year by the State Board of Agriculture. He was also selected as a national finalist for Outstanding Young Farmer of America.