A Granger man turned a long-time hobby into a business, operating a farm winery out of his home. (WSBT photo)
Story Created:
Sep 10, 2009 at 3:51 PM EST
Story Updated:
Sep 15, 2009 at 10:44 AM EST
GRANGER — It looks and sounds like a science experiment in John D’Avella’s garage. Several 5-gallon jugs are set up in rows, stacked on racks. The occasional bubbling sound comes from the “bubblers” or car buoys on top of each jug.
“The bubbler is designed to keep the fruit fly out, which [would] turn the wine into vinegar, and let it give off the carbon dioxide,” explained D'Avella.
“Sometimes they get clogged and they blow up. It can build 150 pounds of pressure in the container. So that’s something we try to avoid,” he laughed.
A simpler formula, perhaps, is D’Avella’s story — he moved here from south central Indiana a few years ago for his job as a computer technician, but continued a family tradition as a hobby.
“As long as I’ve known, everyone in my family has made wine,” he said, matter-of-factly. “It’s just what we do.”
D’Avella said he had several projects going in the building where he now makes wine.
“I was making windmills to generate electricity. And my friends would go 'Ah that's really interesting, but have you got anymore wine left? Is there any wine downstairs?'”
Then last November, he was laid off. He said that was the deciding factor for him and his wife to go into the commercial wine business.
“Things started falling into place and people started getting behind us,” he told WSBT.
But it hasn’t necessarily been an easy 10 months. It’s legal to make wine in your home, but the D’Avellas had to go through lots of hoops and red tape to do it. Right now they have nine federal, state and health department licenses to make the wine in their home for commercial sale.
But there are very specific rules about what he can and cannot do there — for example, the labels on each bottle have to be approved by the federal government before he can use them. He also cannot legally sell wine out of his home to anyone other than close friends and family members.
D’Avella and his wife already have a storefront along SR 23, between Pizza King and Yesterday’s, but they’re currently in the process of getting licensing to sell wine from that store.
He admits some people are skeptical about a winery in Granger.
“And they tell us that,” he said. “It’s just, [for some people] the two words don't go together. Then they think the guy's making it in his garage next to his cars. And when they come here they realize no, it's not the garage, it's next door. This is a separate building.”
D’Avella also said people are also surprised the winery is so clean. But state, federal, county and health department regulations make that mandatory.
Some people, he said, are surprised he only has two small grape vines in his back yard. You won’t find a vineyard there or anywhere in Granger, for that matter. He orders all his fruits from local growers and others across the country.
He says his main recipe is to use both grapes and apples to produce a country wine. But it doesn’t stop there.
“We use cranberry, we use raspberry, we use cherry, all the flavors people are familiar with. And when they taste them in these combinations they're surprised,” he said.
Aside from his passion to create the perfect wine, D’Avella said there’s another reason he loves what he does so much.
“Those days when you’d just rather give the whole thing up, close the whole thing down and walk away, the customers are saying 'OK if you're gonna do that would you give me a couple more cases of wine, please?'”
