Little old wine-maker, me, er, uh, I mean my cousin Mike

Note from Joe Giannunzio: I remember when we lived on the north side of Iron Mountain (must have been 7 or 8 at the time, going down to the train station to pick up loads of grapes so Grandpa Giannunzio (nunzio) could make his wine. We never had a car or truck and neither did he so it must have been one of the uncles who drove us. He made barrels of it. I still wonder if he consumed it all or sold it to the local taverns which he was known on a first and last name basis by all the bartenders. You can still buy daggo red under the counter back there if you know the bartender. I am living proof of that. It is nice that first cousin Mike Gianunzio (son of his late wonderful father who left out one of the n's in Giannunzio) not a misprint took up making wine again. I made my typical brandy this year (cousin Jim Giannunzio's recipe) very easy. Wild mountain huckleberries (my choice or any berry of your choosing.

Recipe...

Fill container with egual amounts of berries, sugar and vodka. Shake up and leave sit on the shelf at least a month.

And for dessert. Take the berries from consumed brandy, heat them and pour them over vanilla ice cream!!

Your friends will love it.

Joe

Now here's the latest on the Gianunzio family's adventure in wine-making...2006 ................................................... Dear Friends and Family....

Well, after a fifty year hiatus, there is a Gianunzio family member making wine again. My grandfather made wine from about 1903 to the late 1950's in Iron Mountain, Michigan and sold it to his buddies around town. I remember going to his house with my dad on Saturday morning with a jug and lots of old Italian men were there filling up on red wine, laughing and telling stories in Italian. I didn't think much of it, but I didn't realize until this weekend how much fun it could be to make your own wine. I wish I had grandpa Nunzio around to teach us his winemaking technique. He learned from his parents in Italy and made quite a few bucks during Prohibition selling his version of Diego Red. Someday I will tell you about my mother's relative that worked for Al Capone during Prohibition.

Unfortunately, Nunzio didn't do what Robert Mondavi did. Mondavi's dad got tired of working in Iron ore mines in Northern Minnesota and moved his family to northern California to make wine. Today the Mondavi family controls the wine business in the Napa Valley; they are very rich and have great wines. My grandfather decided to stick it out in iron ore mining and well, here I am today.

Annie wants to be a winemaker (an enologist) someday. She will be great at it; she understands chemistry. I understand how to drink good wine (very slowly, in a nice wine glass, at room temperature and with some good pasta).

We have four wonderful neighbors (Dick and Bonne and Steve and Karan) here on Camano Island just two doors down from us who are very much into wine, so we all decided to make some wine this fall. We started with a wine making kit to practice on-six gallons of wine (some merlot), but we couldn't wait to get into it in a big way. A little idea got a lot bigger. Now we have a big Italian made crusher-stemmer that can crush a ton of grapes in a morning and a nice 21 litre press from Italy and a corker, carboys, fermenters, and lots of other stuff (so far the cost per bottle is pretty high; this ain't no Three Buck Chuck Wine, but hopefully the cost per bottle will go down as the years go by).

As of three o'clock this afternoon, we have 60 gallons of cabernet sauvignon fermenting in our basement, which after some additional work will turn into wine. We have so far this weekend picked 600 pounds of grapes from a vineyard 150 miles away from here, ran them through the stemmer and crusher today and put them in eight fermenters-plastic tubs with some powerful yeast added after crushing (fifty billion yeast cells per fermenter according to the packets of yeast we used).

After fermentation (for a couple of weeks), the wine must (right now it looks like eight big tubs of crushed fruit cocktail) is pressed and the wine (at that point only clear juice) spends about three months aging in six large glass bottles (carboys), a couple of rackings take place (siphoning the wine from one carboy bottle to a clean one to get rid of the sediment at the bottom) during that time, then the wine goes into oak barrels for about 8 or 9 months, and then we bottle the finished wine (about 250 bottles) and it gets more aging in the bottle (for a year or more). This wonderful red wine should be ready to drink in about 18 to 24 months. Of course, it is always best to let it age in the bottle for as long as possible before drinking. It will be hard not to drink some about 2 years from now. It could age in the bottle for a decade if we want it to.

We had a great time this weekend picking grapes at a huge (900 acre) vineyard in central Washington on the Columbia River about 40 miles east of Yakima in a place called Mattawa. It is a "place" to be sure; it has gas station, two Mexican restaurants, a grocery store and a cop with a radar gun that reads "Another $120 for the Town Treasury".

I have a friend whose (soon to be ex) wife owns a big winery called Preston Vineyards in eastern Washington. He hooked me up with the guy that runs this vineyard, which also supplies Chateau St. Michelle Winery and others with red wine grapes for their great award winning wines. So we got some premium grapes, and they looked like it. Hardly any bad ones as we picked them yesterday by hand (it took about three hours; the vineyard manager, Albert, stopped by and laughed as we carefully snipped away. He said he wouldn't make any money if we were on his crew. In the time it took us to pick 600 pounds, he and his crew with a machine picked 1200 tons of grapes about fifty rows west of us). But, hey, we wanted to experience the old world way of picking grapes by hand.

Albert felt bad and showed up with a Port-A-Potty for us and a recommendation for lunch in a little town called Desert Aire about four miles away. He had a refractometer and said the Brix (sugar content) of our grapes was 25.3-just what we wanted. The PH was 3.3 and the acid test was right on, so our harvest was on the money. He said "Pick as much as you want", so we went until we filled up 12 big 66 quart bins, and we were getting hot in the 85 degree sun. We took all the grapes from 60 vines in row 176 of the Watson Vineyard. Row 176 seemed to go on as far as one could see. Our little harvest was maybe about 300 feet of this one row. There were hundreds of rows in every direction.

We went to the Sandtrap Restaurant in Desert Aire after we filled up Dick's truck and our Highland with six hundred pounds of grapes (amazingly, there were no flies or bugs hanging around the vineyard or our grapes; and there were no snakes or spiders-critters that people tried to scare me with last week when I told them what we were doing).

Desert Aire is a weird sort of retirement community about fifty miles from civilization. But the restaurant had the best damn hamburgers in all of Washington state. Across the gravel parking lot from the restaurant was a motel and a business called "Retirement Solutions". It was closed; I wondered what kind of "solutions" could they dream up in the middle of this desert.

Desert Aire is just ten miles north of the eastern boundary of the Hanford Ranch, the largest nuclear waste site in North America. All around us (even across the vineyard) were the huge electric trasmission towers of the Bonneville Power Administration buzzing away at 330,000 volts per line. Now we know what makes these grapes ferment into award winning wines. The kids in Desert Aire looked a little odd come to think of it (only four fingers on each hand, like The Simpsons).

We left Desert Aire and headed for Yakima. I missed a turn and we (Jackie and I) got lost. A barrista at an Espresso stand gave us the wrong directions and we headed west for miles with Interstate 90 no where in sight. I fell asleep and woke up as we crossed the gate into Mt. Ranier National Park. We were just 75 or so miles off course! But the ride back to Seattle through the Park was spectacular. A three hour trip home took six hours.

We could just buy some damn Cabernet Sauvignon at the grocery store or liquor store and not spent last month's paycheck on wine making equipment, but it just wouldn't be as adventurous.

Our wine will have a label calling it Cabernet Sauvignon from "Isola Di Venti Cellars", which in Italian means Windy Island Cellars.

A couple weeks ago I made the mistake of trying to register this name for our "winery" with the State of Washington. My God, what a hassle. I got a call from the State Liquor Board and they showed up at our house wanting to see the winery. After a few calls, I got them to understand we weren't doing this to sell wine, just for our own consumption and for fun. God help you if you try to do something for fun and the State finds out. I learned that we can make it for home use without a license, but my mistake was filing with the State to register the name-that triggered a host of bureaucratic exercises that I had to do lots of "splainin" to get out of. And, I learned that if you want to be a winery, you have to get licensed by the state and the feds. Mama mia! Nunzio would have told them to go to hell!

Well, in two years, I promise that you will get to taste our Cabernet Sauvignon (if it comes out good; if its crap, this message will automatically destruct on my command). I have attached a couple of pictures (as you might expect this adventure is chronicled by Jackie's wonderful photos)....

Ciao....

Mike

Updated Story on the wine's progress 10/24/06...

Dear Friends and Family.....Three weeks ago, I reported to most of you that the Camano Island branch of the Gianunzios were back in the wine making business with the picking and crushing of 800 pounds of Cabernet sauvignon grapes with our friends Karan, Steve, Dick and Bonnie from a trip to a vineyard in Mattawa, Washington (the Wahluke Slope). I am happy to report that over the last 25 days, the 60 gallons of crushed grapes and juice we produced have been lovingly cared for, being stirred twice daily by the Gianunzios, Mattsons and Bushes, and this weekend, this luscious vintage was carefully pressed in our water powered Italian press in about the same time as the crushing (about 4 hours). The weather broke here in the gloomy Northwest, so it was time to press the must. We did the pressing outside under our deck, where the crushing was done. We filled up tub after tub of Isola di Vento Estates Cabernet Sauvignon (Wahluke Slope Appellation, Washington State). We are calling our little "winery", Isola di Vento Estates, translation from Italian is "Windy Island Estates". The nouveau wine was then siphoned into six glass carboys (large glass containers) of five-six gallons each for a total of just about 41 gallons of wine. There was a lot of "free wine" (the wine juice that just flows into the collection vat without having to be pressed). It could have been caught and vinified separately, but we mixed it all together. Our wine is a glorious deep purple and is already getting clearer as the dead yeast and other particles are settling to the bottom of the carboys. We had probably fifty pounds of left over squished grapes that we bagged up and one of the vintners is going to use it in her garden; this pomace is used by some European vintners to make a low-quality distilled drink called marc or grappa. They make this drink by dumping sugar, water, and the pomace together and ferment it, almost always making a lousy drink that used to be sold to the poor in Europe who couldn't afford wine. There are some Europeans who think it is really a cool drink, but it will make a better compost than a drink, I am sure. In fact, Austrians are using ground grape pomace in humus toilets, waterless toilets with a tank of rotting pomace that digests human waste to a clean odorless state within a month. The French are investigating using pomace as a fuel. It should be called "crappa", not "grappa". We sterilized everything before and after our pressing, and then covered the 41 gallons of wine with cardboard boxes so no light gets in to impact the fermenting wine. The wine is resting comfortably in our basement. We should ultimately get about 200 bottles out of what we pressed. We decided to press the wine this weekend because the bubbling in the fermentation vats slowed down to almost nothing. That means the yeast has finished up most of its work converting the sugar in the crush to alcohol and the Brix (measure of sugar) was one third of what it was when we picked the grapes. It is now vino! Now the wine goes into its secondary fermentation in these big glass containers (I don't know why they are called "carboys"). We also added sulfite to the wine to kill any remaining bacteria and to slow down the remaining fermentation process by the yeast. The carboys are topped with an airlock that lets carbon dioxide and air out, but no air in. In the next month, we have to transfer the wine into clean carboys to get rid of the sediment at the bottom of the carboys. That will make the wine a lot clearer. This is called racking; and we do that every couple of months for the next six months. Then the wine will go into small (10 gallon) oak barrels for about six months, and then back in the carboys for another six months (the last two steps are part of the aging process). Putting the wine in oak barrels gives the wine a little oak flavor and fine tunes the taste of the wine. We are going to have to experiment about how long to keep it in the barrels. Oak barrels come from Wisconsin and Arkansas, and the best ones come from France (where they are Christened by brie eating French priests and aged in French whorehouses for a decade before they are sold for more money than your best dining room table). We will use the American oak barrels. About a year from now, we will bottle the wine. We could wait up to two years before bottling; we shall see. Cabernet sauvignon is a big red wine that deserves a lot of good aging before it is drunk. Drinking it too young would be like eating cookie dough before the cookies are baked. It tastes good, but there is no comparison to baked cookies. So, all of you who have written back and demanded a bottle of this hooch will have to wait until my 56th birthday party in January 2008. I will pass out wine in exchange for wonderful gifts! You will have to let it age in the bottle for a while too; good red wine can go on aging for years and years, and just gets better and better. Some of the folks who got my first e-mail about this sent along stories of their grandfathers or fathers making wine years ago. If you have any stories or know someone who has a story like that, send them my e-mail address. I think I am going to collect some stories and recipes and put them together in an article or a little book that I am going to call "Tales From the Purple Feet Society-Wine making At Home in America". I am expanding the list of recipients on this e-mail for that purpose. This has been a lot of fun and not a lot of work, really. I should have been doing this years ago. I have been drinking (good) wine for about twenty years now, having shared many trips to the Napa, Sonoma and Russian River Valley wine country in California with our good friends, Harold and Karen Miskel. We toured some Oregon wineries with our buddy Paul Elias (who lives with Carol surrounded by vineyards in McMinnville, Oregon). And, I have just begun to hit Washington state wineries in the last five years. So much wine, so little time. I have organized a Wine Tasting Club in our neighborhood, and that is going great-so many people love wine today. If I get to retire in 8 to 10 years, God-willing, I should know something about making wine by then, and I will be ready for the third phase of my life and maybe a second career. Below is the first message I sent out for those just getting this story for the first time. Sorry if you think I am obsessed, but I am having fun with this and it is amazing how many people are winemakers at home. The Boeing Wine Club, we are told, just bought 500,000 pounds of grapes from a Washington state vineyard for their winemaking this fall! Next year, we will have to kick up production to 2000 pounds-maybe 500 bottles. Drink lots of good red (or white) wine this Thanksgiving and Christmas (or anytime really) and don't buy the cheap stuff! Go out and get a bottle of J. Lohr Winery cabernet sauvignon (Seven Oaks Estates Paso Robles) and have it with some good cheese or spaghetti with marinara sauce. Molto Buono! It is my house wine. And, bless you all for listening to me and being so good to me.....Mike