A Barrel in Every Basement

Kevin, my neighbor and mentor, has been making wine for over 25 years. A master vintner, he is the genesis of the "barrel in every basement philosophy".

This is his story....

In the modern world we seem to lose touch with one another. We have all these communication tools, phone, cell, TV, computer, internet, palm pilot, blackberry, and yet at the end of the day we have this feeling that something is lacking in our lives. It's the human touch, one person talking to another the old fashioned way, neighbors touching base, musing about anything- The solution to this malaise is obvious to wine makers throughout the world. We need a barrel in every basement.

My first experience with this concept began with the arrival of a new college roommate, Rocco. He arrived with a gallon of his father's homemade wine. Somehow the stars became aligned, and Rocco invited me over to his parents place for Sunday dinner. His family's house was on the poor side of the city, but when I arrived I was impressed with their backyard garden with vegetables, nut and fruit trees, and flowers covering all but a small patch of grass. Inside the house they all spoke Italian. Roc's family had come over from Calabria, Italy, which was located at the tip of the boot. They had arrived 7-8 years before and both his parents worked at Hickey-Freedman, a factory that tailored fine and expensive suits for the landed gentry. I can remember the first meal that we had. There was spaghetti with just a touch of red sauce that tasted just out of this world, and then came soup, chicken soup with these little meatballs, a meat that they called brachiolle which was a beef flattened out and rolled with spices, cheeses and a hard boiled egg, and bread that must have been made in heaven. And as we ate, a bottle of homemade red wine was poured and mixed with a lemon-lime soda. It tasted different, but good.

After dinner, Rocco's father gestured to me and told Rocco in Italian that he wanted me to go to the cellar. It was a small crowded space with bottles, different size barrels, a wine press and these deep earth smells. There, in the musty semi-darkness we tasted different homemade wines and Rocco filled up a gallon jug to take back with him to college. After several sips from different barrels, Roc's dad and I understood each other. We had connected with a universal language that we just seemed to learn with each sip.

And so that was the SEED. It began to grow with each gallon jug that Rocco brought back to the house. We lived in a rented place a few miles from campus and shared the place with five other guys. Roc took over cooking dinner and as the weeks went by Rocco began to increase the jugs of wine he brought back from home from one to two to three... And then we began to buy some extra jugs for the end of the week. There was something about wine that brought us all together...

Of course college ends, but life has a way of moving you towards things and I ran into a guy that knew a grape farmer along Lake Ontario who wasn't going to harvest because the price of his grapes, Marchial Foche, was too low that year. He told my buddy to pick all he wanted and I got drafted as his laborer and we filled the back of his pickup truck and brought the grapes back to his garage. He had bought a used whiskey barrel and he had these 30 gallon plastic garbage pails, and an old wooden wine press that he had bought at a household sale a few years before. So we were ready! We crushed the grapes, pulled out all the stems that we could find because we had read that this gave the wine a green taste, and got the fermentation going in the garbage pails with this powdered yeast that we had bought at a winemakers shop. Each night for a week or so, I would stop by my buddies house and we would break through the wine must crust with an upside down broom handle. You could smell the yeast and it would foam up just like sodium bisulfite did in chemistry class! After a week or so, we pressed it out and carried it in pails down to his cellar and poured the juice into his 50 gallon whiskey barrel that we had propped up on cinder blocks. It was something, the combined smell of the whiskey and the fermented grapes coming out of the barrel. We found that if we breathed in deeply a few times at the bung-hole we got a little tipsy...

My buddy and his wife hung with the beautiful people, you know the type, no zits, perfect hair, bodies, clothes, underwear slightly starched. Anyway, he had a party for the beautiful people and our wine was served. With the whiskey released from the barrel staves, it had a major kick. Also, we found that after the first glass it turned everybody's teeth deep blue! No more beautiful people, no more reserved superior beings, just blue-toothed humans making connections....