Talk to a Florida winemaker, and it won't be long before you hear that the first wine in North America was made from something called a "muscadine" grape by someone called a "French Huguenot."
You'll hear how wine in Florida has a long tradition behind it, how those French Huguenots — missionaries — plucked those native, wild-growing muscadine grapes way back in 1562, and crushed and fermented them to make holy wine.
They'll tell you how Florida wine is the first North American wine, if not the finest.
When you tell one Bay area wine expert you are interested in Florida wineries, she laughs and takes a shot: "All four of 'em?"
When told there are actually nine, and more to come, the expert laughs and waxes sarcastic, "Ooh." She next admits to never having tried Florida wine, and bails on the interview.
So you look further into this winemaking business. You learn how there are more wineries on the way, how grape growers have had to overcome pernicious plant disease, as well as winemakers' turned-up noses. You taste some more wine and — what's that? This is watermelon wine? It's not half-bad.
Well, not half-bad if you're not a wine connoisseur.
That whole Huguenots-and-muscadine thing was just a happy collision between man and nature. There's not a whole lot that connects the first Florida winemakers to today's, except faith and the muscadine grape.
Florida's growing crop of wineries runs the gamut from Lakeridge Vineyard and Wineries, a very large and self-contained operation that produces 120,000 gallons a year, to smaller wineries, such as Clearwater's Murielle Winery, which operates out of an office park and does not grow its own grapes, and unlike most Florida wineries, does not make any of its wines from muscadine grapes. Winemaker Michael Biglin scoffs at muscadine grapes. He imports the juice, called "must," for his merlots, cabernets and ice wines, then ferments and ages the wine in large tanks in the back part of his office space. Farther south, St. Petersburg's Florida Orange Groves Winery makes only one of its more than 20 wines from the muscadine — the bulk are made from citrus and other berries.
But if there is one characteristic all of these winemakers share, it is unbridled optimism. Maybe not the most popular trait in our cynical age, but it doesn't hurt to have optimism when you're trying to make it in a business dominated by Europeans and Californians. You've got to believe. And you've got be scrappy, like Antonio Fiorelli.
"One day, Manatee County will be Wine Country, Florida," boasts Fiorelli, flashing a toothy grin while standing in front of the gift/wine shop at Rosa Fiorelli Winery and Vineyards in Myakka City, a few miles east of I-75. The stocky Sicilian looks like actor Bob Hoskins with a tan. If Fiorelli is out of place, so is his vineyard, set among the waves of inland Florida orange groves. It'd be easy to drive right by these minnows in the shark tank.
About 30 feet away from where Fiorelli is standing sits the winery, an old garage kept at a wintry-for-Florida 55 degrees. Four-inch thick foam paneling keeps the electric bill to a reasonable $300 a month, Fiorelli says.
He produced 700 gallons of wine his first year, in 1998. This year he made 3,000 gallons. His wine blends are made from muscadine grapes, hybrid grapes developed by researchers to withstand disease, as well as trucked-in grapes from California. "All my wines have Florida grapes," he says, but his most popular wine, Manatee Red, is 80 percent California grapes. Most of the wines Fiorelli makes average about 20 to 30 percent California grapes. Antonio and Rosa Fiorelli have lived in Myakka City for 16 years. After arriving in the U.S. in the early '70s, the Sicilian natives lived in Miami for a few years. They did not want to raise their now-grown kids in what they thought was a harsh environment. They had no idea. When they came to Myakka City 16 years ago, their land was wild. Pines, palmetto and snakes. Lots of snakes. Now all they see is the occasional deer around the vineyard. At harvest time, all of the picking is done by hand. Harvesting of the hybrids starts at the end of June and continues through mid-July. Some old Cuban friends help out with the picking during visits. There isn't much time for relaxation; the muscadine must be picked August through September.
Fiorelli is the local president of the Florida Grape Growers Association, and he is looking forward to a grape-growing seminar the next day at his own vineyard.
"I don't know everything," he says. "I have to go to workshops and try (to) learn. I say "try' and not "learn.' When you come over here and start trying, then you see some problem — a problem you're not gonna resolve until the next (workshop)."
A lot of Antonio Fiorelli's grape growing has been trial and error. Despite warnings he'd heard that non-native grapes can't succeed in Florida, he'd planted several species.
Now he's having quite a time of grafting vine.
He's taken several workshops, to no avail. "They tell you do this, and you're doing that. I don't know," he laughs. "I just can't succeed."
He isn't giving up any time soon.
"I think this is my year," says Fiorelli. "This is the year where we can feel where we are in the business."
From the looks of things at nearby Old Mission, Manatee County has at least one other family hoping to transform Manatee County into Wine Country, Florida. Heidi and Larry May's Old Mission Vineyard and Winery won't be open to the public until late next year, but that doesn't stop visitors from stopping by, which suits the family just fine.
It takes about three years from the time of planting vines to being able to produce wine commercially.
Only three acres are planted with muscadine grapes, and the Mays seek to plant a total of 10. Outside their new home — a new "old" home, built in the style of a Spanish mission — rows of grape vines ripple past two sides of the house.
"People are so disappointed when they find out it's actually a new building," she says with a laugh. "Their little faces drop."
A pair of living-history reenactors, the Mays spend much of their time reliving the days of Spanish exploration of Florida. In fact, they hope to tie their love of wine and reenactment together.
"We're trying to re-create history. We're going to create a story," she says, "and say that this family that arrived here in 1539 actually started (the winery), sort of play on that theme." The downstairs of their home will house the winery and tasting room, replete with armor, an old mission bell, most of it built by her husband, an artist.
"We think it'll be fun to see who buys (into) it."
The property is located alongside State Road 64, on a sloping hill running down to a creek. The undeveloped acres are covered with palmetto and pine scrub.
"There is a hill in Manatee County, and we've got it," says Heidi May.
In the international wine competition at the Florida State Fair, the Mays took two medals in the amateur competition. Isabella's Blush, made from muscadine grapes, won a gold.
"I was very shocked," Heidi May says as she fills a few glasses. "And then it went on to win Best of Show, Red Wine."
"You can taste the muscadine," she notes, "but it's not real overpowering."
The Fiorellis are all sold out of their muscadine wines, including the Florida Muscadine Dessert Wine. A tattered yellow legal pad sits on the shop's counter, page after page containing the names and numbers of people awaiting the next batch. Hybrid bunch grapes have been developed that can grow in Florida, but the Mays have opted to go with muscadine grapes.
"There are eight Florida farm wineries in Florida," says May, "and for those that make a muscadine wine, they're the No. 1 sellers.
"We found that the muscadine is the most popular. It's fruity and it's sweet. The people that come to the wineries are not wine drinkers. They're just normal people. And normal people who don't drink a lot of wine, they prefer sweeter wine."
Jeanne Burgess studied winemaking at Mississippi State, which 20 years ago had the only wine program in the Southeast. She's just marked 18 years as the winemaker at Lakeridge Winery in Clermont, just west of Orlando.
Cold water spews straight in the air from behind a tank, splashing to the winery floor like a geyser. Jeanne Burgess watches from an overhead catwalk. The situation sort of underscores the fact that Burgess is on top and in charge of the situation.
"That does seem like an awful lot of water," she calmly notes. She calls down to a trio of guys in purple (what else?) Lakeridge shirts bottling sparkling table wine. What's the problem? Probably to stave off a lengthy discussion with the boss, one yells up a non-answer: "He's fixing it now!"
Gallons and gallons from the gusher empty into drains in the center of the cold winery's tiled floor. Probably not the best thing for a reporter to see, considering there's a drought-desiccated lake just outside the door, at the bottom of the hillside vineyard.
One of the trio departs to find the repairman. The tanks are a concern to Burgess because they run the winery's cold-water system. White wines are kept at about 55 degrees Fahrenheit, reds around 60 to 70. The repairman walks up. "Seems to me like there's some pressure behind it," she says. "Did you shut off the main shut-off valve?"
"Yes."
Knowing a weak link when she sees one, she quizzes him: "Where's the pressure coming from?" His hem-haw answer is indecipherable over the sound of spilling water.
"You did shut off those two big valves coming out of the floor?"
"No."
Nodding, she says to turn off the other as well.
"That'll do it," she says. It does. The tanks contain wine, in various stages of production, she explains. Lakeridge has 100,000 gallons in tankage, and they add more each year. They're at the point now where they're running out of room inside the winery, and have started installing an outside tank. Of an estimated 200,000 total gallons of wine produced in the state, Burgess says, Lakeridge produces about 120,000 gallons. From the time the grapes are pressed into juice, they are housed in these tanks, Burgess says.
The juice ferments in the giant metal tanks, then goes through several clarification processes and basically stays in the cold tanks until bottling.
"That helps to retain the fruity components of the wine," Burgess says. "That's what a lot of our wines are known for, is the fruity aromas."
"(Wine) is like people — they all have a little bit of variation to them."
Lakeridge's wines are made from several varieties of muscadine grape, as well as bunch grapes developed by the University of Florida research facility in Leesburg. The latest one, of which they're the most proud, is the Blanc Du Bois, which Burgess was instrumental in developing. And the reason they had to develop it is Pierce's Disease.
In many ways, California has Florida beat. Mountains. Climate. Surf. The Playboy Mansion. Marijuana. Better grapes.
Even when we're first, it's at something like Pierce's disease, a grapevine-choking malady with which growers in Florida have always had to contend. Due to warm weather in recent years, an insect — the Glassy-Winged Sharpshooter — that transmits the disease, has just started moving north through the Golden State — whereas we've had the bug, and Pierce's, from the get-go.
"It is indigenous to the Southeastern United States," Burgess says. "It's a big deal in California right now. It is devastating their industry."
While feeding, the sharpshooter transmits the Pierce's bacterium from other kinds of plants to tasty grapevines. Florida's famed agricultural industry has long been a kind of tacit invitation to immigrants to try and grow grapes. At the turn of last century, thousands of acres were planted with varieties of grapes from around the world.
And every step of the way, Pierce's disease was there to stymie efforts at growing the grapes California and Europe are known for. Therefore, University of Florida began an ongoing breeding effort in 1923 to create grape varieties that could withstand Pierce's disease.
"That Glassy-Winged Sharpshooter is very mobile," says Burgess. "It has a number of host plants out in California. There is no known cure for it. Basically, what we've done in Florida is breed grapes that are resistant to Pierce's disease."
The effort, she says, has been very successful: "We've got at least four white varieties that we use for wine now."
Burgess lights up at the suggestion that California grape growers may have to start using Pierce's disease-resistant hybrid grapes.
It wouldn't be the first time a so-called inferior American plant saved the day. In the 1860s, a root louse wiped out whole vineyards in Europe. "They found that by grafting European plants onto American rootstock, no problem," says Burgess. "So America saved — we were the problem; we introduced it — but we saved their industry."
A similar kind of situation could play out in America if California doesn't solve the problem and soon. "We have some of the foremost scientists (at University of Florida) working on this," Burgess says. "We've got the people that have identified the cause of the disease. And so we've got a team of people that could, potentially, find a resolution to this."
About $30-million in Federal money has gone into solving the scourge in California, so far to no avail.
"We could, in many ways, eventually be their salvation. If they can't resolve it, we've got the grapes they can grow … I keep going, "Hey, c'mon, we have it.'"
Among the grapes Burgess refers to is one she played a major part in developing: the preciously titled Blanc Du Bois. Wine snobs may want to stock the cellar with their precious California Cabernets while they can, but Burgess makes no apologies or excuses for her Florida wine.
It was a long time coming. The first plant hybrid was made in 1945, she says. In 1968 a cross was made that eventually became Blanc Du Bois. It wasn't released for commercial cultivation until 1987.
"'97 was our first double-gold medal," Burgess says, speaking of a competition against more than 2,000 at the Indy International Wine Competition in Indianapolis.
"I didn't do anything special," Burgess recalls, "just traditional fermentation and pressing and all that. And this one was just a stand-out from the get-go.
"It's just like, "Wow, there's a winner.'
"We were winning medals on wine made from that grape before it was even released
commercially."
Despite the sell-out popularity of the muscadine among sweet-wine fans, wine connoisseurs and buyers just don't take it seriously. Clearwater winemaker Michael Biglin says, "I find the wines that are made from muscadine grapes have a tendency to be a bit gamy.
"Everybody says, "How do you live in Florida and open a winery? People say, "A winery in Florida? Where's your grapes? And where do you get 'em from?'
"I say, "Well, I don't get 'em from Florida.'"
Gladys and Vince Shook, of the family-owned Florida Orange Groves Winery, don't even attempt to impress the non-believers. At their St. Petersburg winery, they're too busy selling their wines. They make their wines from, among other fruits and veggies, grapefruit, oranges, tangerines, raspberries, strawberries, cranberries, blackberries and blueberries. There's even 40 Karats, made from, yep, carrots.
Gladys Shook says people first stop in "because they think, "oh, whoever heard tell of wine made out of this?' Their curiosity gets them, and they come in, and they sample at the bar, and they say, "wow, we didn't know you could make wine out of this.' They're so surprised."
Two years ago, a panel of judges conducting a blind taste test at the International Wine competition, mistook Black Gold, the dry blackberry wine, for a $60 bottle of cabernet. "And they thought our 40 Karats — which by the way is made 100 percent from Florida carrots — wine was the most expensive chardonnay that they made," she says. "They (the judges) were amazed. It's just that if they don't know what they're drinking, they are more impartial."
It was during a tour in Napa Valley, she and her husband got tired of hearing how wine is an acquired taste.
"Usually, if you take that little tour around Napa Valley, they say "this is an acquired taste,' or "this you have to learn to like,'" says Gladys Shook. "When we heard that, we thought, that shouldn't be. When you taste a wine, you should like it right away, that you don't have to have an acquired taste or learn to like it. It's either good or it isn't good."
The Shooks came back and got in the business of making wine for people who don't have time to acquire the taste or learn to like wine.
"That was our goal," she says, "to make a wine that tastes good the first time that you tried it."
Florida Orange Groves Winery's motto is "There is not one grape in the bunch." However, because they wanted to join the Florida Farm Growers Association, the Shooks opted to start making one token grape wine from grapes grown in Altoona. It's made from muscadine grapes. Don't bother asking for a bottle right now. "We did have one grape in the bunch," Gladys Shook says, "but we're all sold out of it now."
Michael Biglin remembers the taste of every wine he's had the pleasure of drinking. Sitting in Murielle Winery's tasting room, cars passing outside the picture window, Biglin describes the joy of being a Florida winemaker:
"In this high-tech world, where do you find such a low-tech product that you can take to somebody and have them truly appreciate it?
"We all exist in a real fast-paced world, where everything's going a thousand miles an hour. Wine just goes on its way, does what it's going to do. You don't get to push wine — you get to follow it. It goes where it's going to go, and you just hope it lands where you want it to be."
To give features writer David Jasper something to wine about, call 813-248-8888, ext. 111, or write to jasper@weeklyplanet.com.
This article appears in May 24-30, 2001.
