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Gino Razzi / Photo by Jeff Alexander
This is the first installment of a two part profile of Gino Razzi, owner and winemaker of Penns Woods Winery.
A sure way to extract the best from Gino Razzi is to challenge him.
Leaning over a tasting table at the Penns Woods Winery facility in Eddystone, Pennsylvania, Razzi’s voice echoes through the room as he cuts foil from atop a bottle. He launches into a critique of his Delaware County-grown, barrel fermented, 2005 Pinot Grigio. Barrel fermented? Five years old?
“I’m trying to prove to myself what’s possible, what’s not possible,” he insists. “Everybody says, ‘You can’t do this, you can’t do this.’ Don’t tell me before that I can’t do it. Just watch me.”
Spend part of a day with Razzi, listen to his story, and you come away with the impression that he just may be the guy who can help train Pennsylvania into a serious vinicultural contender. Born in Abruzzi, Italy, he came to the United States in 1962. His mother was born in Philadelphia before returning to Europe as a girl, and his sister and uncles also lived in the area. As a young man, Razzi decided to relocate to the States where he joined the Marines, served in Vietnam, then set off for college in California. With the help of some local business people he credits to this day, he started his own wine importing business in the early Seventies which he still operates out of the Eddystone zip code.
In 2002, a few years after he launched Symposium, a Montepulciano d’Abruzzo he created in Italy, Razzi began producing wine from a tract of 30-year old vines in Concord Township, near Chadds Ford. He always admired the winemaking process but freely admits it was the most difficult transition he ever made. “It’s hard to make wine,” he acknowledges. There were failures, like the Chambourcin that fell short of expectations. Razzi learned that more rapidly ripening grape varietals fare better in the face of the compressed Pennsylvania growing season and less-than-ideal temperatures and sun conditions. “Most vinifera grapes can be grown here,” he says, then, as if reminding himself, returns, “I really don’t know what those grapes can do.”
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Razzi at the Eddystone facility / J. Alexander
“It’s good for a Pennsylvania wine.” Razzi doesn’t want to hear any qualifiers attached to his product. It’s patronizing, uninformed. He refuses to be a second class wine citizen. Good wine is good wine, plain and simple, he insists. “We can make some whites over here that will knock your socks off. In a good year, you can make the reds too.”
Some varietals have clearly hit home under Razzi’s care. Sitting down with more than a dozen of his wines underscores the potential. His low and sometimes gravelly voice skips along, high pitched and sing-song as he describes the Penns Woods process and lifts a glass to his face. His whites are indeed clean and vibrant, and the 2008 Traminette – a hybrid grape that crosses Gewurztraminer and another white, Joannes Seyve 23.416 – nearly cuts the tongue with sharp acidity, spilling delicious juicy peach flavors that linger in the mouth like a sunset.
Well made and with structure to age, Razzi’s reds are complex, earthy and display a different quality than many American wines, with oak in check and bright red fruits that don’t lose a lot in winemaking translation. The 2005 Ameritage Reserve has spice, intense sour cherry and game meat flavors. His 2005 Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon is not a vanilla-oaky, paint-by-numbers wine. There are crafted layers and an unbelievably lasting finish.
Penns Wood Cabernet Reserve / J. Alexander
“You don’t make (the wines) in the winery, you make them in the vineyard,” Razzi says. “If you get an ‘8’ grape, you get an '8' wine.” Then he further punctuates his point, “Pay the most attention and don’t screw it up.”
Penns Woods wines are available at the winery’s Chadds Ford and Eddystone locations. They are also sold in restaurants like Capital Grill in Philadelphia.
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