A Barrel in Every Basement Part 2

So Rocco and I got together a year or so after making the blue tooth red. I had run into a young grape grower in the New York Finger Lakes and we worked out a deal to buy Foche and Dechnauc juice in bulk at a very decent price. I added up the expenses, juice, used whiskey barrel, yeast, hoses, corks, other wine making equipment and the total cost for fifty gallons of a 80% Dechnauc- 20% Foche blend would be $120. (This was in the 1970's!) So if we shared the cost it would be $60 each for 25 gallons or 125 bottles of red wine. Do the math! The cost was less than 50 cents a bottle. Well Roc ran into cash flow problems, I ended up with all fifty gallons and the house was filled with the wonderful (To me!) musty smells of the newly fermented wine. My beautiful newly-wed Italian-American wife wondered if the $120 expense was going to create anything worth while and to be honest, I had my doubts during those early months of fermentation. The stench was new, it definitely looked ugly, and early test tastes seemed to have the liquid pointed in the wrong direction. But that's the beauty of making wine. It starts off as something really ugly, the beautiful sweet juice gets cloudy and spurts out yeast fumes and then after eating all the sugars the yeasts die and fall to the bottom. Slowly the juice clears, we rack that off and clean out the dead lees and let time take over.

For first time bottling, I had all my friends and neighbors save their empty wine bottles. I picked them up, soaked the labels off, cleaned the inside with a brush, and then put them upside down in empty cardboard wine cases. In time I had 250 bottles, then I got the corks, plastic corks for the Champaign bottles, and regular corks for the normal bottles. Then I gathered friends and neighbors for a night of bottling. Bottles filled too high found ready glasses all night long. As the night went on, the air was filled with stories, songs, and debates. We were all one, communicating.

And then I remember my wife's father and uncles coming over and I cracked open a bottle and they began to sip and weave stories of their father making wine in the cellar when they were growing up. And with the bottle quickly emptied, my wife said “why don't you get another bottle of OUR wine?” And so I've been making wine every year since. It's become a family tradition. Only in America can you have a third generation Irishman teaching third and fourth generation Italians how to make wine the way their grandfather and great grandfather's did.

Once the seed is planted it spreads. In our neighborhood a new generation has moved in and they're fixing up their houses and starting new families. They see me making wine and they want to give it a shot. And so we've been blessed to have barrels in every cellar. It provides a common ground for all. We buy shares and move from cellar to cellar making and tasting wine. We expand the variety and quality of the grapes and juice that we use. We suffer when the wine heads in the wrong direction, and rejoice as neighbors when we turn the wine around and come up with names to remember the experience like “Back from the Dead Red” and “Resurrection Red”. We have help when a bottled white wine begins a secondary fermentation ..all the neighbors pitch in and help us drink before popping corks empty the wine.

So making wine opens up doors for communication. It can also cover other grounds, like satisfying a dying man's wish. In my case Uncle Chris. He was dying of cancer and had this craving for wine cookies like his mom (my wife's grandmother) made. His daughter's (my wife's cousins) had made the cookies but they didn't turn our right. The cousins were over the house talking to my wife about the baking failure and all of a sudden I realized that the cookies needed yeast.. as in grape juice that was fermenting! And as luck would have it I had my barrel fermenting down in the cellar so I siphoned out a bottle of the fermenting juice and gave it to the cousins, Uncle Chris's daughters, and told them to give the baking another shot. And sure enough they hit the nail on the head! The next night the phone rang and there was Uncle Chris thanking me for figuring out how to make the cookies. On his deathbed his daughters were able to give him a little happiness with a yeasted wine cookie from the days of his youth.

And so the story becomes part of the family history and more barrels appear in the cellars of the next generation, the kids and then the grandkids, and their neighbors. What can I say? Wine restores our belief in God and ourselves as sociable human beings. WE know there has to be a wonderful God because he's enabled us earth bound humans to make barrels of wine to share with each other...