42: Alwyn "Fitz" Fitzgerald: Wisconsin Wines

Paul (Host) 00:00:03
You're listening to Denver Wine Radio, the podcast about Colorado wine. My name is Paul Bonaquisti. I'm the winemaker at Bonaquisti Wine Company, an urban winery I launched back in 2012 in Denver, Colorado, where I've been making and learning about wine ever since. I'm sitting down with other wineries and wine experts to find out what makes Colorado wine so unique and to help you find the wines you like to drink. And now let's put some altitude in your glass.

Paul (Host) 00:00:34
Hey.Welcome, everybody, to Denver. Wine, radio. Special guest in the studio today, Alwin Fitzgerald. Welcome to Denver Wine Radio.

Fitz (Guest) 00:00:43
Well, thank you very much.

Paul (Host) 00:00:44
If I call you Alan. I have to call you Alwin.

Fitz (Guest) 00:00:46
No, call me Fitz.

Paul (Host) 00:00:47
Oh, call you Fitz.

Fitz (Guest) 00:00:48
People who know me call me Fitz.

Paul (Host) 00:00:49
Wow, even better.

Fitz (Guest) 00:00:50
Yeah.

Paul (Host) 00:00:50
Welcome to show Fitz.

Fitz (Guest) 00:00:51
Yeah. People stumble over Alwin.

Paul (Host) 00:00:55
Okay, so you're from Wisconsin and you are part of the Wisconsin wine world.

Fitz (Guest) 00:01:01
Yes.

Paul (Host) 00:01:02
It's fantastic.

Fitz (Guest) 00:01:04
Yeah.

Paul (Host) 00:01:04
So I did a little research, and you tell me if I'm wrong. Correct me about 60 wineries in Wisconsin or how many?

Fitz (Guest) 00:01:13
Oh, I'm going to have to correct you on that one.

Paul (Host) 00:01:15
Okay.

Fitz (Guest) 00:01:15
Last time I checked, there was somewhere in the vicinity of 140 permitted wineries.

Paul (Host) 00:01:19
Wow.

Fitz (Guest) 00:01:20
Somewhere around there.

Paul (Host) 00:01:20
That's awesome.

Fitz (Guest) 00:01:21
Yeah.

Paul (Host) 00:01:22
All right. And that's part of the reason I wanted you to come down and talk to you about Wisconsin wine, because so similar to Colorado wine, to our industry, although we grow different grapes, maybe some of the same, a little bit. We'll talk about that, but man, yeah.

Fitz (Guest) 00:01:38
That's good to be here.

Paul (Host) 00:01:39
Thanks. Glad to have you. All right, so tell me about your background because you're a winemaker consultant, you own a winery.

Fitz (Guest) 00:01:47
Still do, technically.

Paul (Host) 00:01:48
Okay.

Fitz (Guest) 00:01:49
Yeah.

Paul (Host) 00:01:49
All right, so tell me about that and how you got your starting to wine.

Fitz (Guest) 00:01:53
Well, okay, so both of my parents are European, or they were. They both have now passed on. But I remember sipping wine at the dinner table at age six. It was just kind of that European culture thing. And in fact, at age six, with my little delicate taste buds, I didn't really think too much of wine. I didn't like it. And they would cut it with water, too, for us kids. But it's like, what the heck you do with this grape juice? Why'd you ruin it? What's this weird burnie flavor in here?

Paul (Host) 00:02:21
My mom cut mine with Pepsi.

Fitz (Guest) 00:02:23
Okay. Yeah, a little hyperactivity there for that one. Anyway, I just have had that exposure for many years. And I remember I also have a memory, a very clear memory of going to my mom when I was a sophomore in high school and saying, so, gee, mom, what is all this about wine and wine making and how do you even make wine? And in her thick German accent, which to the day she died, she had a really thicker in fact, it got thicker over the years. I think. And she shook her finger at me, which she also did a lot of. It's like a deadly weapon. And she said, well, go buy a book, go buy some equipment, go learn how to make wine. And that's how it all kind of got started. I mean, the irony is here's this woman telling her teenage son to go make alcoholic beverages. But anyway, so I went on from there. I started making wine. Obviously I did not know much and my standards were low, but I just persevered and went off to college. And I switched over to beer making in college just because it's faster, easier, cheaper, and less a little more forgiving, I believe, anyway. But then once I got out of college, I switched back over to winemaking. But I went on to corporate America. I went on to a career and I got an MBA and I have a biology background. And all the years, though, I was slaving away in the corporate world, I just kept making wine as a hobby and perfecting it and taking courses. Eventually I got into my 50s. It just happens to the best of us. And damn it, we do get through our fifty s. I know. How the hell did I get here? I don't understand that. But anyway, I got in my fifty s and all of a sudden I realized, you know what, I'm getting really tired of keeping the boss happy and playing company politics and dealing with egos and agendas and it wasn't a passion. So I finally just bagged the whole thing, took my savings and opened up a winery, Fisher King Winery, and that's in Wisconsin. And that went along gangbusters for ten years. And then we hit Covid in 2020.

Paul (Host) 00:04:20
Right.

Fitz (Guest) 00:04:20
And unfortunately didn't get enough customers. I was having trouble getting staff during that. And then we were about to hit the winter months, which are always lean for a winery, and I had to make a painful decision to close the winery after all that. Yeah. So I'm out here though, because my two kids live out here and I have a great time visiting with them. I'm out here a lot. I skied A Basin three times this year.

Paul (Host) 00:04:44
Sweet.

Fitz (Guest) 00:04:45
I was just up in the mountains. I was just with both of them. My daughter's here in Denver and my son is down in Springs, so I'm kind of looking at maybe the next chapter might be I don't have to stay in Wisconsin anymore. I can move out here and maybe get myself involved in the wine industry out here in one form or another.

Paul (Host) 00:05:02
Definitely.

Fitz (Guest) 00:05:03
So there you go. Now you got my whole story.

Paul (Host) 00:05:05
I love it. I love it. So what type of grapes do you work with or grow in Wisconsin?

Fitz (Guest) 00:05:11
So Wisconsin is kind of a cold state. I mean, we have cold winters. You do too here, I know, but particularly up in the mountains. But the only wine grapes that can grow in Wisconsin that can survive are the cold hardy hybrids. And there's actually quite a few of them now because the cultural research schools keep releasing a new one or two of them every few years. So we probably have more than 30 varietals, both white and red. And there'd be names that if people aren't familiar with the cold hardy hybrid wine grapes, they might not have heard the name, or they may not be familiar with them. So on the reds, things like Marquette, St. Croix frontenac, those types of grapes. And on the whites it's things like St. Peppin, la Crescent, Frantanet, Gree and the like. So there's a whole slew of these grapes. And I got to tell you, some people, they only know the Vinifera grapes, the European grapes.

Paul (Host) 00:06:07
Sure.

Fitz (Guest) 00:06:08
Because that's what came over on the boat with everybody. Everybody just knows the European grapes. Cabernet, riesling, pinot Noir, et cetera. But I'll tell you, you can absolutely make perfectly delicious, fantastic, very drinkable wine from cold hardy hybrid grapes. And the key is they have to have the genes to survive our cold winters or below zero temperature winters.

Paul (Host) 00:06:29
Yeah. And so how many areas of Wisconsin can you grow grapes in? Or at least the wine making grapes, right?

Fitz (Guest) 00:06:36
Well, I would say the greatest. Some people think you can grow it anywhere in Wisconsin, so when you get a little too far north, you can't.

Paul (Host) 00:06:42
They think that about Colorado, too.

Fitz (Guest) 00:06:44
Yeah, it's really the southern half of the southern third of the state. It's tempered enough. It's not our north woods. You don't want to grow in grapes up in your north woods. It just doesn't match. So we grow up quite a few. And there are between 204 hundred vineyards in the state at this point.

Paul (Host) 00:07:01
Wow.

Fitz (Guest) 00:07:02
Well, they're not huge vineyards. I mean, it's not like the vast tracks of square miles of grapes that you see in Napa or even New York State. They're in pockets. They go everywhere from, like a half acre to 20 acres.

Paul (Host) 00:07:16
So I'm trying to get a feel for this because I know Minnesota grows grapes. Obviously, a lot of the hybrids come out of the University of Minnesota.

Fitz (Guest) 00:07:25
Quite a few of them. Not all of them.

Paul (Host) 00:07:26
Yeah, not all of them. But you've got Minnesota and Wisconsin, then Lake Michigan.

Fitz (Guest) 00:07:34
Right. You cross Lake Michigan, and then you hit Michigan. Yes. That's what's over there are challenged geographically.

Paul (Host) 00:07:40
And then they have a wine industry in Michigan, too.

Fitz (Guest) 00:07:42
Right. I mean, there is a whole area of wineries in Michigan, but they tend to think the center of their universe is Traverse City.

Paul (Host) 00:07:50
Okay.

Fitz (Guest) 00:07:51
Which is, if you were to look at Lake Michigan, they're on the east side. Wisconsin is on the west side. They have the benefit of an incredible lake effect that gives them a microclimate within so many miles of the lake shore, like 510 miles inland. And after that, the lake effect tends to disappear. And they're growing cold hardy hybrids more than the interior. But along the lake shore, on their western side, the east side of Lake Michigan, all the way up in a strip, is where they can grow vinifera, which is what you guys are growing out here.

Paul (Host) 00:08:26
Right.

Fitz (Guest) 00:08:27
So we're on the wrong side of the lake. We're on the upwind side, and we don't have another big lake to our west, so we don't get that lake effect. So the only thing we can grow are the cold hardy hybrids. It gives me Pinot envy because I wish I could grow some vinifera. But again, we make beautiful wines from the cold hardy hybrid grapes.

Paul (Host) 00:08:46
Yeah. And we've been discovering the cold hardy hybrids here in Colorado. I think more wineries are open to them now because of a couple of bad October's in 2019 and 2020. So it's opened my mind up to cold hardy varieties. And we're actually pouring petite Pearl and having really good success with it. So people are loving it. Really. To them, it's just a grape name. They haven't heard or haven't tried. And ultimately their palate is the decision maker.

Fitz (Guest) 00:09:14
Right. As it should be.

Paul (Host) 00:09:15
Exactly. Some of the wines. I wish you could have brought some Wisconsin.

Fitz (Guest) 00:09:20
I would have loved it. Well, you know what? Next time I see you, I will get you some wine. I made actually not just Wisconsin wines. I'll give you my wine.

Paul (Host) 00:09:27
Oh, yeah, for sure. I want to try your wine. And I want to try the Wisconsin grapes, too. Okay. So what are your top two or three Wisconsin hybrids to drink?

Fitz (Guest) 00:09:48
Well, my favorite red hybrid, I think the growers don't like it too much because of some issues. But as a winemaker on the vintage side, the ecological side, I really like this grape. It's Marquette. And what's nice about it is it's across with a whole bunch of different cold hardy hybrids. Right, right. But what's nice about it is it has as a genetic grandparent, it has Pinot Noir. Now we can't really grow Pinot Noir in Wisconsin. I know one grower who's growing Pinot Noir and it's not a lot like a couple of really big, long rows and the hoops that he has to go through at the end of the season to keep it from dying over the winter. I mean, the stuff that he has to do with this plan is unreal and it's impractical. I know we have climate change and maybe in 50 years from now we'll be growing Pinot Noir in Wisconsin. I don't know.

Paul (Host) 00:10:39
Right.

Fitz (Guest) 00:10:39
But Batter, Casa or any of those, it just doesn't work. But Marquette survives most winters. I mean, even cold hardy hybrids can get challenged. If you have a particularly rough winter or like you said, where you have a freeze either early in the spring after the grapes have already started warming up or at the end in October before harvest or around harvest, but we can grow Marquette in most conditions. And it actually takes on a Pinot Noir character.

Paul (Host) 00:11:08
Wow.

Fitz (Guest) 00:11:08
So it's got that bearishness up on the front end and it's a little lighter. It's not a heavy it's not like a Cab or certainly not as big and jammy as Infinites or anything like that. It's very nice. And our wines, my wines and other people's wines in Wisconsin have been winning gold medals from coast to coast with the cold hardy hybrid grapes.

Paul (Host) 00:11:27
Oh, that's great.

Fitz (Guest) 00:11:28
So on the reds, that's my favorite red, although I like Petite Pearl also. And I have some of that in the tank right now. On the whites, I have two favorites made from Wisconsin grapes, of Wisconsin grapes, and that is St Peppin. St Peppin makes a really nice white wine.

Paul (Host) 00:11:45
I do not familiar with that one.

Fitz (Guest) 00:11:46
Well, St Peppin is used a lot around the Upper Midwest for making ice wine, and it's not because the grape itself has some unique characteristics that are really good for the flavor or anything like that. It's a perfectly wonderful grape, has great flavor. But St Peppin in particular has a really thick skin. So when you make ice wine, you actually let the grapes hang dangerously long past harvest. You hope for the best. You hope it's not going to get rot or storm or hall or horrible things happening because you should have picked them, damn it, when they were ready, right. But you let them hang and then they freeze, and then you're actually going outside and you're crushing them and pressing them. Like in December when you finally get a little bit of a mild day and that whole period of time between the normal harvest in, say, October or September or whatever, and December when you're finally actually harvesting them and turning them into juice, there's so much damage and abuse that each one of those little grape berries gets that the thicker the skin, the more intact it is. So you're not going to get them cracking open with their sugary, extra sugary juice, because they're losing moisture and it's getting concentrated. The sugars are getting concentrated and getting disease building in bacteria or yeasts or whatever. So St Peppin is the preferred grape for a lot of winemakers in the Upper Midwest for doing ice wine just because of the thick skin. Yeah, but I just like making a regular white wine out of it.

Paul (Host) 00:13:14
That's cool. Is there a lot of ice wine being made? There is in Wisconsin.

Fitz (Guest) 00:13:17
Well, there's some in Wisconsin, and then there's the folks that kind of cheat a little. They don't do it the traditional way. They'll take grapes and freeze them so they can't call it ice wine then. But anyway, the other one is another hybrid. It's a newer hybrid. It's called front and a gree. It's white, not completely white because grey not blank. It's kind of a little darker white grape skin color, but they're definitely yellowish orangeish, greenish. And it's a natural mutation of the Fontana grape, which is a red, cold hardy hybrid grape that we use. Front and act is a wonderful grape, except it always comes in high in acidity, so the winemaker has to deal with that. But the flavor is outstanding. With regular Fontana or red wine grape, we make a port out of Frontenac, and it's delicious. I mean, I know that sounds self serving, but it's true. It's a really good, very popular wine of ours. But Front and a Greed was a natural mutation that was just discovered in the vineyard. It's like one out of every so many Front and egg plants just had these light colored grapes. And at first, the growers thought the wrong grape got planted in there somewhere. But then when they did genetic testing on it, they said, no, it's still Frontenac. It's just it has a mutation that the skins come out much lighter.

Paul (Host) 00:14:30
Wow, that's cool. And that's the cool thing about grapes, just these mutations over the course of history, making a whole new variety out of it.

Fitz (Guest) 00:14:39
Right. That was natural, that wasn't genetically manipulated or Crossprint. Yeah, they make good wines. The whites tend to be there are a little higher in acidity. They tend to have a little bit of sweetening. We tend to stop the fermentation a little early or occasionally back sweeten a little bit just to offset that acidity a little bit. But the red, you can make a really great dry red.

Paul (Host) 00:14:59
So the people of Wisconsin, how is it? Of course, there's challenges in any industry, but telling them, hey, you want to try some Wisconsin wine? So the people in Colorado, I'd go, what?

Fitz (Guest) 00:15:11
Right.

Paul (Host) 00:15:11
I mean, it's hard enough to tell them, hey, we make wine in Colorado, so what's that like in Wisconsin?

Fitz (Guest) 00:15:16
Well, it's a little bit of a double whammy from what you guys have here in Colorado, because not only is it wine made in Wisconsin, just like wine made in Colorado exactly. But the only time we offer vinifera those European grapes is we have to bring the grapes or juice from out of state where they can grow.

Paul (Host) 00:15:36
Right.

Fitz (Guest) 00:15:36
So a lot of wineries opt to just bring in juice and grapes and make wines that people are more familiar with. So getting our wines into a real high end restaurant like, say, in Madison in the capital, can be a challenge because those are expense accounts restaurants. And when visiting dignitaries are in town or whatever, they bring their guests there, and they want to pick out the wine off the wine list and look knowledgeable. And if they have never heard of petite pearl or whatever they're going to order, oh, well, this is a pinot Noir from the Willamette Valley. So they play it safe or within what their knowledge base is. So we have a little bit of a double whammy, especially when we're trying to promote the wines that are made from the cold hardy hybrid grapes in addition to just being grown in Wisconsin. That being said, we have worked very hard. I was on the board of the Wisconsin Winery Association for many years, since 2012, and at the end, right before COVID hit and everything, I was the president of the Wisconsin Winery Association. We have put together a real full court press to educate people in Wisconsin or visitors to Wisconsin on Wisconsin wines. And at first, like ten or 15 years ago, people would turn up their wine nose at Wisconsin wines or these weird hybrid grapes that made wine.

Paul (Host) 00:16:54
Right.

Fitz (Guest) 00:16:54
And to be fair and honest, there were back then, since there were fewer wineries, there were some sort of mediocre wines getting put out by some of the Wisconsin, a lot of fruit wines, even vegetable wines.

Paul (Host) 00:17:08
Oh, wow.

Fitz (Guest) 00:17:08
Yeah. And there's nothing wrong. There's some really outstanding fruit wines out there, but over time, people are starting to really respond. We've had success in getting people much, much more aware and even preferring, in some cases, many cases actually wines made from locally grown Wisconsin wine grapes. It's still a process and it's still an education process, but we've had some good changes in that area, and I think you guys have had some of that as well. You got the advantage of having wine made from grapes that people are very much more familiar with. Yeah.

Paul (Host) 00:17:38
And that's why it's taken me and some other wineries around the state, I think, a long time to open up to cold hardy varietals because we've been blessed with vinifera growing in Colorado and that's what's familiar to our customers. But I know over the years I've spoken to people who had a bad experience early on with Colorado wine. It may have been 20 years ago they tried something that was really sweet.

Fitz (Guest) 00:18:07
Right.

Paul (Host) 00:18:07
That's the only one they tried. But they assumed all Colorado wine is sweet and a little off or made with fruit. So that's been part of our challenge, to get people to explore new Colorado wines, try in Colorado grapes and see for themselves.

Fitz (Guest) 00:18:23
Well, I got to tell you, yesterday I just went on a Denver wine walk and I tasted more delicious, good wines made by Colorado wineries in that walk. I thought it was outstanding.

Paul (Host) 00:18:35
Yeah, that was an excellent event that I participated in colorado wine walk put on by Blanchard Family Wines. It was downtown Denver in the dairy block. And yeah, there was about eleven, I think about eleven wineries. There 400 people, it sold out, and it just was a great experience and exposing our wines and seeing the excitement to try everyone's wine.

Fitz (Guest) 00:18:59
Yeah, well, I'm really looking forward to the likelihood of getting out here to Colorado at some point, not just visiting my kids every two months, but getting out and getting involved in the industry. Here.

Paul (Host) 00:19:12
Yeah, definitely. Because you certainly have some great experience, great knowledge in the Wisconsin wine world and your background. So, yeah, we'd love to have you out here in Colorado.

Fitz (Guest) 00:19:26
Yeah. So anyway, some entities out there who's looking for a winemaker general manager or I have some equipment and some bulk wine to sell. Sorry, that's my big plug. I wrote a book and I'm plugging it or something.

Paul (Host) 00:19:36
Yeah, you have your winery that you closed down, but you have all the stuff, right. You have a winery in a box for sale, right?

Fitz (Guest) 00:19:43
Well, I do have one potential opportunity and I think it's going to happen, but I always like to explore other options out there. There's another winery that's going to be opening up just north of Madison, and they've offered me to be their general manager and wine maker. They're going to buy all the stuff. I'm just waiting for it to actually really come to pass, and I think it will, but even if it does, in a few years from now, I'm probably going to be looking to come out here anyway regardless, just because I love the area and I don't want to be so far away from my two kids.

Paul (Host) 00:20:14
No. And you need to hit a base.

Fitz (Guest) 00:20:16
And some more and tag another 14 years.

Paul (Host) 00:20:20
That's right. Well, right on. I'll win. But I'm going to call you Fitz. Right on, Fitz. Thanks for coming down to Denver Wine radio.

Fitz (Guest) 00:20:28
Yeah, it was my pleasure.

Paul (Host) 00:20:29
Appreciate you.

Fitz (Guest) 00:20:29
All right. Likewise. All right.

Paul (Host) 00:20:31
Cheers.

Fitz (Guest) 00:20:31
Cheers.

Paul (Host) 00:20:34
That's our show for this week. Thank you so much for listening to Denver Wine Radio. Your homework for the week is to go out and taste some Colorado wine. If you have any questions or comments or just want to let us know what you're drinking, go to denverwineradio.com or you can email us or leave us a voice message. We'd love to hear from you. And remember, put some altitude in your glass. Produced and distributed by the Sound Off Media Company.