The Strawberry Winemaker

Rising out only a few miles from swampland, the flat, humid sprawl of Independence, La., is about as far as you can get from the rolling hills of Napa Valley, Calif. Henry Amato hasn’t let this stand in the way of his becoming a successful winemaker, though, even if he has had to bend the industry’s traditions a little bit to make it happen.

For starters, Amato doesn’t use grapes. Why should he, when he lives in the heart of Tangipahoa Parish’s strawberry capitol? The son of strawberry farmers, Amato grew up in a landscape that, each spring, was dotted with miles of the plump red berries.

“I remember when we would go into town and load them directly into boxcars where they would go up North,” he says in a voice that rarely climbs above a gentle whisper. Amato is so close to the fruit he can even remember how, in a time before plastic, he would cover the growing fruit under a protective mulch of pine needles and twigs that his family had him gather—the straw which gave the berries their name.

Strawberry wine was a family tradition introduced by his Sicilian grandparents. Spurred by the farmer’s rule that nothing goes to waste, anything that couldn’t be sold went either to the local cannery or to the whiskey barrels used to ferment the ripe berries over the next year.

Changing times took farming away from the center of family life, with Amato working as a pipefitter and later a landscaper. But Independence never lets its own get too far away from strawberries. Still farming several acres of strawberries on the side, Amato launched Amato’s Winery Inc. in 1993 with three recipes handed down from his grandmother for dry, sweet, and semisweet strawberry wine.

The company had modest aspirations—just finding a few people willing to give his wine a try was a good enough start. But after acting as his own distributor and primary salesman at local farm stands and farmers markets, Amato found the adventurous palates he was looking for.

“A lot of folks say, ‘I haven’t had this in 40 years,’ when they try it,” says Richard McCarthy, director of the Crescent City Farmers Market in New Orleans where Amato has been a vendor for years. “And young people who are not that familiar with wine find it far less intimidating.”

Amato isn’t competing with grape vintners in other regions such as the Pacific Northwest. He’s friendly with the handful of local competitors and doesn’t trouble himself trying to appeal to connoisseurs. “People know what they like,” he says, “so everybody is their own wine connoisseur.”

Before long, he found enough enthusiasts to give his business a lift and expanded his operations significantly in the late ’90s when he was able to salvage vats from an old Coca-Cola plant, redesigning them as distillation tanks. “From Coca-Cola comes strawberry wine,” McCarthy muses.

And he also has found a way to help other local farmers profit from their excess harvest while expanding his own product line. In addition to buying more strawberries, Amato now uses local blueberries and oranges as well. While orange wine (another Sicilian tradition) does especially well around the annual Orange Festival in nearby Belle Chasse, La., his blueberry wine has taken off in Japan, where Amato now ships upwards of 1,200 cases a year. Blueberries, it seems, are the subject of a minor Japanese health craze.

Now earning a full-time living from his winemaking with the help of his wife, Jessie, and a small staff of part-time workers, Amato remains close to the process. In addition to overseeing the entire distillation process personally, he still makes the local delivery rounds throughout Tangipahoa and mans the tasting tables himself.

“If you ask to see the winemaker of a Louisiana wine, you’re probably also going to be talking to the guy who cuts the grass and washes down the buildings,” he says.

But as his business matures, Amato has made one concession to mainstream wine tradition. His latest vintage also is his first grape wine. Of course, that grape also happens to be muscadine, a mainstay crop of southeast Louisiana. But then Amato never did have an interest in straying too far away from home.

Michael Depp is a writer in New Orleans.

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