I began my professional winemaking career in 1972, and although I loved and knew wine I did not know much about red wine vinegar. My family background was Midwestern and we used mayonnaise based dressing for everything. Luckily as a young, first generation winemaker I fell in love with the boss’s daughter. I married into an Italian American family that had been making wine for fourteen generations. Like many European families that came to California, they brought their love of wine and the dinner table. On that dinner table were wonderful salads that were dressed with olive oil and intense, complex red wine vinegar. That red wine vinegar and oil dressing made even the most simple salads special. I watched as the salad was passed and passed around again, until finally bread was dunked into the bowl to sop up the last of the dressing. I knew I needed to learn more about making that wonderful red wine vinegar.
Over the next few years I learned that many of the winemakers and winegrowers I worked with had a special barrel of red wine vinegar on their property. They made red wine vinegar for their family drawing from the barrel when it was just right and adding more red wine to replace. These barrels were like sourdough bread starters where you take some out to bake a batch and add some fresh dough back to feed the culture. In this case it was vinegar out and new wine in but it is the same concept.
These special vinegar barrels were hidden in the barn or the pump house but always away from the wine cellar, as you didn’t want the vinegar bacteria loose in the winery. The place had to be warm in the summer and not too cold in the winter to allow the bacteria to work. The vinegar bacteria need heat, air, wine and time to work. This style of vinegar making is often referred to as the Orleans method but I prefer to call it the benign neglect or the traditional method.
That culture used to make the vinegar is a family treasure, not that any of us wouldn’t share it, but it takes years to develop and create the necessary volume of vinegar to keep up with a large family. I had to do my own. My first barrel was started in 1977 with samples from a co-worker at Woodbridge Winery, Lawrence Gribaudo and another winemaker/vinegar maker Dino Barengo. By making our current vinegar that we are selling to you in a barrel solera there is still some of that 1977 vinegar from the first barrel in each blend.
Our family has grown larger, four children, all now married, and nine grandchildren. Sometimes I thought the only reason they came home was to refill their vinegar bottles. We realized we could not keep up with the demand, so one barrel became two and two became four and our production grew. Over the years, there were countless family and friend’s suggesting we should “share” our vinegar . I resisted because of a busy winemaking career and a realization that the vinegar I was making would be very expensive compared to the mass produced vinegar on most supermarket shelves.
I have finally relented and now we are going to sell our vinegar on a limited basis. We will never be big. It takes too much time (years) to make and age the quality of vinegar we want to serve, but we do want to share our labor of love with more people. Our vinegar is for lovers of flavor, and we beg your understanding, but the price reflects the time and cost to make it.