Drinking Wyoming: At Vintages, Italian Master Vintner Customizes Wine To Taste

Cowboy State Daily’s 'Drinking Wyoming' is presented by Pine Bluffs Distilling.

CHEYENNE — If you were to buy a case of 12 bespoke bottles of wine, crafted using centuries-old Italian techniques and blended to your particular tastes, you’d probably expect to pay a small fortune.

But at Vintages Handcrafted Wine, bespoke wine (custom-mixed) is all they do, and the cost is more like $15 a bottle for a wine that has been engineered to your liking.

You can even put your own custom label on the bottles.

The Cheyenne winery at 309 North American Road is owned by master vintner Lino Di Felice. He grew up in Canada, in of the largest expatriate Italian communities in the world.

Di Felice has been making wines for as long as he can remember.

“One day my father would say, “Here, do this with the grape press,’” Di Felice recalled. “And then wine would be flowing out of the trough in the grape press, and I could see it bubbling away in the big barrels.”

The Conegliano Mentor

As he got older, the jobs he was asked to do became more and more complex. Eventually, he was making his own wines and often found himself helping other families make wine, too.

In 1982, Di Felice started a business selling grapes, which he would use to make a year’s supply of wines for a family.

In the process of doing that, he also met a mentor named Alberto, who had trained in Italy at one of the oldest wine school in Europe. Alberto shared his knowledge with Di Felice, teaching him all about the science of making wines.

Di Felice would split grape shipments with his new mentor. Working together, they could bring in the best grapes from smaller vineyards in France, Italy, Germany and California.

The small vineyards liked Di Felice’s small batch process. Instead of being mixed in with grapes from 50 vineyards, they would shine as the star of his wine show.

“I would come to their kitchen table and bring my samples of wines,” Di Felice said. “And we would just sample this and that and we’d end up agreeing, OK this is what I’m going to make you stylistically. These grapes, this wine.”

That particular model was a seasonal process. The grapes were going to come in fresh, all at once. That meant people had to buy a lot of wine at one time.

“I’d do the equivalent of let’s say, $300,000 in sales, but I’d do it in 12 weeks,” Di Felice said. “It was amazing. But it was crazy, too.”

Customizing The Wine

Di Felice had a neighbor come over one day, asking to buy just a bottle of wine.

“I don’t sell single bottles, Di Felice said. “The moment you do that, costs go up, and then the urge is, well, ‘I’m going to distribute it and sell it to distributors, to liquor stores.’ Then you have to use stabilizers.”

Additives were not something Di Felice liked in his wine. But Di Felice didn’t say yes or no right then.

Instead he asked a question — one that would eventually change his whole business paradigm.

“Why don’t you just go buy a bottle at the liquor store?” he asked his neighbor.

“Well, I get headaches from commercial wine,” his neighbor said.

But he didn’t get headaches from drinking Di Felice’s wine.

“I went, ‘Huh, interesting,’” Di Felice said. “And then there was like a stream of these people.”

All of them were citing difficulties with additives in commercial wines.

“There’s a whole list longer than your arm of fine print additives,” Di Felice said. “And it’s not that individually, those additives aren’t tested. They are. They’re not going to kill anybody. But it’s the mixture.”

Hearing someone say they had given up enjoying wine or that they’d learned to accept that it was going to give them a headache motivated Di Felice to modify his business model, so he could sell someone a case of wine instead of an entire year’s supply.

And that’s how he ultimately arrived at his present model, where he is selling a customized case of wine that has no additives and costs around $15 a bottle.

“This way, I can take this order, and that order, and I’ll still be able to make my, basically between 180 to 500-gallon lots,” Di Felice said.

By mixing and matching different wines, he has gained a lot more options for his customers as well.

It’s a business model his clients tell him they haven’t seen anywhere else in the United States.

“Nobody is really going to do this at a professional winery, because it’s too small,” Di Felice said. “This is not super scalable. It’s very individualized. And that makes us unique.”

Cut The Red Tape

Vintages was originally a Fort Collins, Colo., business.

“I’m from the Mediterranean,” he said. “I need that sunshine and all that nice beautiful weather we have in the Mountain states.”

Initially, he was told his idea was never going to work in Fort Collins because it’s beer country. Colorado still has a pretty big craft brewery scene, but that didn’t hold Di Felice’s business back at all.

“It absolutely took off, to the point where, over 25 years, I probably have more than 20,000 contacts who have come through and made wine,” Di Felice said.

Many of the customers who found him were from Wyoming, or they had children studying at University of Wyoming. Ultimately, it was his friendship with a Wyomingite that led him to switch to the Cowboy State.

“Doing business here was just so much easier,” Di Felice said. “That was a big impetus for me.”

As Colorado’s grown, it’s become less and less friendly to businesses like his, Di Felice said, which are walking to the beat of a different drummer.

“Here you can talk to the top guy, no problem,” he said. “In the old days in Colorado, it was like that. But then it became just this big barrier, and getting licensing was always a trick.”

In Wyoming, he feels that he’s had more help from officials in adapting his business model to work with the state’s liquor licensing laws.

“It’s just been so folksy and just nice,” Di Felice said. “I mean, to this day, I just sing their praises.”

Wine And Dine

One of the new activities Di Felice has added to his business model recently at Vintages is food and wine pairings, where customers can come in and try a set of custom-blended wines he has made for a catered meal prepared by an area chef.

That lets him teach people about wine and food pairings and how they do, and sometimes don’t, go together.

At the most recent dinner prepared by Chef Petrina Peart, there was a serving of chicken, beef and pork paired with two white and two red wines.

The two whites were a Lodi Chardonnay with a soft, buttery flavor, while the Oakville Chardonnay was fruity, with an acidic high note.

“A lot of people don’t like chardonnays that are buttery,” Di Felice told the group assembled for the tasting dinner.

Those buttery notes come from fermenting malic acid into lactic acid, which creates the compound diacetyl. If you’ve ever smelled buttery popcorn at a movie theater, that’s diacetyl.

Buttery chardonnays are a bit out of fashion these days. Fruit-forward and crisp is more prized.

But with the right food, that buttery chardonnay may taste better than one might expect.

“Try the Lodi with the chicken,” Di Felice suggested. “You may find that you like it better than the Oakville.”

In fact, the Lodi made the bite of chicken feel more luscious, while the Oakville made the overall experience feel drier.

Then a Rhone style red was poured, with the suggestion to try it with the chicken.

Usually, chicken breast is paired with aromatic white wines, like Riesling or Pinot Gris, but, in this case, the Rhone went really well with the white meat chicken.

There was no sassy after taste, and the overall bite was fruity and delicious.

A petite sirah went around, to try with the peppery beef. It’s a big bold red, which Di Felice expected would give the beef a little extra, peppery kick.

Not so much pepper that the bite would be overpowering. Just enough to make things interesting.

The experimental drinks were repeated with bites of pork. With some focaccia in between as a palate cleanser.

The meal ended with a chocolate raspberry port paired with chocolate mousse.

The meals have become a great collaboration, Di Felice said.

Wines can feel intimidating, but the dinners help demystify how things are working and let people give the Vintages experience a try before committing to an entire case of wine.

Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.