Alyssa Cwanger, Post-Gazette Three-year-old Gionna Quarzo, left, and her friend Joanna Medofer, 9, take a turn at the wine press at the Brownsville home of Gionna's "Pap Pap," Dick Quarzo. Family and friends of all ages turned out to make this year's wine. Mr. Quarzo welcomed the youngsters' help with a teasing, "Just don't let your mother see." Click photo for larger image. Related article Food is essential to 'Taste of Italy' event A Taste of Italy Wine Tasting & Italian Buffet When: Oct. 15, 7 p.m. Where: Sons of Italy Lodge, Race Street, Brownsville, Fayette County (just off Route 40). Attendees (the hall holds up to 250) get a souvenir wine glass for tasting the wines of 19 or more local wine makers with a smorgasbord of homemade Italian hors d'oeuvres, music and more. Admission: $25 in advance or $30 at the door, to benefit the Brownsville Area Revitalization Corp.; raffle tickets for a three-night trip to Niagara-on-the-Lake, Canada, plus $700 cash, are $10. Raffle proceeds will be used to renovate the former Plaza Theater pipe organ. People who make (but don't sell) wine may bring samples and be part of the event. To do so, call the number below by Oct. 12. Awards will be given for best dry red, best dry white, best dry rose, best sweet wine and the people's choice. Otherwise, says the corporation's Caroline Fecek, "People just mingle and talk." And drink and eat. Information: 724-785-3520.

The first evening of autumn still feels like summer -- blue-skied and balmy, the air filled with the high pitches of children and yard tools. But here in the Hiller neighborhood of Brownsville, Fayette County, trees have started to spill yellowed leaves onto the lawns.

An even surer sign of the season is all the cars parked on the grass and along the gravel alley behind Dick Quarzo's house.

The open attached garage is the scene of all the action: A dozen men loudly working with plastic tanks and hoses and odd-looking contraptions. Inside, the air is hot and heavy with laughter and fruit flies. The floor is covered with cardboard. The cardboard is getting covered with purple.

It is autumn, time for making wine.

"This is all natural -- no preservatives, no yeast, no nothin'," says Mr. Quarzo, leader of this loose group of Brownsville-area wine lovers who help make, drink and good-humoredly critique each other's wines.

Several of them are donating bottles to next Saturday's "A Taste of Italy" wine tasting and Italian buffet at the Frank Ricco Sons of Italy Lodge 731. The fund-raiser for the Brownsville Area Revitalization Corp. is unusual in that it features homemade vino and the folks who make it.

The event, now in its fourth year, was the idea of Mr. Quarzo, a barber who is the Sons of Italy president. His father, Leo, like so many other immigrants from Italy, made his own wine. It was his father who convinced him to build the space for a tiny wine cellar at the back of the garage. Mr. Quarzo says there are no words for how thankful he is that he took the advice.

"I know he's looking down at me and smiling," he says as he pours a plastic glass of his cabernet sauvignon. It's nearly black, and rich with the aromas and flavors of blackberry and of oak, from the new Western Pennsylvania-made barrels in which he ages it for at least a year.

For more than 30 autumns now, he and some of the others have continued this tradition that goes back much farther with their mostly Italian forebears. It's a tradition that's very much alive throughout this region, where homemade hootch frequently, and usually affectionately, gets referred to as "dago red."

"D-A-Y-G-O red," jokes friend and neighbor Rich Dascenzo.

The guys laugh, but they make some pretty sophisticated stuff -- cabernet and zinfandel and merlot and blends from California grapes that they buy in huge quantity from the Strip District.

	Alyssa Cwanger, Post-Gazette From left, Erman Hartman of McMurray, Ron Filiaggi of Donegal Township and Sam Taylor of Brownsville squeeze together in the Quarzo garage/wine cellar. Click photo for larger image.

The recipes haven't much changed. Basically, you squeeze together the ingredients -- grapes, and friends and relatives -- then allow things to get better over time.

"There are two things that will kill wine: air and impatience," says Mr. Quarzo, who's prone to such pronouncements as they work.

A week earlier, the guys crushed his grapes and set them to fermenting. On this night, Sept. 22, they're turning purple as they drain the juice and squeeze out the rest with their hands and with iron-and-oak manual presses.

It's the nearly dry "brick" of grape skins, seeds and stems that is left that earlier generations mixed with water and sugar to make a potent "second wine."

Mr. Dascenzo teases Mr. Quarzo about how his father was so thrifty that he pressed the grapes into a brick dense enough to sharpen his barber razor on it.

"They got as much out of it as they could," says Mr. Dascenzo, who still uses the leftover "must" to make some secondo, or second wine. He sometimes works with other ingredients, too, such as peaches or pears. One wag shouts, "They say Richie can make wine outta rocks!"

Alyssa Cwanger, Post-Gazette Richard Quarzo Jr., right, puts some elbow grease to the wine press. Click photo for larger image.

"But we all go back to the grape," Mr. Dascenzo says. "The grape is the wine."

Several of them are old Italian guys. But some are younger, including Mr. Quarzo's son (who lives next door) and his son-in-law (who lives nearby and who is Croatian). They are utility workers, teachers, a restaurateur, an auto parts stores owner, even a "Doc" -- podiatrist Alan Sally, who warns, "My wine is for medicinal purposes only."

Over the next several days, they'll go house to house, helping Doc and others with their wines. It sounds like a lot of toil, but they don't look at it that way.

As the evening deepens, so do Mr. Quarzo's pours. When the wine barrels are full and most of the equipment is hosed off, he announces, "OK, guys. Come over here and eat!"

Just as she did the week before, for the crushing, Mr. Quarzo's wife, Norma, has put out a spread of food: pizza, wings, chips and dip, and a salad of tomatoes, onions, cucumbers and basil, all from the garden just across the alley.

Everybody, from "Pap Pap" Quarzo to some of his granddaughters, sits out on the patio under the big, starry sky and eats and drinks and talks -- the kind of thing they'll be doing at next Saturday's fund-raising event.

The talk inevitably turns to the old days, which weren't so good for Italians, who often were dirt-poor and treated like dirt besides, they say. But, reminisces Carl DellaPenna, "When somebody came to the house, they had to have something to put on the table."

	Alyssa Cwanger, Post-Gazette All hands got into the low-tech action, little changed from decades ago. Click photo for larger image.

As a boy, he can remember making wine with his grandfather and, after he died, with his grandmother. After she died, his father stopped doing it altogether.

Then, last year, Mr. DellaPenna and his father returned to making wine, including the beloved muscatel. Their family loves to pour a little on just-drained forkfuls of hot pasta, which they eat with fresh ground pepper as a soupy, soul-warming appetizer pronounced scatone.

"C'mon, mangia," Mr. Quarzo says, encouraging his friends, old and new, to eat some more.

Crickets purr as Mr. Dascenzo gets up to walk home. Mr. DellaPenna invites him over to their place that weekend for the finishing touches on his and his dad's wine.

"We're having steaks afterward," Mr. DellaPenna says.

"I'm not asking you to work."

"A Taste of Italy" features "good old-fashioned Italian food," says Brownsville Mayor Norma J. Ryan. She shares family recipes used at the event with Post-Gazette readers.