Wallkill, NY
Christine Kelley and her friend decided they were going to go skydiving one summer night because they wanted to “do something crazy”. Christine was a high school English teacher when her and her friends made this decision one summer. Unfortunately for her friend, that was the first and last time she ever went skydiving, for Christine she never thought she’d jump more than once, but it changed everything.
“it was the most life changing experience I ever had, I felt absolute joy and freedom.”
Christine described her first-time skydiving as a completely freeing experience. She said it was the first time she was able to be completely there in a moment, aware of everything going on around her. The little girl in her could touch the clouds and fly with birds.
“I was a teenager that made my mother grey and my father drunk, and then I met my husband, had three daughters, and became a mom. I was a teacher, I was on the PTA, I was a soccer mom, a softball mom, a dance mom. But when I started to jump years later, I found myself again, which as a dedicated mother, I had kind of lost”
Christine hadn’t completely lost herself, she explained, but as someone who wanted to be there for her children wholeheartedly, there was a part of her that she locked away for a long time.
“I felt a happiness that I’ve never truly felt before.”
Some of the most beautiful experiences Christine has ever had were things you could only experience in the sky. On her eighth jump, she jumped through a hole in a cloud. Skydivers call this a “cloud rush” because it is the only moment you can tell how fast you’re actually falling. On another jump, after Christine opened her parachute, she was able to fly through the sky beside an eagle. To this day, Christine has jumped over 3,000 times.
“Because our sport is so extreme, and we do lose people, it makes you realize how fragile life is, and how you really only have this moment, that’s why I skydive.”
But that’s not all she does. Christine’s new-found passion gave birth to her newest baby, Freefall Sangria, Liquid Altitude. After she started skydiving regularly, she wanted more free time that being a high school teacher didn’t exactly have to offer. Christine left teaching to become a freelance web designer. She also had been working at the café at Skydive the Ranch in Gardiner.
By nightfall, Christine would turn on a strand of dragonfly lights in what she called at the time, the DragonFly Café, signaling that the café was officially a speakeasy for the skydivers for the rest of the night. After spending all day jumping the skydivers would make their way to the cafe for Christine’s homemade sangria.
Christine’s sangria not only became tradition, but it also became a part of the culture at Skydive the Ranch. It wasn’t very long until more than just the local skydivers fell in love with her concoction. Co-Founder of Freefall Sangria, Tom Falzone, with over 15,000 jumps, is the Coach of the West Point Parachute Team. When the cadets got word of Christine’s sangria, they couldn’t get enough of it. Before the two could keep up, a staple to the speakeasy nights at Skydive the Ranch had made its way farther away from the Dragonfly café than Christine or Tom ever imagined. Not only were the skydivers asking for more sangria but their friends and families were too.
“So we thought hey, we might actually have something, it’s not just skydivers that like to drink.”
For a bit of time, Christine and Tom had been making beer in their basement and distilling in the backyard. It was a truly homemade process as they put together a still out of a keg and copper piping. Although her recipe was the same, it wasn’t quite the Sangria that it is today. They were bottling it in cheap green glass bottles that weren’t yet labeled. What was important was that everyone who needed to know knew those green glass bottles meant Christine’s sangria.
Eventually, those discrete green bottles given away as gifts, for special occasions, and for no occasion at all other than indulging in some delicious sangria, became talked about a bit too often. Christine knew that they either needed to stop making it all together or commit to transitioning what had become much more than a hobby into a business. After Gable Erenzo, owner of the Liquid Mercantile, tried it and told Christine and Tom he believed they had something they knew it was time to make a decision. With someone like Gable’s approval as well as their unexpected and relatively new clientele, the decision they made was no longer much of a question at all.
And so, Freefall Sangria was born. Their sangria uses raspberries, strawberries, blueberries, peaches, and plums, all of which are New York fruits. For the wine, they use cabernet sauvignon, merlot, and baco noir, a specific choice of three different bold grapes so that when the ice served with the sangria melts, the flavor still remains. Instead, Christine explained, it opens up and changes the flavor profile a little. The last two steps are to splash the sangria with a bit of citrus (the only part that is not New York) and then finish it off with a grape spirit to raise the proof. This brings it to 30 proof, much higher than most bottled sangrias found in a liquor store. Freefall Sangria is actually one of the highest proof sangrias on the market, as most are around 7%. Where many others remain quite sweet comparable to a fruit juice, Freefall drinkers can still taste the wine in their sangria.
The Freefall Sangria website is equipped with a whole host of recipes to turn their sangria into any cocktail mixed with your favorite spirit. Their sangria can be found in over 220 locations from Saratoga to the Hamptons and they regularly do tastings in liquor stores on Fridays and Saturdays as well as events. Next year Freefall plans to expand into New York City and come out with their new, white sangria. While this time of year Christine will usually travel somewhere warmer to skydive, she still drinks her sangria but warmed up with muddled cinnamon, cloves, and allspice.
Contact: (845) 419 – 3393
Click Here to visit Freefall Sangria’s website