Heavily Armoured

There's something chilling inside a Lake Bluff castle.
Get ready for some white nights.

Wine is the new canned ham. This occurred to me while standing in the lobby of Paterno Wines’ headquarters in Lake Bluff, a Tudor-Gothic mansion built as a residence a few generations ago by the Armour meat-packing family and rescued from long neglect by Pinot Grigio profits — which are beating pork products hollow these days.
   It’s still a family affair, however, and you get the feeling that, though we’re no longer the hog butcher to the world, the Terlato family is going to make sure that Chicago will be the high-end grape juice vendor to America for a very long time to come. And yes, it does seem that that sort of title ought to belong to someone in California, but Midwesterners are quiet about this sort of thing. The company will admit to their favorite statistic: that one out of every eight bottles of wine selling for over $14 in the United States has their name on it.
   The nickel history. In 1946, Anthony Paterno purchased the Pacific Wine Company, a Chicago bottler of California wines. Nine years later, his son-in-law Anthony Terlato came to work for him after working in his father’s retail liquor store at Clark and Ridge in Rogers Park. Over the next 20 years, they began distributing, then importing, wines — as Paterno Imports — including Louis Latour and Beaulieu Vineyards. Readers of a certain age can gauge their success by the fact that Pacific was the company that brought Lancers, Mateus and Blue Nun to every restaurant table in the country that didn’t have a bottle of mustard on it. Fast forward to the late ‘70s, and Terlato is in northwest Italy visiting wineries. He stops for dinner and finds 14 bottles of a thing called Pinot Grigio on the wine list. Being smarter than you or I, he orders all 14, picks his favorite, visits Santa Margherita and cuts a deal to import it to the U.S. — and if you think you were drinking it before 1980, you grew up in the Piedmont. A very few years later, a glass of Pinot Grigio was in every paw at every cocktail party in North America. Today there are 569 versions on the shelves.
   They added more Italian wines to the portfolio, then more California wines.Then, in 1996, they bought Rutherford Hill Winery in the Napa Valley and started making wines — and moved the headquarters from its South California Avenue location next door to the city dog pound to the slightly more salubrious surroundings of 6-plus acres in the woods of Lake Bluff.
   In 2002 they sold the distribution business, and these days they’ve bought more California properties and are making their own under the Terlato Family Vineyards label (among the cleanest, most attractive labels on the shelves, incidentally). The 2004 Russian River Valley Pinot Grigio came out this summer at $24, the Dry Creek Valley Syrah (from Sonoma) is just now on the shelves for $35, and Angels’ Peak (a Bordeaux-style blend of Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot and Petite Verdot from Napa) will hit next April, priced at about $48. But the bulk of the business is still importing. They’ve got partnerships from the Loire Valley to New Zealand, selling wines from California, Oregon, Chile, Argentina, France, Italy, Australia and Greece.
   Yes, Greece. And get ready, this is not your father’s retsina. Terlato — the man who taught people to say Pinot Grigio — is about to teach America to say Moschofilero. “Nothing in their history would lead you to believe they could do this,” he says, “but there it is.” He found it in a blind tasting, he says, and was knocked out. He was so sure that America would jump on this wine that he convinced Boutari, the winemaker, to switch fully 25 percent of their production of other wines to make more of it. The company is using the same tactics they did with that Italian white selling it by the glass in restaurants, including Charlie Trotter’s and 80 others. Bob Chinn sold 100 cases to go with all those crabs the first month it was available, and Terlato says the company expects to sell 20,000 cases this year. I don’t doubt it. It’s a bright white, unoaked and crisp, full of citrus but with surprising floral and melon notes. Imagine fruity Frascati, or, well, a Pinot Grigio with melons and roses on the side.
   You’re going to love it, just as soon as you can pronounce it. Say mo-sko-feel-er-o, and toast Lake Bluff.

- by Terry Sullivan
©2005 by NORTH SHORE.