When vinter Fred Koehler presses his grapes the backdrop is not the mountains of California, but the traffic of Roselle Road.
In the heart of Du Page County, far from the wine country, Koehler knows how to turn grapes into gold. In May, 1985, his barrel-fermented 1983 Chardonnay beat out 184 other chardonnays to capture the gold medal and the best of show at the annual Reno Wine Adventure competition. A month later, the same wine beat more than 200 chardonnays to win a gold medal and best of show title at the National Restaurant Association competition in Chicago.
And on this sunny fall day he is beginning to work his magic on the 1988 crop.
From California come refrigerated trucks bringing pinot noir, chardonnay and cabernet sauvignon grapes to his Lynfred Winery in Roselle. From southern Illinois, other trucks bring chancellor and chambourcin grapes and from Michigan come seyval grapes.
In the parking lot behind the winery, there are stacks of wooden boxes brimming with golden-green muscat grapes and wine-dark zinfandel grapes from California.
Koehler and three workers are crushing the grapes in a temperamental Italian machine. When working properly, it can crush a boxful of grapes, about 36 pounds, and spit out the stems in as much time as it takes a person to eat a small handful of the fruity, sweet muscat grapes.
Koehler is proud of these grapes. He picks a bunch out of a box, saying, ”This has 25 percent raisins,” referring to the shriveled, brown grapes.
”There`s no juice in them, but they`re as sweet as can be.”
When he and his late wife, Lynn, opened the winery in 1979, ”We wanted to make a world-class wine from California grapes to show it could be done outside California,” he says. ”We did not want to grow grapes.”
Growing grapes would have meant being stuck with bad grapes in the event of a bad harvest. And the couple wanted to be in the Chicago area, near a big market, an impossibility if they had a vineyard.
With the load of muscat grapes being crushed this day, Koehler`s aim is to produce a sweet, fruity after-dinner wine. So the juice, the skins and the seeds, called ”must,” are all pumped from the crusher into a large vat in the winery`s cellar, to give the juice ”skin contact” for a few days.
”When the juice becomes as fruity as can be,” it`s pumped into a wine press, a cylinder with slits in its side that is rotated by an electric motor so the juice can be separated from the skins. From there the juice is pumped into 750-gallon tanks, where it is fermented before it is pumped into oak barrels for aging. Then comes the bottling, corking and labeling.
The crushing is halted for a half-hour or so when the machine goes on the blink. Koehler figures out what went wrong and shows his assistant, George Pena, how to file a shaft to give it a flat surface so a sprocket for the crusher`s chain drive can be secured with a bolt to the shaft.
To make his wine, Koehler has to be a mechanic, a chemist and a glass washer. But above all, he has to be the taster and judge of a wine`s flavor and its ”nose,” that unique blend of aroma and bouquet, so that his carefully selected grapes will become wines he wants to sell and drink.
Koehler uses a big medicine-dropper to extract some of his latest chardonnay from a barrel made of French oak. Swirling the still-fermenting wine in his glass, he sniffs and says ”toast and vanilla,” just the sensations he`s seeking in this white wine.
The white wine is being barrel fermented. After the crushing, the skins and seeds are immediately separated from the juice, which is allowed to stand a few days in a big tank, so any solids settle out.
Then the juice is pumped into new French oak barrels, which hold about 40 gallons, and yeast is added to begin fermentation. The barrels are not completely filled because during fermentation when the yeast eats the sugar, turning it to alcohol, the wine bubbles and roils, rubbing the sides of the barrels and picking up taste from the oak barrels.
When fermentation is complete, the wine is removed from the barrel, which is cleaned to remove any residues. Then the wine is pumped back into the barrels where it will remain ”in the wood” for about six months, before it is bottled and aged further.
The cellar is filled with barrels of wine, some in floor-to-ceiling racks and others resting in cradles on the floor. The winery`s capacity is 5,000 gallons a year, but Koehler expects construction to begin in the spring on an addition that will allow him to increase his production to 15,000 gallons.
On this day, his balky wine crusher has at last successfully processed all the muscat grapes, and it`s time for Koehler to test the juice for acidity and sugar content.
By determining the sugar content, he can tell the amount of alcohol that will be in the wine. Acid is what gives the wine ”backbone,” Koehler says, and his tests show the muscat juice is a little shy. He may have to add some acid to the juice after testing further.
As the grapes are crushed, sulfite is added to kill the wild yeast, which appears as a light gray coating on the grapes. ”We don`t want a wild fermentation,” Koehler says. A wild fermentation is difficult control, with the process sometimes ”getting stuck” in mid-fermentation.
Instead, Koehler prepares a mixture of wine yeast and juice that will ferment the 300 or so gallons of juice from the muscat grapes.
Koehler has no mere crush on wine and winemaking. His grandparents made wine in Germany and they continued making wine when they arrived in the United States, settling in Des Plaines in the 1920s.
They were farmers and grew vegetables, which they bartered for fruit to make wine for themselves and for sale.
”I grew up in that environment. We had wine on the table most every day,” Koehler says.
After graduating from Maine East High School, he served in the Navy during World War II and was trained as a meteorologist-along with untold numbers of other sailors. After the war, all those meteorologists flooded the job market. Koehler decided to look elsewhere and settled on the food business.
His first stop was with a company that owned a collection of drive-in restaurants and doughnut shops; later he worked for the Itasca Country Club and a company that managed private clubs.
But he never lost touch with winemaking, and continued making a few barrels each year.
In 1972 he met his future wife Lynn, who was also in the food business. They began to tour California vineyards, taking slides and gathering information.
They married in 1974 and began to make more wine at their Wood Dale home, experimenting with different grapes. At the time, wine was enjoying a boom in popularity in the U.S.
The couple gave most of their homemade wine away as Christmas presents, which ”wasn`t really legal,” Koehler says. Soon people who couldn`t wait till Christmas were calling and asking if they could buy the wine. ”Lynn said let`s get serious and open a winery,” Koehler recalls.
In 1975 and `76 they toured more vineyards and began to search the Chicago area for a suitable location for their own winery. They first thought about locating in an old brewery in the city, and turned to a copy of the 1939 Yellow Pages for the addresses of now-defunct breweries. Unable to find one that met their needs, the couple shifted gears and began to look for an older house that they could renovate.
It was friend in Roselle who called them about an old house in the village. Koehler says that when Lynn saw the stained-glass windows with their clusters of grapes, she said, ”`This is it.”`
They closed on the house in 1977 and spent the next 21 months working at their old jobs and stripping the oak woodwork of the house. They made their first wine in `78 and opened the next year. Lynfred Winery has been in business ever since, with Koehler continuing on his own after Lynn died in 1984 following a chronic illness.
”We miss her very, very much,” says Diane Koehler, 28, Fred Koehler`s daughter from a previous marriage that ended in divorce in the late `60s.
”She was a dynamic person, and the creative force behind the winery. Everybody liked Lynn. She was a real fun person.”
Now Koehler, 60, makes wine with Pena, his assistant. ”We do it together. He`s learning,” Koehler said. He employs three other people, including Diane, full time, and has eight part-time workers.
”I do a little bit of everything,” Diane says. ”I`m mostly involved in the retail and marketing part of the business.” She also puts together the winery`s newsletter, which comes out four times a year. ”We have a mailing list of about 4,000 people, with 500 of those names outside the state and ranging all across the country,” she says.
Diane also runs 20- to 30-minute tours of the winery, which take place on the hour between 1 and 4 p.m. each weekend, as well as tastings, which are available any time during the winery`s regular hours of 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. daily. Beginning in November, those hours will expand to 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. daily. ”That`s a real busy time,” Diane says. ”We always end up having to hire extra help.”
She describes her father as shy. ”He laughs and jokes around here but he takes his work very seriously. He`s devoted to the winery-it`s his life.”
Koehler`s commitment to the winery extends to his workers. He helped Pena get through the federal government`s amnesty program for aliens, and Pena plans to become a U.S. citizen in 1990.
Pena knew nothing of the wine business-a plus, according to Koehler. ”He had no bad habits to correct. I don`t have anybody telling me how to do it. He`s a perfect employee.”
Illinois has always had wineries, which were known for quantity-rivers of Concord grape wine-rather than quality, Koehler says. Prohibition knocked them out of business.
Now there are five vineyards in the state, including Lynfred, Koehler says.
Lynfred makes only varietal wines in which a particular grape, zinfandel, for example, is used. There is no blending of wines. Koehler also makes fruit wines: cherry, blackberry, apple and pear, to name a few.
Back in his office, a former bedroom of the old house, Koehler relaxes in his swivel chair. One wall is lined with floor-to-ceiling wine racks, containing his zinfandels from 1980-84 and cabernet sauvignons from 1979 and from 1982 to 1986.
On another wall are pictures of bunches of wine grapes: chardonnays, sauvignon blancs and cabernets.
On the first floor, in what used to be living room, there is an antique bar and racks displaying the 40 wines he makes.
The winemaker uncorks an `87 fume blanc. ”You`ll smell smoke and grass.” To prove his claim, he goes outside and brings back a handful of grass. He urges a visitor to smell the grass and compare it to the wine.
”It`s nice to drink now, but by Christmas it should be super.”
Koehler settles back into his chair. ”This is what I wanted to do. My escape from the food business. My doctor can`t believe how much my blood pressure dropped.”
