FALL 2020 Italian American Digest
ITALIAN CORNER
PAGE 18
The Harvest:
Homemade Wine
Cav. Joseph Ventura
We are almost in September: “harvest
time”. My father Jerome once hurried
to go to Clifton, NJ, to buy grapes to
make wine at home. Faithfully,
every year, and until his last
years - at the young age of 95
- he continued to produce his
precious white Moscato, red,
or Aglianico del Vulture wines
from his beautiful Lucania.
But how is this homemade
wine made? My father told me
about it often. I listened to it
and watching him every year. I
learned the following:
The first operations to be
carried out after the grape
harvest are those of the
crushing and destemming,
i.e. separating the stems of
the grape (in this regard there
are manual crushing and
destemming machines for small
quantities that are fine). While
carrying out this operation, it is
necessary to add the antiseptic
substance trisphosulfine. The
"wine" obtained from this first phase of
operation must be placed in a container,
possibly in stainless steel, with a tap. The
container must be washed and disinfected
with a part of a sulfur disk, making it
burn inside (or cleaned with boiling
water). After this operation the container
can be capped: after a few minutes it
can be reopened avoiding breathing the
smoke that has been produced. Close
the lid so that the gases produced during
fermentation can escape.
At this point it goes to racking: for
white grapes, 1 day; for black grapes, 5
days. The racking consists in the escape
of the “must” (grape juice) from the
container and in the collection of the
skins which still have a lot of liquid. The
skins are then inserted into the small press
Girolomo Ventura and
his home winery
and then passed through the pressing.
The juice obtained must be combined
with the one just drawn off. The juice is
then placed in demijohns. A small plastic
“kettle” is used with a cap. The demijohns
are then placed on a mezzanine floor.
The must slowly subsides and after about
20 days the first racking takes place. The
wine to be decanted must not be stirred,
because it could cause the movement of
the "scum" that has accumulated in the
bottom.
A sample of "your wine" is then closed
tightly in a bottle and should be analyzed
by a winemaker; instead, many have it
analyzed by friends and “paisani”, who
will surely suggest you put some benzoate
in it for the clarification of the wine.
After 15 days, taste your wine again;
however, if you want my
own personal advice:
Don't start drinking
it before Christmas: it
needs to mature !!!
Now if all went well
you will have the great
satisfaction of having
“created your wine” !!!.
Look at it inside a glass.If
your white wine will have
a golden color it is okay;
if it is amber you will
have to start worrying!
Proceed with the tasting
of the first glass ... you
will be thrilled because
it will seem like the
best wine you have ever
tasted!!!
We then move on
to bottling using corks,
bearing in mind that
a manual bottling
machine is necessarily required. For the
red wine bottled with corks, try to see
how it is a year later. We recommend
bottling in the spring trying, therefore,
to consume the wine in the current year,
with the greatest attention to white… and
remember to bottle with the right moon
(MOONSTRUCK)!
My father presented the wine best,
creating a label and using a heat shrink
capsule on the cap. And now, after having
"clarified" one of his personal secrets, I
can only hope that everything went well
and that this year you will enjoy your
homemade wine.
In vino veritas!