Posted: May 02 2007 at 9:59pm | IP Logged

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A U-brew for the Bentley-driving crowd

BEPPI CROSARIOL

FROM WEDNESDAY'S GLOBE AND MAIL

MAY 2, 2007 AT 3:17 PM EDT

VANCOUVER — If most wine from those U-brew outlets is a bargain suit from Goodwill, Gianni Seminari's is more like Savile Row.

In fact, it wouldn't be strange to catch some of his well-heeled Vancouver customers strolling into his store in their designer duds to check in on their barrels.

"Sometimes it's funny, because in the back of the store the people park their Bentleys and we laugh, because they come here and they are bottling seven-, eight- and nine-dollar wine," Mr. Seminari says.

The Milan native and his son, Andrew, run Il Vino, a do-it-yourself wine club boldly going where few, if any, U-brews have gone before.

Forget the pro forma ritual in which customers dump a scoopful of commercial yeast into prepared juice to start fermentation. And don't even think of coming back to bottle your results in a hasty eight to 12 weeks.

Mr. Seminari personally buys and trucks in fresh grapes from top West Coast wine regions such as Oregon's Willamette Valley and British Columbia's Black Sage Bench area of the Okanagan Valley.

He crushes and ferments the fruit, then invites customers to participate by tasting and blending their own cuvées from lots he's been aging for up to three years in the finest $500 to $1,000 American and French oak barrels.

"Gianni convinced me that the wine he produces is excellent," says friend Robin Delany, who has just added 150 bottles of Il Vino wine - at about $9 each - to his 800-bottle cellar of much more expensive reds from Bordeaux, California, Australia and Chile. "I was just never interested in homemade wine. So much of that stuff is really lousy."

Mr. Delany, president and founder of the Delany's Coffee House, a local chain of upscale cafés, became an Il Vino customer last year after sampling the wines for the first time in a comparative tasting arranged on a dare by Mr. Seminari.

Arriving with a pair of his favourite B.C. wines from his own stash - a $37 blend called Nota Bene and a $35 cabernet sauvignon from acclaimed winery Burrowing Owl - Mr. Delany was ready to silence Mr. Seminari once and for all.

The verdict? Mr. Delany ranked three Il Vino wines at the top of the list, with his beloved Nota Bene in fourth and Burrowing Owl in fifth. Two other Il Vino wines and a $50 Louis Latour Burgundy rounded out the bottom of the list.

"I thought I had a reasonably good palate," Mr. Delany says. "I thought I would pick my two out in a flash. But I was wrong."

He was also in good company among the crowd of about 20 amateur judges. "The top two stellar wines were both Gianni's," he said.

Mr. Seminari, a former chemical engineer who once worked as a lab technician for a Tuscan winery, started branching into grapes from standard U-brew wine kits years ago at his main facility in West Vancouver.

He still offers the option of making wine the fast way, by dumping yeast into juice, but he expanded into the city core in March to serve a growing list of urban-professional customers, many of them serious trophy-wine collectors, who wanted to work with actual fruit.

Other wine-savvy clients include Michael Walker, the former executive director of the Fraser Institute, and Lawrence Higa, a Vancouver developer who testifies Il Vino wines can age beautifully, too. "I have let them sit for a couple of years and I've tried giving them to people, and if I don't tell them what it is they're just overwhelmed," he says.

Canadians are allowed to make tax-free wine providing it's for personal consumption and they participate in the production. Since Il Vino relies on natural yeasts present on the grape skins, there's no yeast-pitching technicality to comply with the law. Instead, Mr. Seminari invites customers to participate by tasting and consulting on blends.

It's a practice he says involves more expertise and commitment than simply pouring powder into a vat, though for a while his argument furrowed a few brows at the B.C. liquor commission. "It took me a while to explain," he recalls with a smile.

Mr. Seminari's gross profit on an $8 to $9 bottle is about $3. Roughly half his 1,200 customers opt for grape-based wines, accounting for about 120 standard 225-litre barrels.

Il Vino isn't the only U-brew operation in Canada to offer a grape option, but such wines generally see no time in expensive oak and are cranked out with the usual haste. Mr. Seminari, 59, also spends a considerable amount of his time networking with growers and controlling grape quality.

In the case of Oregon and Washington State, he has grapes trucked up in refrigerated trailers no more than 15 hours after they are picked. In the case of more distant regions, such as Paso Robles, Calif., he has the juice pressed by growers he's known personally for years. It's then frozen into blocks one cubic metre in size for shipping.

Mr. Seminari's reputation as a grape hound is spreading, too. He was recently recruited by a group of Canadian and Chinese investors to duplicate the Il Vino concept in Hong Kong, using frozen U.S. juice.

Scheduled to open later this year, the Sino Il Vino will ferment in a ground-floor facility but will feature a showcase tasting "cellar" apropos of the urban jungle that is Hong Kong.

"They will have a 25th-floor barrel room," Mr. Seminari reports with a chuckle.

He has also started crushing grapes for other U-brew operators around Vancouver and is the consulting grape buyer for Laguna Canyon Winery, a boutique operation near Los Angeles that sources its fruit from more fertile regions to the north, including Paso Robles, the Napa Valley and Sonoma County.

"They don't pay me enough, but I like it," he says.

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