Guerilla Educators

Making Wine; the 2006 Vintage

Here's a toast to Uncle Tony, Peter Jay, and all the teachers of the vine who have gone to the great wine cellar in the sky.  Salud!  Cent'anni!
In early October, 2007, we bottled a very fine Cabernet Sauvignon/Old Vine Zinfandel blend.  The wine aged in a new, fine grained, American Oak barrel so there is a noticeable tannin spike that will mellow with time.  The blend is remarkably smooth for just coming out of the barrel and has about a 15% alcohol content.  With the final bottling, the wine was racked 4 times over the course of the year and has developed a color and clarity that are outstanding.  There is a pronounced cherry flavor with vanilla undertones and a slight tobacco finish.
We did a great job with this wine, if I say so myself.  As one of our long gone teachers of the fine art of winemaking used to say, "Making wine is 50% making wine and 50% keeping everything clean.  Somehow, it always fell to the young guys to uphold the cleaning part of the equation.  Click the photos to enlarge the images.

Making Wine-The Viognier That Almost Got Away - sometimes ignorance is bliss.

          In 2000, we made a delightful Merlot/Malvasia blend and 2 whites - a Sauvignon Blanc and a Viognier.  This is a story about that viognier.  None of us had heard of viognier but we were determined to make white wines that year and quite frankly, beside the Sauv Blanc the Viognier grapes were the only other white grapes our supplier had in stock, so Viognier it was.  According to the best information available, Viognier is to be barreled for just a few months so the spice, floral, citrus, apricot, apple and peach flavors associated with the best of this noble wine are not drowned out by the oak.  Our little band of winemakers always keep the wine in the barrels for 1 year and, by golly, this is what we would do with the viognier.  If it ain't broke, don't fix it, right?  To compound the travesty of keeping the wine too long in the barrel, our white wine barrel was brand new so the tannins were strong to begin with.  We anxiously awaited the bottling of this wine in September of 2001 to see what "God hath wrought" (to quote the creator of the atom bomb).  By the smell, we knew it wasn't vinegar but it did not resemble the bouquet of any wine any of us had ever experienced.  So strong!  More like whiskey than wine.  And the taste just out of the barrel was smoky and oaky, not at all like the spice, floral, citrus, apricot, apple and peach flavors associated with viognier.  The oak and smoke were in fact so strong that some in our gang thought it was a failure.  Somewhere in that heavy mix of cigars and pencil shavings I suspected that we had a very special wine.  Lo and behold, about a month later this very powerful, unique wine had begun to round out and, if one used one's imagination, you could almost taste fruit!  Well, here we are almost 7 years out from the great viognier experiment and those of us who still have any of this wine left in our cellars feel very lucky indeed.  To be sure, the oak is still there as the foundation of the wine and a wonderful, smooth, complex blend of fruits have begun to assert themselves.  This has truly become a wine for the ages and one in which we are very fortunate indeed to have blundered our way upon.      

Making Wine-The first of an occasional series about the alchemy of winemaking

I have "only" been making wine with my South Philly friends for 10 yours now.  I say "only 10 years" because our direct mentor, Bruce Izzi, has been making wine for more than 30 years and he learned from Uncle Tony and Peter Jay, whose winemaking skills and prowess goes far back to Southern Italy into the mists of distant time.  I had the pleasure of working with Uncle Tony for the first couple of years of my initiation into this brotherhood of the vine.  He had slowed down  good deal but then but if Tony saw we were cutting corners, he'd stop the operation and tell us to do it again, "RIGHT THIS TIME".  My favorite story was about Peter Jay who, being the elder of the group would always be the first to taste the newly bottled vintages.  Before tasting, Peter would first get his rather large, aquiline nose into the glass and take a big whiff of the bouquet.  If the wine passed muster, Peter Jay would utter the now legendary words everyone wanted to hear, "Da Pope don't have dis f%*!#in' wine"!
From Peter jay and Uncle Tony, we learned some very simple yet effective winemaking techniques centered around cleanliness, temperature, and air.  Rack the wine 3 times a year, keep the cellar cool, and make sure that the barrel is topped off and airlocked to keep bad yeasts out of the aging wine.  "Racking" simply means to take all of the wine out of the barrels in order to clean any sediment out of the barrel.  This attention to detail has served us "young guys" (all over 50) well.  This year we have in the barrel a potentially historic blend of about 86% cabernet Sauvignon and 14% Old Vine Zinfandel from the legendary Brutocao vineyards of Mendocino County.
We are currently drinking a delightful Cab Franc/Old Vine Zin bottled in September of '06 that keeps getting better as it ages in the bottle.