With economic recovery still a work in progress, many businesses are doing more cutting than growing, but as our Matt Hunter reports, a less than three year-old winery in Lake George is doing the opposite, as the owners pop the cork on a new state-of the-art facility.

QUEENSBURY, N.Y. – Mike Pardy has wine making down to a science. With automatic pouring, corking and labeling machines, he can crank out a bottle in a matter of minutes. But when he and his wife Sasha opened up the Adirondack Winery in Lake George in April 2008, it wasn't quite that easy.

"We just weren't having enough space in the back here,” Sasha Pardy said. “We used to make the wine in the back to be able to keep up with customer demand and it was really hampering our ability to put enough wine on the shelves."

That first year, about half the wine on the shelves at their Canada Street store came from other New York wineries. With a great deal of customer interest right away, they worked round the clock to be able to sell strictly their wine with about 35 varieties available at all times.

This past October, they took the next step and moved into a new 4,000 square foot wine making facility in Queensbury.

"We enjoy the space,” Mike Pardy said. “It gives us a little more work room, a little more storage space and we can move our equipment anywhere we need to go to make it a little bit easier for the bottling and the rackings that we do."

When the Pardys started out, they were making wine in six-gallon jugs, giving them about 30 bottles of wine each. Now, they're making it in 250-gallon steel tanks, producing about a thousand bottles each.

"We can have anywhere from about 1,000 cases running at a time to about 1,200 cases always in production, which is about a whole year's production our first year in business," Mike Pardy said.

With their wines earning more than a dozen awards and a map in their store showing people from all 50 states have come to enjoy their wine, the Pardys have found success in the thick of a down economy, a taste of good fortune that's not lost on them.

“You can only plan based on your research,” Sasha Pardy said. “But no research can be perfect because every market is different. We really hoped, of course, but we had no idea how well it was going to catch on."

While the wine making operation has shifted to Queensbury, the store and tasting room on Canada Street will remain open.