Wedding DJ at The Inn at Grace Winery in Glen Mills, PA

The Space

Land here traces back to a William Penn grant parceled to the Hemphill family as Sweetwater Farm, and the Quaker farmhouse the family built on it in 1734 still stands at the center of the property, with a Georgian wing the Hemphills added in 1815. The day after the Battle of Brandywine in September 1777, British officers occupied the homestead for two nights while their troops stayed in the barn, and the farmhouse’s third floor later served as a Civil War infirmary and, before that, a stop on the Underground Railroad.

The estate’s modern life as a winery began in 1996, when Grace Le Vine bought the property, then known as Sweetwater Farm, and ran it as a bed and breakfast. After her death in 1999, her brother Chris Le Vine and sister-in-law Vicki took over, planted 10 acres of vines in 2007, and spent two years restoring the crumbling 1750s bank barn into a working winery, releasing Grace Winery’s first vintage in 2009.

Capacity & Layout

The main event space occupies the barn’s third floor and seats up to 140 guests, with a second-floor conference room and a caterer-ready kitchen supporting it and the winery itself on the ground floor below. A newer, smaller option, the Vineyard Barn, adds 1,200 square feet on the edge of the vines, holding 90 guests for a cocktail-style reception or 60 for a seated dinner, which gives couples two very different scales to choose between on the same property.

Ceremonies typically happen at an outdoor amphitheater tucked into Sweetwater Wood, with a back patio nearby for cocktails looking out over the vineyard. That amphitheater has a scenic backdrop but no noted weather cover, which is worth planning around for a couple choosing that spot, while the barn’s third-floor reception room and the Vineyard Barn both give an indoor fallback that the outdoor ceremony site does not.

Amenities

Guests can stay on site across 25 total accommodations: seven rooms split between the 1734 and 1815 wings of the Manor House, nine vacation cottages with full or partial kitchens, and the separately renovated Sweetwater House, built in 1748 and updated in 2022, which rents as two cottages, East and West, together or apart. The Tasting Room, open Friday through Sunday, pairs farm-to-table food with the estate’s own wines, Pennsylvania craft beer, and cocktails.

Beyond the event spaces, the property runs a seasonal outdoor pool, a fitness center, a bocce court, fire pits, a billiards room, and an honor bar for guests staying overnight, so a wedding weekend here has somewhere to be between the ceremony and the reception. The wine itself, made in a dry French style from Merlot, Cabernet Franc, Pinot Grigio, and Chardonnay grown in the estate’s mineral-rich limestone soil and aged in French oak, is a detail couples can build a menu or favors around.

Location & Getting There

The estate covers 35 to 40 acres in the Brandywine Valley, less than 30 minutes from the Philadelphia Main Line while still arriving to open vineyard rows and Sweetwater Wood. Complimentary parking is on the property, and the working vineyard, which supplies 40 to 60 percent of the grapes in the estate’s wine with the rest sourced within a 45-minute drive, is visible from most of the outdoor event spaces.

The winery’s oldest structure, the 1750s bank barn, was rebuilt over two years and finished in 2010 to house fermentation tanks, the tasting room, and an event floor above them, so the reception room sits over working cellar space rather than storage. That construction, heavy timber framing over a stone base, gives the third-floor room enough structure to carry a DJ setup and dancing, unlike the open-air amphitheater below, where sound has to be planned for vineyard air instead of four walls.