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The Journal News | Wine & Food | October 2005 | Wine Making
Try this, Grandpa: Homemade wine gets modern
by Gary Stern
For serious wine drinkers, the notion of homemade wine evokes images of someone's grandpa in overalls back in the old country. He's knocking back a sweet, syrupy, noxious liquid that's good for one thing, and it's not taste.
Rich Mattina has seen that image in the frightened eyes of wine-lovers.
"I know people who have crushed grapes in Italy, who have been to vineyards around Europe, who have huge wine cellars but look at me and said "I'll never make my own wine,' " Mattina says. "People hesitate to do it, because they don't think it will be very good. But by the time they have their own name on a label, they go nuts."
Mattina was a successful businessman living in Chappaqua and a budding wine connoisseur when he sensed an opening in the region's wine market. Wine lovers were making quality wine in growing numbers across the country, using equipment and techniques that Grandpa never dreamed of.
Suburbanites would make their own wine and take it seriously, Mattina thought, if they knew that the wine could be good.
After several years of research, he opened Make Your Own Wine, a winery and school, in Elmsford last year. A class of about 150 people began crushing grapes last fall and bottled the winery's first batch in July. Their cases of cabernet sauvignon, merlot, syrah, sangiovese, brunello, zinfandel and various blends should be ready to enjoy by Thanksgiving.
"I was a little concerned in the beginning, because wine was made in my family when I was a kid," says Bob Bonanno, 63, an engineer from Hawthorne who signed up with his wife, Terry. "It was a hit-and-miss kind o f thing, if you know what I mean. I was concerned that the wine might not come out so good."
He says he was won over by Mattina's approach (and by some convincing sips of Mattina's vino).
"It's an experience, giving you a real appreciation for wine," Bonanno says. "You can say you made it. From the Bonanno Cellars, or something like that."
Mattina, 40, a native of Yonkers, thought that a hands-on winemaking school would appeal to wine people on several levels. They could make wine using top equipment and without having to make a mess in their basements. They could meet other wine people and make it a social thing. And they could learn about every step of the process.
"I figured that in Westchester, people want to be educated," he says. "That's my best sales tool. I teach. They do."
Winemaking goes back to the late Stone Age, when grapes were fermented in animal-skin pouches, as the archaeologist Patrick McGovern of the University of Pennsylvania has shown. So it's a good bet that it started as a family or village activity and stayed that way for some time, until commercial wineries began refining the process and producing high-end vintages that get graded by magazines and stored in cellars.
Of course, less sophisticated methods continued to be popular in Europe, particularly in Italy, where generations clung to family recipes. But when immigrants to America tried to adopt these recipes without the benefit of Italian grapes and old-world wisdom, home-made wine got its perilous reputation.
Now, however, winemakers can nurture quality wine in their homes. for one thing, they remove the stems from the grapes, a step their hard-working ancestors may have overlooked. and they check sugar, acid and other levels, making adjustments when necessary.
"I got into making wine not in the old-world way, but in a new-world way." says Salvatore Restuccia of Croton-on-Hudson, who owns four 100-liter stainless-steel fermenters. "That means real winemaking yeasts, real equipment. I wanted to do more than just crush the grapes like my uncles did when we went to Italy when I was a kid. The process of making wine is about controlling it all the way and tweaking it all the way."
He was a collector of fine bordeaux and cabernets when he turned 40 and, during a trip to Marin County's wineries, decided to try making his own. It would have to be the best possible wine that a theatrical lighting technician could make.
"Wine is a living, evolving, breathing substance," says Restuccia, now 47, echoing Virginia Madsen's defining monologue in "Sideways." "When you love wine, you want to know everything about it."
It seems that lots of people do. Ernesto Capalbo gets 50 or 60 contestants at the annual winemaking contest he holds at his White Plains eatery, Ernesto's Ristorante.
"It's a custom, a tradition, that we used to do on the other side," says Capalbo, 55, who hails from Calabria, Italy. "It's getting more popular every year, and people do really good stuff. People want to keep the tradition going with better wine."
There's no census of home winemaking, but the Home Wine and Beer Trade Association estimates that at least 4 million Americans dabble in fermenting grapes.
"Wine itself has gotten more popular; it's more readily available and people realize how good it is," says Dee Roberson, the executive director of the group, which is in Valrico, Fla. "But wine is fickle. You might spend $30 on a bottle and find that a $7 bottle is just as good. Now people find they can make the wine they like."
A consistently good bottle of decent wine is nice, but why else do people do it? Why bother to buy equipment, to have to test the fermenting juice, to have to wait and wait to pop a cork, when you can buy most varieties at your neighborhood shop?
Tom Corbett, who chairs the amateur wine competition for the American Wine Society, probably has as good a handle as anyone on what motivates serious wine-makers. He listed several unsurprising factors, such as family tradition, not having to pay taxes, the opportunity to meet other wine people, and the creative challenge.
But his favorite is that winemaking has sex appeal.
"Everyone seems to think making wine is really sexy," he says. "We don't like to dispute the notion. Try telling them that you're an accountant and see if that sounds sexy to them."
Mattina gives seminars on each part of the winemaking process and throws in talks about the making of corks and barrels. He usually puts out mozzarella and tomato, and he throws a party now and then.
His 3,500-square-foot winemaking room has 16 1/2 tons of air conditioning equipment to keep the temperature where it needs to be and rows of aged oak barrels to hold the young wines. Thousands of pounds of grapes will come in from California this fall for the next round of wine.
Make Your Own Wine is open by appointment only. And no one goes near the wine but the boss and his customers.
Hugo Iodice, 42, of Cortlandt Manor, has fond memories of making wine with has grandfather in the Bronx. So he was anxious to give Mattina's business a try. This fall, he's coming back with at least six relatives.
What better thing can you do and have a product to consume at the end?" says Iodice. "You do it for the same reason that you plant tomatoes when you could go to A&P. It tastes better when you grow it yourself."
Should you decide to try making wine at home, by the way, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms sets pretty liberal limits on how much you can make; 200 gallons a year for a household with two or more adults; 100 gallons a year for one adult.
Photography by Mark Vergari
Rich Mattina, the owner and winemaker of MYO Wine in Elmsford, spins a BOTTLE TO APPLY ITS LABEL. The people surrounding him spent nine months making wine. They started by crushing their own grapes and ended with this session, where they bottled and labeled their creations.
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Rich Mattina is the owner of Make Your Own Wine in Elmsford.
