Harrison Township and South Harrison Township are not the same municipality. They never have been. One holds the historic district and Main Street of Mullica Hill. The other sits several miles southwest, mostly farmland, mostly quiet, with its own governing body and its own zoning. The names just happen to overlap in a way that makes half the county assume they're talking about one place when they're actually talking about two.
Gloucester County's two most decorated wineries sit one in each township. William Heritage Winery is in Mullica Hill, inside Harrison Township, on land the same family has farmed since 1853. Wagonhouse Winery is a few miles away in South Harrison Township, on land the current owners didn't buy until 2011, and hadn't even leased until 2004. Both are stops on the Two Bridges Wine Trail, a roughly 50 to 60 mile route through Gloucester and Salem County farmland named for the Delaware Memorial and Commodore Barry bridges that frame the region along the Delaware River. Both get folded into the same sentence in every tourism write-up about South Jersey wine country. What almost never gets mentioned is how differently the two of them got here.
A Farm That Never Stopped Being a Farm
William Heritage Winery started as a peach and apple orchard, and before that, a working farm going back six generations to 1853. Bill and Penni Heritage began converting the 150-acre estate to vineyard in 1998. They released their first vintage, a 2001 chardonnay, in 2002. The winery now has 40 acres under cultivation and produces around 13,000 cases a year, making it one of the larger wine producers in the state. The Garden State Wine Growers Association named it New Jersey's Winery of the Year twice, in 2011 and 2014, and it has picked up honors from Wine Enthusiast, Wine and Spirits Magazine, and the Beverage Testing Institute along the way. It was also one of the participants in the Judgment of Princeton, a tasting organized by the American Association of Wine Economists that set New Jersey wines side by side with premium French vintages.
None of that required the farm to become something else. The tasting room sits on Mullica Hill Road, the same road the family has always worked. During harvest season the winery still runs pumpkin picking and hayrides. There's a petting zoo. There's a bistro that sells bread and cheese made from the same farm-grown fruit that goes into the sweet wines. The vineyard is an addition to what the land was already doing, not a replacement for it.
A Farm That Started From Borrowed Ground
Wagonhouse Winery's origin story runs the opposite direction. Dan and Heather Brown didn't inherit a farm with a wine future already visible in the soil. In early 2004 they leased 3.5 acres from Dan's family, who had farmed in Mickleton for more than a century, planted their first vines, and, as their own site puts it, hoped for the best. They started selling wine in 2005. It wasn't until January 2011 that they bought their own land in South Harrison Township and built the tasting room that exists today, modeled on and built where the original wagon house on the property once stood.
Wagonhouse now has 10 acres of grapes and produces around 7,000 cases a year, a little more than half of what Heritage puts out. Its 30-plus wines split across two labels, a dry and semi-sweet Wagonhouse line and a sweeter Three Boys Brand named for the Browns' three sons. One detail sets it apart from every other winery in the state: Wagonhouse is the only New Jersey producer making wine from Pinotage, a red grape developed in South Africa in 1925 that almost nobody else in the region touches.
Both wineries sit inside the Outer Coastal Plain American Viticultural Area, a federally recognized growing region covering more than 2.25 million acres of southeastern New Jersey. The AVA designation is what lets both operations call themselves part of a real, defined wine region rather than a scattering of hobby vineyards. But the AVA doesn't explain why one winery got there through six generations of continuity and the other got there through a riskier, less certain start. That part is just two different families making two different decisions about the same land use, twenty years and a few miles apart.
| William Heritage Winery | Wagonhouse Winery | |
|---|---|---|
| Township | Mullica Hill, Harrison Township | South Harrison Township |
| Farmed by the family since | 1853 | Over a century (leased, Mickleton) |
| First vines planted | 1998 | 2004 |
| First vintage / first sales | 2002 | 2005 |
| Current tasting room built | 2002 | 2011 |
| Vineyard size today | 40 acres | 10 acres |
| Annual production | About 13,000 cases | About 7,000 cases |
| Notable recognition | NJ Winery of the Year, GSWGA, 2011 and 2014 | Only NJ winery producing Pinotage |
The Trail Keeps Going Past the County Line
Two Bridges isn't a two-stop trail. It runs west into Salem County, where a handful of other family operations fill out the route. Auburn Road Vineyard in Pilesgrove has built a following around Friday night dinners with a visiting chef and a tasting room that gets strung with lights around the holidays, according to visitors who've taken the trolley tour that stops there. Salem Oak Vineyards in Pedricktown is a smaller, family-run operation tucked into the Outer Coastal Plain's western edge. Further down the route sits Monroeville Vineyard, where the wine has reportedly been made by the same husband and wife team across three generations of the same family.
None of these are new additions dressed up to look old. They're the same kind of story Heritage and Wagonhouse are telling, just with less name recognition outside the county. The Garden State Wine Growers Association has run a passport program for years that lets visitors get a stamp at every participating winery on any of the state's trails and mail it in for a prize, evidence that this circuit has been treated as a real, structured regional habit for longer than most of the marketing language around "New Jersey wine country" has existed.
What Living Near Both Actually Looks Like
Heritage is open seven days a week, year round, from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., with hours extending to 7 p.m. on Saturdays. Wagonhouse keeps a tighter schedule, Saturdays from noon to 6 p.m. and Sundays from noon to 5 p.m., built around the same farm-weekend rhythm the Browns started with in 2004. Neither winery requires a reservation to walk in for a tasting, though Heritage recommends calling ahead on busy weekends.
The point isn't that Gloucester County has good wine, which is a claim tourism sites have been making for years. The point is that the two operations most often cited as proof of that claim didn't arrive the same way, and they didn't arrive in the same place. One is six generations deep in a township called Harrison. The other is fifteen years into a township called South Harrison, a name close enough to the first that it gets flattened into the same sentence more often than it should. They're both real, they're both a short drive from most of the county, and they got there on two completely different paths through the same soil.
If you've spent a Saturday afternoon at one of these tasting rooms without realizing the other sits in a township you'd swear was the same place, that's the kind of detail that's easy to miss even after years in the county. It's also the kind of thing worth knowing if you're weighing what a property near either one is actually worth, or wondering how vineyard-adjacent acreage gets valued differently than a standard residential lot. If that's a conversation you want to have, reach out to the Nancy Kowalik Group.
