Home grape growers/wine makers
Where dreams are bottled
By Janet Eastman
September 08, 2005
ORV MADDEN has waited three years to try the ultimate house wine. It’s a Pinot Noir made from grapes he and his wife, LeAnn, have babied in their backyard. The wine tastes like something between a velvety ‘97 Williams Selyem and a pungent first-year harvest, and it’s sealed in a bottle with a label that reads:
Madden Vineyards
Montecito, California
“I hope people feel that my wine is drinkable after all this work,” says Madden, sitting in a John Deere Gator truck at the base of his tidy vineyard.
He spends three hours a week pampering 300 grapevines that are laced across one-eighth of an acre. Each vine produces a bottle of wine each year. On this scale, he will never see a warehouse full of wine with his name on it, but he can make enough to have a few glasses at dinner with friends. And though his setup is much more elaborate than most, he is not alone.
Wine is hot. It has edged out beer as Americans’ first choice of alcoholic beverage, according to a recent Gallup Poll. It was at the center of a hit movie, “Sideways.” It has fueled countless jokes about Napa Valley becoming the new Disneyland for adults.
Interest in wine is also inspiring people to try making their own, whether as an obsession or a passing fancy. Stores, clubs, publishers, plant growers and consultants these days specialize in catering to small-scale grape growers and winemakers. And starting Friday, near the height of the harvest, the Los Angeles County Fair will showcase 85 bottles of do-it-yourself wine in its 18th annual home winemaking competition. (Sorry, they’re for display only.)
The vintner’s art can be complex at times, but getting started doesn’t require a great deal of expertise or expense.
“I don’t find so much that it’s wine collectors who are interested in making wine, but rather it’s the average fellow on the street who likes wine or has just gotten interested in it,” says John Daume, owner of Woodland Hills’ Home Wine, Beer and Cheesemaking Shop, which has been a vintners’ hub for 35 years. “There’s going to be a certain percentage of those who say, ‘Why not make it myself?’ It’s not expensive, but like any hobby, you can get as crazy as you want.”
On the low end of the scale, ferment-it-yourself kits that make 5 gallons can cost as little as $100 – or $4 a bottle. They typically include some form of juice or concentrate, plus basic equipment such as glass jugs, measuring cups and so forth. (If you’re so inclined, you can design your own label on a computer.)
That’s how Jim Graver, a sales representative for a vehicle leasing company in Mission Viejo, got started more than 30 years ago. “My wife bought it for me, and she regrets that to this day,” Graver says, adding that a portion of their two-car garage now houses a wine cellar, a grape press, various bottles and gadgets, and a small oak barrel for aging.
Though kits used to be more miss than hit, their quality has improved dramatically in the last few years, as has the selection of juices, concentrates and even frozen grapes, says Brad Ring, publisher of the home-oriented WineMaker magazine.
“Winemaking used to be a seasonal pursuit, but now there is a pretty large selection of concentrate from around the world,” says Ring, who has seen circulation double in the last five years to 35,000, or an estimated 108,500 readers. “You can make an Australian Shiraz from Australian juice. You don’t have to limit yourself.”
In fact, you don’t even have to use grapes or grape juice. Thomas Henke of Covina, the winner of the “rose, fruit and miscellaneous” homemade wine contest at this year’s L.A. County Fair, makes honey wine, or mead, in his kitchen.
To concoct his 17%-alcohol pomegranate mead, Henke, an engineer by trade, squeezes a gallon of Sue Bee honey that he bought from Sam’s Club into a clean apple cider jug. He adds 10 ounces of concentrated pomegranate juice, three quarts of water and two teaspoons of Fleischmann’s rapid-rise yeast. “In a few minutes, it starts fermenting,” Henke says. “It hisses, gets foamy and bubbles like crazy.”
After the mixture burbles for two or three months, he transfers it into five 750-milliliter bottles, lets it age for nine months, then uncorks the contents.
“It has a real nice kick to it,” he says. “It sneaks up on you because it’s smooth and you can sip it all evening, then it hits you.”
Other winemakers forgo an investment in equipment altogether by simply dropping in for instruction at a place such as Squashed Grapes, a winemaking store in Camarillo. It costs $175 to $300 to produce, bottle and label 30 bottles of wine, says Carolyn Taylor, who opened the shop with Gwen Ripplinger two years ago.
The educational process often turns into a party – complete with hors d’oeuvres and, of course, wine – as friends and family join in on the bottling. Customers can sign up for as little as two sessions, with the store taking care of the nitty-gritty of fermentation and the like, or they can choose to make more frequent visits. Either way, “it’s a good way for beginners to get their feet wet, and they don’t have to hassle with the mess,” Taylor says.
JUST as the variety of wines is seemingly endless, so are the ways to make them. But any homemade wine boils down to three things, Graver says: cleanliness, keeping air exposure to a minimum, and, most important, the grapes.
Those with a brown thumb need not despair. Fresh wine grapes are readily available through wine supply stores, as well as from commercial vineyards.
Though Graver started with a kit in the ’70s, he now prefers to make wine with grapes bought from a vineyard. As the leader of the 65-member home winemaking division of the Orange County Wine Society, Graver organizes “group crushes.” In a few weeks, his group will go to a vineyard in Temecula and purchase grapes in bulk. (Afterward, they’ll take turns using a few members’ $200 machines to remove stems from the grapes and crush them.)
“The advantage of buying grapes this way is you get a better price,” Graver says. “And many vineyards don’t want to sell at all for less than 500 pounds.”
Depending on the kind, grapes bought this way cost from 30 cents per pound to $1.50 per pound; as a rule of thumb, 100 pounds produces a little more than 5 gallons of wine.
Though it’s not as cost-effective, hobby vineyardists take winemaking to the next step. They nurture anywhere from 10 to a few hundred grapevines in their backyards. It’s relaxing, they say. Romantic. A point of pride.
Andy Coradeschi, who runs an equipment rental firm for Hollywood productions, got into winemaking only a little more than year ago, with plastic containers and used beer kegs as the heart of his operation. Now he’s growing two dozen vines on a 10-by-80-foot strip between his Agoura Hills tract house and his neighbors’, and he’s looking forward to when they’ll produce Syrah, Grenache and Mourvedre grapes.
That day can’t come soon enough for him. Though grapes are easy to grow in Southern California, owners of vineyardettes must be patient. Young plants need at least three years to mature, and grapes need months of hang time in the sun.
Orv Madden, founder of the Hot Topic and Torrid clothing stores, has been through the wait, albeit on a more elaborate scale.
A few years ago, when he and wife were mapping out their backyard landscape, he tasted a satisfying ‘97 Williams Selyem Pinot Noir from the Hirsch Vineyard. Charged up, he called in consultant Wes Hagen, the vineyard manager and winemaker at Clos Pepe Estate in Lompoc. Hagen looked over Madden’s property and selected a site based on soil, sun, rain, wind, drainage, slope and other natural factors, such as hot and cold pockets.
It takes a huge crew to manage a commercial vineyard, but hobbyists can handle the work if they keep the plot small. In the Maddens’ case, workers prepared the soil and installed wire trellises, irrigation and plants.
Then the couple took over. They were ankle deep in mud and rain when they added soil amendments. They checked sticky bug traps for signs of the glassy-winged sharpshooter, this berry’s enemy. They watched out for mildew and shooed away deer, gophers and rabbits that wanted to chew through irrigation lines. They spent two days clipping off low leaves, row by row, to expose young buds to the sun.
Last September, Madden picked a handful of the grapes, squeezed them into a Baggie and dribbled some of the juice onto a refractometer, a pocket-sized gadget that measures sugar content. When the “Brix level” reached 24 degrees – about 12% to 13% potential alcohol – Madden made the vintner’s most important call: It was time to harvest.
At daybreak, the Maddens and their all-volunteer crew of five descended on the vineyard with empty pails in hand. They spent hours stooping over to clip clusters.
When they were done, their muscles ached, their faces were dusty and their hands were sticky with juice. In front of them, however, was a pickup truck full of Pinot Noir grapes, which were taken to a winery to be converted into wine. Since it was their first harvest, they wanted experts to take over.
Other home growers, especially those with more modest plots, crush the grapes themselves on harvest day.
Some squash them by hand – yet never by foot. It might disappoint “I Love Lucy” fans, but winemakers of all levels are rightfully germ-phobic, and stamping the grapes with bare feet can introduce bacteria that will quickly convert wine into vinegar.
Though a commercial vineyard may use a steel grape crusher as large as a two-car garage, a home winemaker can accomplish the same job with a hand-cranked crusher the size of a baby bathtub or even make do with a potato masher that squishes grapes inside a clean bucket.
MAD scientist types like Paul Hohe relish the post-harvest part of the process. Hohe and his wife, Elva, grow Syrah, Merlot, Sauvignon Blanc and Chardonnay grapes in their backyard in Orcutt, near Santa Maria.
Hohe, a retired obstetrician, still tinkers with vessels, measuring devices and meters. But the ones he uses now care for grapes, not mothers-to-be.
He takes acid readings with a pH meter, adds chemicals as needed and monitors their temperature readings. He wants to make sure the white wine juice stays cool enough to retain its fruity flavor and the red wine ferments at room temperature to extract the color and complexity of the grapes.
“He approaches this just as he did his practice,” says Elva, his wife of 20 years. “He puts his heart and soul into it.”
After a week bubbling away like a lava pit in 30-gallon, food-grade plastic containers, the slurry of red grapes is pressed to remove the skins and pulp (white grapes are pressed before fermentation). The juice is poured into Sparkletts-size glass bottles called “carboys.”
The bottles are topped with plastic fermentation locks to allow carbon dioxide to escape and prevent oxygen from seeping in and spoiling the brew. About three times over six months, Hohe uses an electric pump to transfer or “rack” the wine into clean bottles to separate it from the sediment.
Months later, the clarified wine will be poured into standard-size bottles and a sterilized cork will be inserted with a hand-powered device that compresses the cork and drives it into the bottles.
In a year or so, Hohe will decide when the red wine is ready to drink. The white wine can be served two weeks after bottling.
“We grow Sauvignon Blanc grapes because it’s our favorite white varietal to drink,” says Hohe, who was an extra in “Sideways,” appearing in a cafe scene next to the main characters. “The beauty of making your own wine is you can manage it the way you want it. It doesn’t always work, but usually it does.”
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The grapes of past
Though Napa and Sonoma counties are the top wine grape producers in California’s $15-billion-a-year industry, Los Angeles County was once the state leader in winemaking. Spanish missionaries planted grapes along the coast in the 1700s. By the 1880s there were 400 operating vineyards in the county.
But the grapes were first decimated by the bacteria in Pierce’s disease, which is carried by the glassy-winged sharpshooter. Also leading to their diminishment were land development and Prohibition.
Even during Prohibition it was legal to make wine for personal consumption, up to 200 gallons per household, and that law still holds. Wine, however, can’t be sold without a license.
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That little old winemaker – you
By Janet Eastman
September 08, 2005
Becoming a home winemaker can be as simple as buying a 5-gallon do-it-yourself kit for $100 or as elaborate as hiring a consultant and crew to create a personal vineyard, designed and planted for $5,000 to $20,000 an acre. Here are some sources to get you started:
Supplies
Winemaking stores
The Home Wine, Beer and Cheesemaking Shop in Woodland Hills sells kits, tools, chemicals and grapes, and offers classes. Owner John Daume says a serious beginner can get started making wine from fresh grapes at home for a few hundred dollars. (818) 224-3656,www.homebeerwinecheese.com
Squashed Grapes in Camarillo sells materials and teaches the basics of winemaking using in-store equipment. (805) 384-9721, www.squashedgrapes.com
The Florida-based Home Wine & Beer Trade Assn. has a locator service on its website to find home winemaking stores. www.hwbta.org
Nurseries
There are thousands of varieties of grapes, but a nursery staff can tell you which grow best in a given area. Cabernets and Merlots thrive in warmer sites, while Chardonnays and Pinot Noirs like cooler, foggy sites in valleys or on slopes facing the ocean.
Expert help
Classes
Some universities offer extension classes on growing wine grapes and making wine. For example, UCLA Extension has a four-course program; classes start Sept. 26. (310) 825-9971, www.uclaextension.com. In addition, UC Davis has a winemaking course for distance learners. (800) 752-0881; www.universityextension.ucdavis.edu
Consultants
Home grape growers should start by figuring out how many bottles of wine they want each year, then determine the size and location of the plot. A consultant such as Wes Hagen can help for $100 to $200 an hour. (805) 735-2196. But the Master Gardeners programs through the UC Cooperative Extension Office offer free advice to home gardeners. www.mastergardeners.org
Wine groups and fairs
Wine societies sponsor educational activities and competitions. In L.A., the Cellarmasters home winemaking club meets at the Home Wine, Beer and Cheesemaking Shop in Woodland Hills the first Thursday of the month. (818) 340-9376, www.cellarmastersla.org. The Orange County Wine Society has a winemaking subdivision. (714) 708-1636, www.ocws.org. Nationally, there’s the American Wine Society, based in North Carolina. (919) 403-0022; www.americanwinesociety.org.
To see some award winners, check out the L.A. County Fair’s homemade winemaking competition Friday through Oct. 2 at the Fairplex, 1101 W. McKinley Ave., Pomona. (909) 865-4590, www.lacountyfair.com.
Research
Books
How-to books that focus on small-scale vintners and provide descriptions of grape varieties, growing regions and organic methods include “From Vines to Wines: The Complete Guide to Growing Grapes and Making Your Own Wine” by Jeff Cox (Storey Books, $18.95); “The Grape Grower: A Guide to Organic Viticulture” by Lon Rombough (Chelsea Green Publishing Co., $35); and “90 Years of Winemaking” by Richard Schumm (Authorhouse, $15.50).
Online
WineMaker magazine has step-by-step instructions on its website (winemakermag.com/yourfirstwine/grapes.html). Del Mar winemaker Lum Eisenman’s free book, “The Home Winemakers Manual,” is downloadable at home.att.net/lumeisenman/.
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– Janet Eastman