Wauwatosa winemaking duo having 'time of our lives'

For these two best friends, home winemaking is a pastime, it’s an obsession — and just maybe it’s a steppingstone to a future career.

In the basement of Daniel Ratzburg’s home in Wauwatosa, he and Landon Carus get together on Tuesday evenings to make batch after batch of wine, which they give away to friends, family and neighbors.

It’s become what Ratzburg, 29, calls “an aggressive hobby.”

They’ve dubbed their amateur winery Double Daylo, which combines their first names. And they’ve put together a website,  where you’ll see an owl-with-a-wineglass logo that’s a nod to an owl figurine they used to pass on the way to Club Tap in Wauwatosa.

Sorry, you can’t buy it

Double Daylo operates “under the home brewing laws,” so none of the wine is sold and they “make sure to keep it below the legal limit of 200 gallons a year,” Ratzburg explained.

Nevertheless, it adds up to hundreds of bottles of wine stored in his basement. (At first they reused bottles, but as their hobby has progressed, they’ve begun purchasing new bottles, at a cost of about $1.25 each, to save the trouble of scraping labels off old bottles.)

For fermentation, they use about nine glass carboys, as well 10 stainless steel beer kegs. Each keg, they’ve learned, holds 75 bottles of wine.

It was Carus, 31, who first introduced his buddy to wine and winemaking about four years ago through a friend who was into winemaking.

Previously, they had been content to while away their free time bowling or playing video games, but they “went ahead and made one batch of strawberry wine and thought — this is fun,” as Carus tells it.

“We kind of got into it because you can make wine cheaper than you can buy it,” he laughed, saying that winemaking has evolved into a “cool hobby — I like the ownership of it, making the wines ourselves.”

They are learning as they go. The Purple Foot, a brewing supply company in Greenfield, is where they go for equipment, information and recipes. And they’ve joined the Wisconsin Vintners Association, an educational organization for home winemakers.

It’s all about the fruit

Most of what they make is semi-sweet fruit wine, often blended with grape-based wine. They consider Raspberry Cabernet to be their flagship creation.

For fresh fruit, they shop at Costco or Woodman’s, while Wisconsin cranberries are purchased at a frozen food warehouse in Stevens Point.

They’re always happy to make use of donated fruit. One of Carus’ neighbors, for example, gives him rhubarb in the summer in exchange for a few bottles of wine. And a co-worker swaps peaches for peach wine.

“Hey, if you’ve got fruit, we’re interested,” said Carus.

Being able to taste the fruit in the wine is important to them.

“If it’s blueberry wine, we want to taste the blueberries,” he said, adding that they do blind taste tests to make sure they can tell what fruit is in the bottle.

One of his favorite wines is Blueberry Pluot, which they bottled a couple of years ago — and that’s the wine Carus will be using for a toast at his wedding to fiancée Roni Christensen in September. (They would make more of this wine but have had difficulty finding a good source for pluots, which are a cross between plums and apricots.)

They’ve also started working with classic wine grapes — and have made their first batch of Syrah, using grapes purchased through the vintners association.

Supportive wives

According to the guys, at least, Carus’ betrothed and Ratzburg’s wife, Andrea, are totally on board with this hobby run amok.

“The women in our lives have supported us through every step,” wrote Ratzburg in an email. “We couldn't be more thankful for them allowing us to have vast space and time taken up for our hobby. They also enjoy the countless glasses of wine they have to taste test for us.” He added that the women are starting to make some of their own batches of wine.

And he joked that their 4-year-old daughter corked her first bottle recently.

Both Ratzburg and Carus work at RitterTech in Pewaukee, which distributes hydraulic equipment. And while they figure they’d have to keep their day jobs to make ends meet, they dream of opening a commercial winery, perhaps within a couple of years.

“We want to be the people you buy your wine from,” Ratzburg said.

No hurry to go big

But launching a full-scale winery is both complicated and expensive.

Money, of course, is a major stumbling block. They have not yet drawn up a business plan, but their rough estimate is that it would cost between $30,000 and $100,000 to get a commercial winery off the ground.

And as Ratzburg outlined, “Legality is a very large factor when it comes to going commercial.  Location, recipes, labels, names, etc., all have to be approved by the governing agency, which is quite the lengthy process (potentially a year or more from first request to final approval).”

For now, he said, “We are having the time of our lives making wine and being able to share it with friends and family. We aren't in a rush to go commercial.”

His winemaking partner agrees: “We don’t know if we want to pull the trigger on a winery," Carus said. "But we’re having too much fun to stop.”

Anne Schamberg is a freelance writer who lives in Waukesha. Email her at aschamberg@gmail.com.