I had been meaning to catch up with Gino Fortino, owner and
winemaker at Fortino Winery, for a while.
I had been meaning to catch up with Gino Fortino, owner and winemaker at Fortino Winery, for a while. We kept running into each other at various events, promising we would find time in our busy schedules to meet. Our meeting finally happened this past Saturday. As I will get to in a minute, that meeting could not have come at a worse time for Mr. Fortino.
The meeting was scheduled for a Saturday afternoon, with no specific designated time. When I arrived around 2pm, Gino was buzzing around, grabbing cases of wine from the back storage room and ringing up sales to happy customers. It was easy to notice that the tasting room at Fortino’s was full of people. My quick count put the number at 20 visitors.
After a quick greeting and handshake, Gino asked me to wait a bit until he could free himself to talk. I said, “No worries,” and quoting Jagger and Richards said, “Time is on my side.”
Gino suggested sipping some wine while I waited, and a co-worker poured me a taste of their 2004 syrah. This full-bodied syrah was nicely balanced with berry fruit flavors, and at $22, was the most expensive wine sold at Fortino’s. Most of the other wines are priced from $12-18 a bottle.
Fortino Winery was founded in 1970 by Ernesto Fortino, Gino’s father. The roots of winemaking in the family actually trace back four generations. Gino and his sister Teri took over running the day-to-day operations when Ernesto semi-retired in 1995. “I grew up around the winery. It has been a part of my life since I was a young boy, and forever will be,” Gino said.
As we sat and talked outside, I could tell that Gino was nervously keeping an eye on the ever growing number of guests in the tasting room, now estimated around 30.
“The wine experience here at Fortino’s has always been about having fun,” he said. “That’s why we created a tasting room that is airy and spacious. It allows folks to move around and feel at home.” As he pointed out poetically, a tasting room allows someone to get to know wine at its most important level – with your sense of taste. “Most people go into a grocery store and pick a bottle off the shelf, knowing nothing about the wine. They go by packaging,” Fortino said.
We proceeded to take a nice tour of the facility, located on scenic Hecker Pass Highway. The property owned by the Fortino family encompasses 60 acres and produces eight varieties of grapes.
We stepped inside one of the fermentation rooms where large, empty bags of sugar were laying on the floor. “We make a variety of dessert wines in conjunction with Casa de Fruta. The most popular is our apricot wine, made from locally grown fruit. We also make plum, cherry and pomegranate wines. Our customers love them,” smiled Fortino.
Fortino Winery was one of the first California wineries to institute a wine club, now commonplace with most wineries. “We still have dozens of members who joined our club when it first started back in 1978,” he said. “That’s special.”
The fermentation rooms also held large wooden storage tanks, tanks from the 1940s that Ernesto bought from the old Christian Brothers winery. Used only for storage, the tanks hearken back to when wine making was a bit different, but not as different as one would imagine.
“It’s still the same in most regards. The big change over the last 40 years has been the emphasis to make wines drinkable now. Wines today need to be ready to consume, easy on the palate and with soft tannins. Forty years ago, you had to let wine age a while before you could drink it,” Fortino said.
Gino was ever the polite host, but I could tell he was champing at the bit to get back to his customers. I was aware of this and encouraged Gino to return to the tasting room, which now held about 45 people. If I had not been aware, I could imagine Gino getting exasperated with my endless questions and shouting, “Dude, you’re wasting my minutes!”
The rest of the Fortino experience will be told next week, but one reminder before I sign off.
When a tasting room is as crowded as it was at Fortino’s, do not “belly up to the bar” and ignore the fact that others are present and trying to access the wine like you. Have the server pour you a tasting, then step aside to let others through.
Cheers!
