Business & Tech
Wine-Making, Family Style
The Petretta family ditched regular jobs to do wine-making full-time... and when you hear their story, it sounds like fate. Not a bad commute, Candlewood Shores to Wappingers Falls, if you're building a dream....
Kathleen Petretta, by nature given to smiling, develops a serious look. "Why are chemicals being dumped into wine when we have easy access to refrigeration?" Adding sulfites doesn't make sense to her, or her husband Giovanni — as a former special-education and early-intervention therapist, she wonders about the dangers of preservatives, of fermentation-arresters. "So we said, 'Let's see if we can bring back the tradition of authenticity'" — an older, more family-oriented way of making wine.
The Petrettas are doing real-deal family wine-making in a shoebox winery less than an hour from their Candlewood Shores home. True, when you think "wine" you don't think "Wappingers Falls, New York"... but that's part of the charm of the Santo Stefano winery, it's sheer out-of-placeness, five minutes from Route 9's strip malls. An eccentricity Kathy recognizes, even relishes: standing behind the wine bar, having just served up a lovely, chewy, very peppery zinfandel, she explains that we're looking at what used to be "Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble's Grand Poobah Lounge." We're in a converted hunting lodge, 10 acres on which, she says, "the guys went out, shot an animal, then cooked and ate it." The land, and a couple of shooting shacks, remain... but much of it will eventually become vineyards and herb gardens, because the Petrettas are attempting to re-create a bit of the Old World, where men showed their manhood not by hunting but by hosting.
You can't call Giovanni Petretta a "man without a country," but you can call him, almost, a "man without a village," because his hometown of Santo Stefano del Sole, in the Avellino province west of Naples, was badly damaged by the 1980s Iripina earthquake. Three thousand people were killed in Italy, many more put out of work, so Giovanni, his mother and brother migrated to the U.S., settling in Yonkers.
"It was rough in the beginning," he says, joining his wife behind the bar and offering me a taste of another wine, Vino Patrino, a blend of Cabernet, Petite Syrah and Merlot that won a recent Westchester tasting. For years Giovanni worked construction in Westchester County and Manhattan — "You could buy a brownstone for $100,000 downtown" in the 1980s, he notes with some retrospective amazement — but eventually settled on decorative painting, a skill he'd learned as a child in Italy.
"Giovanni came to paint my house" in Scarsdale, NY, "and he never left," Kathy jokes. The couple have three children, ranging from four to 17, all of whom have helped, at some point or other, in the wine-making process. Giovanni made wine in Yonkers and continued the tradition after the family moved to the Shores in 2000, where they hosted wine-bottling parties at their beachfront home for up to 200 people. The winery — more precisely, the Santo Stefano Winemaking Club — evolved from those events, as Kathy and Giovanni realized they had a knack for creating community. And perhaps a workable business, too, starting with the purchase of the long-empty Twin Lakes Sportsmen's Club in 2008.
"We're flying by the seat of our pants here," she says, because wine-making — the major motivating force — now includes running a cafe-style restaurant, holding comedy nights and concerts, hosting bachelor and bachelorette parties, and setting up a cigar lounge. The dining area, she says, is "literally a factory when the grapes come in" — a series of screens hides a manual forklift.
The grapes are from California and arrive by air because Giovanni wants the quality he knew in Italy. "I don't have to do anything" to hide defects when the grapes come in, he says — the skins are whole, unbruised, hand-picked and fresh. "You can't make good wine with bad grapes," he continues, "unless you're French" (I think he was joking, but can't swear to it). He flies out to Napa and Sonoma counties on buying trips three times a year, aging and blending mostly by instinct and experience — the Petretta family has been making wines since 1525 — and by testing the results on friends and family. And although Giovanni says "I don't want to run this place like a laboratory," Kathy has gone back to her alma mater, Cornell, to pick wine brains (the college has a famous Hotel Administration graduate school that boasts a "Banfi Vintners Professor of Wine Education & Management"). The result, says Kathy, is "a totally inclusive and new concept" in wine-making — a community as well as a business, "a place you can hang out," in her words, as well as a profitable club (at least one day, the Petrettas hope).
"People can come and crush the grapes, come back and press, come back and bottle, come back and pick up their personal vintage to take home and share," she says — perhaps after flying into Dutchess County Airport, all of two minutes away, or spending a day with the kids at Splashdown Beach in Fishkill, 10 minutes south.
"If you pushed me," says Kathy, as Aretha Franklin sings over the speaker system, "I'd say the best part of this is the enlarged family. I can greet patrons with, 'Hey, how did the surgery go?', 'Nice to see the kids again.' It's been fulfilling for both of us, but especially Giovanni — the benefits for him have been exponential." Which you can tell as you watch him tap a barrel, or stainless-steel holding tank, for visitors and talk about his youth in Santo Stefano.
"It's on the top of the hill," he says, "the roads all zig-zag. You feel like you're on a balcony. We grew everything, we'd pick peaches — the best peaches — when we walked to play soccer. It's one of the best towns in the world." The Hudson Valley's Santo Stefano may be flatter, and the projected vineyards much younger... but the sense of "building a dream" is unmistakable.
Santo Stefano's "WineStock" Concert and Cookout is Saturday, May 15. For reservations and information, call 845-297-2580.
You can't call Giovanni Petretta a "man without a country," but you can call him, almost, a "man without a village," because his hometown of Santo Stefano del Sole, in the Avellino province west of Naples, was badly damaged by the 1980s Iripina earthquake. Three thousand people were killed in Italy, many more put out of work, so Giovanni, his mother and brother migrated to the U.S., settling in Yonkers.
"It was rough in the beginning," he says, joining his wife behind the bar and offering me a taste of another wine, Vino Patrino, a blend of Cabernet, Petite Syrah and Merlot that won a recent Westchester tasting. For years Giovanni worked construction in Westchester County and Manhattan — "You could buy a brownstone for $100,000 downtown" in the 1980s, he notes with some retrospective amazement — but eventually settled on decorative painting, a skill he'd learned as a child in Italy.
"Giovanni came to paint my house" in Scarsdale, NY, "and he never left," Kathy jokes. The couple have three children, ranging from four to 17, all of whom have helped, at some point or other, in the wine-making process. Giovanni made wine in Yonkers and continued the tradition after the family moved to the Shores in 2000, where they hosted wine-bottling parties at their beachfront home for up to 200 people. The winery — more precisely, the Santo Stefano Winemaking Club — evolved from those events, as Kathy and Giovanni realized they had a knack for creating community. And perhaps a workable business, too, starting with the purchase of the long-empty Twin Lakes Sportsmen's Club in 2008.
"We're flying by the seat of our pants here," she says, because wine-making — the major motivating force — now includes running a cafe-style restaurant, holding comedy nights and concerts, hosting bachelor and bachelorette parties, and setting up a cigar lounge. The dining area, she says, is "literally a factory when the grapes come in" — a series of screens hides a manual forklift.
The grapes are from California and arrive by air because Giovanni wants the quality he knew in Italy. "I don't have to do anything" to hide defects when the grapes come in, he says — the skins are whole, unbruised, hand-picked and fresh. "You can't make good wine with bad grapes," he continues, "unless you're French" (I think he was joking, but can't swear to it). He flies out to Napa and Sonoma counties on buying trips three times a year, aging and blending mostly by instinct and experience — the Petretta family has been making wines since 1525 — and by testing the results on friends and family. And although Giovanni says "I don't want to run this place like a laboratory," Kathy has gone back to her alma mater, Cornell, to pick wine brains (the college has a famous Hotel Administration graduate school that boasts a "Banfi Vintners Professor of Wine Education & Management"). The result, says Kathy, is "a totally inclusive and new concept" in wine-making — a community as well as a business, "a place you can hang out," in her words, as well as a profitable club (at least one day, the Petrettas hope).
"People can come and crush the grapes, come back and press, come back and bottle, come back and pick up their personal vintage to take home and share," she says — perhaps after flying into Dutchess County Airport, all of two minutes away, or spending a day with the kids at Splashdown Beach in Fishkill, 10 minutes south.
"If you pushed me," says Kathy, as Aretha Franklin sings over the speaker system, "I'd say the best part of this is the enlarged family. I can greet patrons with, 'Hey, how did the surgery go?', 'Nice to see the kids again.' It's been fulfilling for both of us, but especially Giovanni — the benefits for him have been exponential." Which you can tell as you watch him tap a barrel, or stainless-steel holding tank, for visitors and talk about his youth in Santo Stefano.
"It's on the top of the hill," he says, "the roads all zig-zag. You feel like you're on a balcony. We grew everything, we'd pick peaches — the best peaches — when we walked to play soccer. It's one of the best towns in the world." The Hudson Valley's Santo Stefano may be flatter, and the projected vineyards much younger... but the sense of "building a dream" is unmistakable.
Santo Stefano's "WineStock" Concert and Cookout is Saturday, May 15. For reservations and information, call 845-297-2580.
