It’s an improbable sight, nestled among the new subdivisions along Aptakisic Road in the northern suburb of Long Grove, but there it sits, looking like a transplanted slice of the Napa Valley: an estate vineyard, with ten rolling acres of grapevines surrounding a brick-and-stone winery.
Between 1990 and ’95 DiTommaso busied himself with preparing the lot for construction, taking down trees, excavating two large ornamental ponds, and surveying the sites of the houses. His plan was to break ground for the houses in the spring of ’96.
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But as the vines took root in the earth, an idea took shape in DiTommaso’s mind. Late in the summer of ’95, DiTommaso was relaxing on the acreage with a glass of wine made from his backyard grapes. It tasted good to him–“robust but smooth,” he says. Suddenly it dawned on him that the subdivision was never going to happen. “I was sitting overlooking the pond and the property, and it grabbed me,” he says. “Can I do a vineyard on this? Should I do it? It’s a huge undertaking.”
There are no quick start-ups in wine making: it takes at least three years for newly planted vines to produce wine-quality grapes, and they don’t reach their prime until a few years after that. DiTommaso didn’t incorporate Valentino Vineyards or open it to the public until the spring of 2000, but he had no problem keeping busy in the meantime. He planted new vines every spring, adding DeChaunacs, Canadices, and Venturas to his original plot. Now he has about ten acres under cultivation, supporting 5,000 vines that will eventually yield 16 varieties of grapes (he expects to have the other half of the land planted within three or four years). And at the center of the acreage he built the 6,000-square-foot building where juice from his grapes is fermented into wine, aged in wooden barrels in the cellar, and eventually bottled.
If the notion of Illinois as a wine-producing state strikes people as odd or even comical, it’s because they don’t know their history. According to Karen Binder, marketing director for the Illinois Grape and Wine Resources Council (IGWRC), on the eve of prohibition Illinois ranked fourth among grape-growing states and was home to 400 wineries that produced around a quarter of the nation’s wine. Most of that, says Binder, was inexpensive table wine consumed by working-class immigrants from wine-loving countries like Italy, Germany, and Poland. “But that doesn’t mean that upmarket wines, wines of distinction, can’t come from Illinois,” she says. “It’s just that prohibition cut off the regional winemaking tradition at an early stage, in its infancy. And after prohibition ended, Illinois wine didn’t really bounce back.”
Lawlor expresses particular concern for recent start-ups like Valentino Vineyards. “It’s bad for everybody, but it’s the people who are just getting under way who are going to get hurt the most.”
DiTommaso’s concern with details doesn’t prevent him from flouting conventional wisdom at times. There is, for example, the matter of the pH level of his vineyard’s soil. Much of the soil in northern Illinois has a low pH, meaning it’s acidic; tests on DiTommaso’s land revealed the pH to be unusually high, skewed toward the other end of the scale. “According to the books, a good pH range is 5.6 to 6.0 for good grapevine vigor,” DiTommaso says. “My soil was in the 7.2 to 8.4 range, so I had thought I’d have a growing problem.”
