Cicero

Home made cabernet sauvignon. Most other wines give me a hang over.

My father makes wine every year and has been for the last 30 years; he used to buy the cheapest grapes too, which at the time were muscatel and barbera. It’s a bit of an unspoken Italian custom, if someone offers you a glass of wine, you drink it and say that it is good. You better have a big set of balls to tell someone straight up their wine is bad.

Well the case with my dad is that he never fully realized how bad his wine was. He knew it could be better, but never conceptualized how bad it was. Worse yet, most other Italians made their wine even worse than his. So he starts putting a little more money into his efforts, adding chemicals to clarify the wine, cooking it to make it stronger and storing it in varying ways. But there never was any significant improvement.

Then 3 years ago he bought a grape crusher that separated the stems from the meat, skins and juice of the grapes. Before he used to allow the stems to mix with the meat, skins and juice of the grapes while being put through the wine press. This always led his wine to being EXTREEMLY dry and very strong. Now with his new grape crusher, the wine became sweeter and to my tastes, much more palatable. Thankfully last season he went to buy grapes and found that all the barbera was sold out, so he bought a dozen cases of cabernet sauvignon. It is delicious; my only disappointment is that he didn’t take these steps to improve his wine sooner. I’m very proud now that he’s able to make such a great wine without any chemicals or additives. It is pure, unadulterated wine.

Wine making season is coming up soon, in the next three to six weeks we’re going to be very busy with buying the grapes, crushing them, putting them through the wine press, the fermentation process and then bottling.