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Now, don't tell anyone or...aw fuck it, every Italian family knows this one.
This is how to make Dago Red, the standard Genovese table wine.
First, you need an old whiskey barrel. If you come from an Italian family, your family already has a barrel. Find out who had it last year and go get it. You are required to share half of your first run with the person who supplied you the barrel. Don't worry, the person who gets it next year has to do the same for you. If you're starting with a new barrel, buy it in March, pour two gallons of water into it, put it on one side of your garage and slowly roll it across the floor--slowly as in "it shouldn't reach the other side until July." This leaches excessive amounts of whiskey out of the wood. You can recover this water and drink it, it's pretty good. Also keep in mind that your first batch of wine will have notes of Jack Daniel's.
You also need a washboard. If you're not from an Italian family, any old-timey hardware store has these; if you are Italian, look in the barrel for it.
You'll also need a siphon hose, 50 glass gallon jugs and a funnel.
Your ingredients are 25 boxes of Zinfandel grapes, 25 pounds of raisins, 25 of sugar and 25 gallons of water. If you're not Italian, also get some Zinfandel wine.
Get started by rubbing the grapes against the washboard to break the skins. Let them drop into the barrel and put the lid on.
Now here's the deal with the Zinfandel wine: Dago Red is NOT a scientific process; you're working with wild yeasts so it can do damn near anything. (When you make wine the fancy winemaker way, you use sodium bisulfite to kill the wild yeasts and infuse the must with a known strain after the sulfite neutralizes.) You test the wine to see if it's ready to be bottled by drinking it. If your Italian family makes Dago Red, you already know what it tastes like; in fact, you probably got a small bottle of the last batch to go through the barrel when you picked the barrel up. If you're starting from scratch, you don't have this institutional memory, so you drink the Zin to figure out what the Dago Red is supposed to taste like.
Anyway, about five days after the lid went on, you start testing it. When the wine tastes good, siphon the wine off the grape hulls, filter it through coffee filters, and bottle it in gallon jugs; make sure the caps are on loosely. This is your first run--half of this goes to the last person who had the barrel. Be very careful here: if you wait too long this shit turns into vinegar, like it did on my grandfather about 20 times.
Now chop the 25 pounds of raisins--a food processor works great. Add them along with the sugar and water to the barrel, install the lid, wait five days and start sampling. When it's right, put it into gallon jugs.
Next, put the gallon jugs in your basement for three or four months. After that, bottle it in fifths. Lay it down for five months and you've got something special.
You get half the first run. Your benefactor gets the other half. The second run is for Christmas presents.
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