On a rural, backroads path, in the cellar of a 100- or so year-old house in Atco, Louis Caracciolo is busy bottling the juice of a grape he hopes will be around another 100 or more years.
As a maker of fine wine, Caracciolo has culled the greatest grapes from around the world since 1975 and tried to encourage them to thrive in the sandy soil of South Jersey.
It was a balance, he said, of finding strains that would thrive in this climate, and produce enough to make money.
Now the search appears to be paying off. The first bottles of the first wine of a new variety called Calisto Gris are being opened, and Caracciolo is pleased with the results. "It's excellent," he said.
In a winery named for Amalthea, one of the moons of Jupiter, it wasn't always this way. The road that led to the development of Calisto Gris, and the other varieties now in production or experimentation, twisted like the vines Caracciolo's business depends on.
"They produced gold medal wines," Caracciolo said of his first grape- growing attempt in 1975-76. "But they wouldn't grow in any great quantities." At least, not all of them. So he tore those vines out. And started over.
"I put in the best grapes of the world to see what would grow here," he said. "Then I figured in the economics. Nature dictated the grapes which would grow."
Those included merlot, sauvignon blanc, gamay beaujolais and cabernet franc. Now, the wines they're producing have been blended and lie aging in oak casks or bottled and ready for consumption. "The great wines of the world are not made from one grape," stressed Caracciolo, "but a blend of two or three different ones."
Like the winery itself, each new wine will be named for a moon of Jupiter.
Before beginning his own winery, Caracciolo worked with some of the largest and best-known wineries in Europe, such as the French winery Chateau Margaux, directed by Paul Pointiet. According to Caracciolo, the Europeans, particularly the French, take a different approach to producing wines from their American counterparts.
"Vintage wines," he said, "are made in the field, not by the winemaker."
This, however, is not a philosophy shared by the majority of American winemakers, particularly those in California, according to Caracciolo, whose feelings have made him persona non grata among some.
"Really, we're just custodians of a natural process," he said. And dabbling with the end product, using what he calls the "high-tech goodies at our disposal," is not part of his approach.
