Salute -- At Leonetti's, Wine Making Is In The Blood
IN MOMENTS OF MODESTY, Gary Figgins may shrug his broad shoulders and say it's really no big deal. All I do, he explains, is let grape juice spoil.
The comment draws a laugh. It belies the skill, science, art and hard work that have brought national acclaim to this Walla Walla winemaker.
But buried in the remark is a fundamental truth.
For no matter how wine is dressed up in fancy labels, no matter how many flowery, arcane terms are used to describe its smell and taste, some things about winemaking are eternally and undeniably natural.
It's natural for grapes raised on the sunny, well-drained slopes of southeastern Washington to be rich in flavor.
It's natural for yeast to turn sugar into alcohol.
And it was natural for Figgins, grandson of Italian immigrants, to grow up with an interest in making wine. "It was in my blood," he smiles, swirling an ounce of plum-colored merlot in a tasting glass, releasing its rich aroma.
What's unusual is not that Figgins makes wine, but that this former Army Reserve drill sergeant, this 20-year employee of a can-making factory, has produced, with no formal training, some of the highest-rated wines in the world.
"Who makes America's best merlot?" Wine Spectator magazine asked on a cover last winter, answering the question inside with an article on Figgins' winery, Leonetti Cellar. A month later, the publication's annual "Top 100" list of wines worldwide ranked Figgins' 1992 merlot No. 4, his 1991 cabernet sauvignon No. 13. Only five other Washington vintners had wines on the list, and none had two.
By now, it's no secret that Washington produces wonderful wines. From Bainbridge to Zillah, Woodinville to Walla Walla, more than 80 wineries are now crushing, fermenting and bottling the fruits of Washington soil.
Only a handful are the mega-producers whose labels dominate grocery-store shelves - the Columbia Crest, Chateau Ste. Michelle, Hogue Cellars variety. Far more typical in scale is Leonetti, where the 5,000 cases produced this year equal what Columbia Crest, the state's largest winery, can bottle in under eight hours.
LEONETTI CELLAR IS literally a "mom & pop" business.
Pop is Gary, who at any given moment could be welding a pump, pruning a vine, sniffing a merlot or running a forklift load of cardboard cases out to the UPS van that pulls up at 3:30 every afternoon in the spring shipping season. (A glance at one day's UPS labels reflects Figgins' national attention: cases on their way to Texas, Virginia, New Hampshire, California, Arizona, Oregon and Florida.)
Mom is Nancy Figgins, who processes orders, inquiries and invoices from her personal computer in the winery's top-floor office. At the busiest times, her sister, mother and cousin pitch in to help.
High-school sweethearts from Walla Walla's Catholic high school, Desales, Gary and Nancy married a year after their 1967 graduation and have raised two children: Amy, 24, and Chris, 21.
To understand how wine got into Figgins' blood, start with the name in gold script on his purple-and-gray label: Leonetti.
In 1906, Frank Leonetti was determined to leave the poverty of his native land and, with his wife Rose, find opportunity in a new world. From their home in Calabria, at the toe of the Italian boot, the journey took the Leonettis through New York's Ellis Island, then by train to the southeast corner of Washington.
Here, homestead land was available for farming outside a bustling little city created by pioneers in the 1850s. Settlers had retained the Indian name meaning many waters: Walla Walla.
Already in place when the Leonettis arrived was the grim edifice that would become the city's best-known landmark: Washington State Penitentiary opened as a territorial prison in 1887.
As family after family of Italian immigrants settled, they helped one another with the adjustments of relocation. Summers were reassuringly like home, hot and dry. But icy blasts of winter tested their endurance.
These Italians could forgo some aspects of their former lives, but had no intention of shedding their fondness for a mealtime staple as basic as bread or pasta: vino. At first, Leonetti and some of his neighbors arranged for boxcar loads of grapes to be delivered from California. Later, they brought back the vines themselves, growing a Rhone grape they called "Black Prince." Aging his wines in a dirt-floor cellar, Leonetti made about five 50-gallon barrels a year for family and friends.
By 1950, Frank and Rose Leonetti had raised two sons and six daughters and enjoyed frequent visits from their many grandchildren. Memories of Grandma and Grandpa Leonetti's farm are some of the earliest and sweetest of Gary Figgins' childhood. The acres of hills and farmland were a place of high adventure, of fishing, hunting, camping, hiking and seeing farm animals close-up.
"They grew everything from lettuce to onions," Figgins recalls. "They put up their own hay for the barn animals; they raised their own livestock; they made their own sausage." Grandpa was a lively old gentleman, who smoked pungent Italian crooks. He was stern with his own sons but loved to tease the grandkids.
Figgins, 47, figures he was about 5 when his grandparents first poured him a glass of wine with dinner. As in the old country, the child's portion was tiny and diluted with water. But Gary knew this was something special - something he was never served at home.
These days, Frank Leonetti rests where he has spent the last 40 years: under the tall firs and silver maples of Walla Walla's Mountain View Cemetery. A deep, bitter freeze in the mid-1950's wiped out the area's vineyards and shortly after, Leonetti fell victim to lung cancer. Rose, who died in 1973, lies beside him, and names on nearby headstones show the bonds of Italian-American community weren't severed with death: The Mondellis are here, so are the Deccios, the Allessios, the Ragusos and the Pontis. Small as it is, the cemetery even holds two other Frank Leonettis.
ALTHOUGH HIS grandfather's vines died on the hillside, the image of the fiery Italian and the magical beverage lived on in Figgins' memory. By his early 20s, Gary was crushing fruit, adding yeast and seeing what would develop. His technique was rudimentary. "Sometimes I just crushed it in the bottom of a bucket with a wooden stick." He made small batches of wine from apricots, blueberries, apples, cherries and plums, learning the principles of fermentation.
The next important phase of Figgins' wine education came at a most unlikely institution, the U.S. Army Reserve. Figgins spent nine years in the reserve in the late 1960s and early 1970s. During two-week stints at Fort Lewis or California's Fort Ord, he hung out with another Walla Walla reservist, Rick Small. In the evenings, since neither favored the bland beers most reservists drank, they'd split a bottle of wine.
It started with cheap stuff. "We were the Boone's Farm Apple Club," Figgins said, after a soda-pop wine best served ice-cold. But their tastes turned to better things, and they'd pool spare cash to buy the best bottles they could, trying a different wine each time.
Back home, Figgins and Small became fast friends. "I'd go over to his house on Friday nights and we'd play guitars and share a bottle of wine," recalls Small. Nancy would be working her evening shift at a jewelry store (Rick was still single) and the Figgins' two kids would be tucked in bed. Wine glasses at arm's reach, Rick and Gary would strum and sing (barely, Figgins admits) folk-rock hits like John Denver's "Rocky Mountain High" and anything from Neil Young's "Harvest" album.
As time passed, they spent less of the evening playing music and more talking about the wine - what made it good, how it could be better.
It would be remarkable if those Friday sing-and-sip sessions had yielded one world-class vintner. In fact, they produced two. Small went on to open Woodward Canyon Winery in Lowden, 13 miles west of Walla Walla, garnering his own awards and medals. His 1991 cabernet sauvignon was No. 22 on Wine Spectator's last Top 100 list. Though the demands of the business don't give them much time together anymore, Figgins and Small remain mutual admirers. "He set an incredibly high standard, far and above anything anyone else had been doing in our state," Small said.
Small and Figgins made several wines together in 1976 and 1977, aging them in the Figgins' basement. By the following year, Figgins was in his ninth season of amateur winemaking and was ready to test the market.
"It was an exciting time," Figgins said. "People saw the potential here and everyone had high hopes." The results exceeded his dreams: Wine & Spirits buyers' guide called his 1978 cabernet sauvignon the best in the nation. Subsequent vintages continued the success.
As small-business owners know, even a great product, made on a small scale, produces limited income. In the early years especially, every spare nickel was reinvested in equipment, supplies and construction. Figgins dug the lower level of his three-story winery in 1985, but it was two years later before he had the time, money and materials to continue the above-ground floors. Through two winters, the cellar sat like a bomb shelter under bales of straw, warmed by portable space heaters.
Six years ago, income from the winery reached the point that Figgins could quit his "day job" as a machinist for Continental Can Co. (now Crown Cork & Seal), a sprawling industrial campus in the shadow of the state penitentiary. Working two jobs was taxing, but the experience was invaluable for Figgins, who kept factory equipment in working order.
"Being a machinist teaches you that you can fix anything, that you can do anything with the right tools," said Figgins. That attitude is crucial at a winery, a business that is part farm, part factory, where the owner is often the chief mechanic.
FIGGINS' OWN vineyard is small, three acres flanking his home on the east edge of town. Most of the grapes for his wines - he makes only reds - comes from selected vineyards in the Walla Walla, Columbia and Yakima valleys. Each contributes its own characteristics as the wines are blended.
Most wine drinkers would probably say wine has a single important ingredient, grapes. But Figgins speaks with equal passion about oak. Scouring whatever sources he can find, Figgins collects information on the types of oak barrels worldwide and how they flavor wine in the aging process. Aging wine in oak, of course, is a centuries-old practice, but Figgins is among a new wave of vintners using extra slats inside barrels to increase the wine's exposure to wood.
On a visit to his cool, dark barrel room, in the winery's lowest floor, I glimpsed this passion for oak. Figgins lifted the plug from the top of a barrel, then used a clear tube called a "thief" to siphon out enough merlot to spill into two tasting glasses. I raised mine to a shaft of light from the doorway to examine the deep, violet color. But Figgins' mind was on fragrance, not hue. He closed his eyes and swirled the sample under his mustache, then smiled. He noted the nuances of vanilla and butterscotch contributed by the French barrels. We repeated the process with wine from two other barrels of American oak; each had its own shade of aroma. To me, the distinctions were detectable, though subtle. But to Figgins, the variations are essential. When he bottles this merlot, he'll blend it from the various barrel types, mixed to achieve a balance.
Despite the attention his wines have drawn, Figgins is determined to keep the operation small. For wine lovers, that's good news and bad: It's easier for a winemaker to maintain quality when production is low, but Leonetti wines now sell so fast they're virtually gone before the labels are slapped on the bottles.
Unlike many Washington wineries, Leonetti has no tasting room open to the public. There's little point in enticing visitors when no wine is available. The mailing list is full; so is the waiting list to get on the mailing list.
For retailers, managing a limited allotment of Leonetti wines often means setting aside small amounts for longtime customers; seldom do the bottles hit the shelves. The increasing price hasn't chilled demand; typical retail was $33 for Figgins' latest merlot, $37 for the cabernet.
Wine-drinkers desperate to try a Leonetti but not lucky enough to be a merchant's friend can check wine lists of some of Seattle's upscale restaurants, but should expect a hefty markup.
Since Leonetti Cellar's past and present are grounded in family, it's fitting that its future should be as well. Next year, Chris will bring a horticulture degree home from Washington State University, having tailored some of his school projects to deal with growing grape vines.
His strong back and high interest in the family business have already been major assets at Leonetti. "I remember from the time I was 12, helping out however I could, picking leaves out of the crush, moving barrels as I got a little older," he said.
At Leonetti, Chris will first take over what his dad calls "the science part," checking the levels of sugars, acids and other substances. "That will free me up a little," said Gary. "I'd rather be sticking my nose in a wine glass, sniffing barrels and making judgments about what the wine should be like."
The prominence of Leonetti wines has helped rekindle Walla Walla's awareness of its Italian-American heritage. Figgins' brother, Berle, a consultant to grape growers, is planting a small vineyard at a local museum to replicate those of Leonetti and his contemporaries.
Two summers from now, the Leonetti story will come full circle. That's when Gary and Nancy plan to load up all the wine they can carry and make their first visit to Italy. It's a trip they've planned far in advance, waiting for the time that Chris could look after the wines during their absence.
Already, Figgins has checked Italian maps for the town names he saw on his grandparents' passports, Cosenza and Serra Pedace. Part of the fun will be trying to locate Leonettis to whom he may be related. And chances are, if he uses his own wine as bait, Figgins won't have any shortage of cousins.
Jack Broom is a reporter for The Seattle Times. Harley Soltes is Pacific's staff photographer.