Sipping Stories: Adventures in Vinomondo

We can enjoy wine at the same time, we're presenting it to everybody else.

and the way, It just kind of evolved.

It just kind of seemed to fall into our laps.

I, I just don't know how else to explain it.

It was, it's such a, uh, it's such a contrast to go from I.

T.

to the world of winemaking.

that's kind of a different avenue to take.

It's it's just a means of just sitting back and just looking at the world

and just saying, you know what?

I'm, just going to take it easy.

The wine is good.

Life's too short to drink cheap wine.

Hello, everyone and welcome to Total Michigan where we interview

ordinary Michiganders doing some pretty extraordinary things.

I'm your host, Cliff Duvernois.

Once again, I find myself in Port Huron and I'm always looking for

kind of like unique places to go, things that people are doing

that's just a little bit different.

And when I came across this place here, I thought this is so cool

because to me, it strikes me as a completely interactive wine experience.

And when I say that it's not just walking in sampling wine and walking out the door.

There's a lot more to it and to help guide us on this path today is going to be Brett

Sharnhorst of Vinomondo in Port Huron.

Brett, how are you?

I'm doing great Cliff.

Thanks for joining us today.

It's an honor to have you here.

Thank you.

And I'm really excited about this.

Uh, We get to talk about, wine, something that I absolutely love and yeah.

So, this is great.

If you would just tell us what is Vinomondo?

Vinomondo is a basically a do it yourself winery sort of situation.

So people can come in you can do a tasting if you want.

We offer flights, wine flights.

You can have a glass of wine if you want.

If there's a particular wine that you really just can't get enough

of, then we offer something unique.

You can actually order a batch of wine.

You can either get a batch of 15 bottles, or you can get a batch of 28 bottles.

We will actually go out and order the materials.

We will make that wine fresh for you, just for you.

And then, uh, it takes about eight to 10 weeks for it to be ready.

And then when it's ready, we call you up.

So you come on in and bottle your wine.

And if you have bottles of your own, that's great.

As long as they're clean.

But if not we can sell some bottles for you.

And they're relatively cheap.

And then, you come in, you can either come in by yourself, but we

recommend bringing in some friends.

And then we've got a whole facility in the back of our facility here, uh, the

back of the store where they can come in and they can just bottle their own wine.

They can drink their own wine while they're bottling it.

And It's really a great social event And it's just something that, to my

knowledge, nobody else in the Port Huron area or even southeastern Michigan does.

And I've been to a number of wineries throughout Michigan and, they

pride themselves on, we grow our own grapes and we bottle it here.

But in this particular case, this is some place where people can come and literally

just pick out the kinds of wines that they like, or if they like a red, or if they

like a white, if they like more fruity, if they, you know, and they can really, like

you said, customize it to their palate.

right, right.

So we don't have our own vineyard, obviously.

We're just on a little corner here at Lakeshore and

Kewadin here in Port Gratiot.

But what we do is we order the materials they're shipped in by our suppliers.

And the juices and the grapeskins, what have you, they come

in from all over the world.

They can come in from California.

Oregon, Italy, Spain Germany, South Africa, I mean just everywhere,

Australia, everywhere around the world.

And that's, the basis of our name, Vinomondo, which stands for World Wine.

We have all different types of wine to satisfy all sorts of palates.

We've got sweet wines, we've got dry reds, we've got whites we've got blushes.

Just, if there's any sort of wine that you enjoy, or even if you don't enjoy wine,

you know, we think we can convert you.

But we even have our own a handful of homemade brews here as well.

So something for every palette.

Brett, what I would like to do is I'd kind I'd like to talk

to you about your back story.

Like where are you from?

Where did you grow up?

So I personally grew up in Warren, Michigan, right around

the 12 Mile and Hoover area.

I ended up going to Bishop Foley High School in Madison Heights.

And that's pretty much just my whole youth story right there.

I got my degree, my bachelor's of science, I got it from Oakland University.

And then some years following that, I got my master's degree

from West Texas A& M University.

So I was kind of a late bloomer where that goes.

But that's my background is in I.

T.

Actually, I'm an I.

T.

Project manager for a company called Taubman, a wonderful place.

And that's just what I've been doing for all of these years.

That's what my career has been.

But through a series of events that took place over the course of my life.

I just found myself in a situation where I was talking to my wife and I said,

i'm not so certain about our retirement.

What are we going to do after we get to the point that?

Because you know it is an industry that is constantly evolving.

We've got people coming out of colleges that know so much more than I do.

And frankly, they can get paid less.

So it's, it's just something that kind of weighs on you after a while.

I mean, right now I'm a project manager, so I've evolved out of the,

development phase of things, but it's something that always stuck in my mind.

So, my wife and I, having been repeat customers of Vinomondo here for eight

to 10 years we thought, well, why don't we try our hand at making our

own wines and see how that works out.

So we started out something that was a grassroots operation.

And we learned shortly thereafter that the people who owned Vinomondo

here were looking to retire and sell.

So at that point we thought, well, why don't we maybe just pool our

resources and talk with the owners and see about buying this facility?

Because we didn't want this place to go away.

Our fear was that somebody was going to come in, put their own spin on it,

change how things worked around here.

The, the batch concept was absolutely a must have.

And that is something that we thought would probably be the

first thing that would get cut.

And we didn't want that because that's something that's

really unique to Vinomondo.

we went through the, uh, natural course and channels and everything.

We went through the process of, purchasing the winery and in

So Jackie and I have been, in owners of Vinomondo wineries since then.

You said that you're primarily in I.

T.

So why did you decide to get into I.

T.?

Well, I like wine.

Let's do that one again.

I thought it was

thought it was coffee.

I thought you had to be a guy to be an I.

T.

an guy.

So the reason why I wanted to get into IT was, when I was a little

kid, boy, I'm gonna date myself here.

When I was a little kid, there was a little store on the corner of 12

Mile and Shainer called Radio Shack.

And it was just an up and coming thing, and all the kids

used to gather down there.

And they had this little TV sitting there with a keyboard in front of it.

And it was called the TRS 80.

It was a little flat Keyboard kind of thing that you hooked up to your tv.

That quickly evolved into a love for just problem solving, you know, and and

coming up with ideas creating things out of the blue that You know, maybe

somebody else had never thought of.

So that's how my IT background developed.

Now, at what point in time did you decide, to start exploring the world of wine?

So interestingly enough, I wasn't always a wine lover.

I really didn't get into wine until fairly recently.

Probably right around the same time that Vinomondo got its start.

And it's not because, you know, we came to Vinomondo back then.

It was just something that I'd never really been that interested in.

I was more of a beer guy.

I drank a lot of soda pop.

That kind of stuff.

and when I did drink wine, I gravitated toward the sweeter wines as most people

do when, when, you know, they just get started out and drinking wine.

Right.

I didn't really think much about getting into other wines and

broadening my palate for that.

but.

Again, what happened was some friends of ours would go over to Canada

and they had a place over there where you could make your own wine.

Actually, what they made was wine spritzers.

Remember back in the day, you know, when you would mix some,

uh, some sweet, soda pop in with a wine and then you had spritzers.

So there was a place over there in Canada that actually excelled in that.

Well, they ended up closing and our friends were like, okay,

well now what are we going to do?

Cause you know, we liked the wine spritzers.

We would actually, give them some money and They would go

ahead and buy some for us.

But then our friends found this place, Vinomondo, and they said,

you know what, you guys really got to come check this out.

This was, this is a really fascinating place.

So we came, the four of us, we came here and we did a tasting and

I was just, I was struck, I had never been that much of a wine fan.

But then I tried the wines here and this is why I keep telling

people, you know, you got to come here You got to try this out.

The wine is just so flavorful.

And it's not a super dry wine.

I mean even the dry wines are not that super dry.

It's just very flavorful on the palate.

And I was so struck with the flavor that I wanted to broaden my sense

Of, flavors for the wine and on all the different tastes that we had.

So now that's how I started getting from sweet wines into the semi dries,

getting into the whites, getting into the dries, and then even going beyond that.

Now that we've started experimenting with doing some bourbon, no

confusions with the dry reds.

And that's what we've got today with, with the Chairman of the Board that's

sitting here in front of us right now.

That really expanded my palate.

And it's just, like I say, it's the experience and really having a taste

of some really good wine that will really change your mind about any

preconceptions you had about how wine is or how it tastes or anything like that.

And that's what I would just recommend to anybody.

While I think you bring up a good point there.

Because this is something that I have found often to be very

challenging, is that it's just the approachability of wine.

Because I know a lot of people out there, I personally, I, I love a

good glass of wine with dinner.

I appreciate it so much.

But when I talk to other people about it, they're almost afraid to try it

because, you know, like if you go to a grocery store or something, there's

just so much that's on the shelf.

You don't know what to pick.

What's going to go good with what.

Even, even if you did, if you even go back to the old rule about,

red wine goes with red meat.

Right, Even if you remember that basic concept right there, still, it's like

you're sweating bullets because am I going to spend 20 on something that I

am not going to like, So it sounds like.

Vinomondo has found a way around that.

Well, yeah.

First of all, the rules are there are no rules.

I mean, when it comes to wine.

There are no rules.

You know, you have some people that will say, well, you got

to drink red wine with a meat.

And you got to drink white wine with a chicken.

You got to drink white wine with a fish.

You know what?

You drink what tastes good to you.

So, so two points to be made here.

First of all, when you mentioned the fact that you go to the store

and you buy a bottle off the shelf.

That to me has always been a problem.

Because when you go to a big box store and you pull a bottle off the shelf,

you don't know what you're getting and you're probably paying anywhere

from 15 to 20 for a bottle of wine.

And you can't just open it up and pour yourself a glass right there and taste

it and go, yeah, I don't like this.

And then put it back on the shelf.

You know, when you take it home, you're right.

You're stuck with it.

We won't let that happen here.

We want to make sure you're happy with the wine.

And what's more is that, because of the way we make the wines,

we are so competitively priced.

I will stake our wines against any big box store wine, any big box

store wine for flavor and, for cost.

And for the after effects.

So a lot of these wines that you're going to see in these big box stores are going

to have these additional sulfites added to them because they have to sit on a shelf.

They got to be prepared to sit on a shelf for who knows how long

Our wine is not designed for that.

Our wine is designed that when you drink this, you're, when you taste it, you're

going to be like, I got to drink this.

I don't expect this to last long.

So we don't add any artificial sulfites to our wine.

It's about drinking the wine.

It's not about making something that's going to be worth, a

million dollars down the road.

We want you to enjoy the wine.

We want you to enjoy the flavor.

Now, that's not to say there aren't sulfites in wine.

There's always natural sulfites in wine.

I have heard of some locations that, you know, make contentions that, you know,

we don't have any sulfites in our wine.

Well, I think what they mean is they don't have any artificial sulfites

in their wine, which is fair to say.

But you can't put a label on a bottle that says there's no sulfites.

Right.

in any event, what we can do and what we do say is we don't

add any artificial sulfites.

And it's intended to that, you know, our, our bottles last about one to four years.

We've got four years of, uh, wine sitting at home and I can still open up

one today and it tastes just as great as it was when we first bottled it.

It's aged a little.

So it's smoothed out a little, but you know, it doesn't taste like vinegar

by any stretch of the imagination.

It's still a very good wine.

And you brought that up and I'm glad that you did because there's been a lot of

times where I have gone out and bought a red, like a California red or something

from Oregon and had one or two glasses.

That's it.

I don't like being drunk.

And I do not want to be hung over the next day.

But still, after one or two glasses the next day, sometimes

my head is pounding so hard.

And I just completely don't get it.

And I, I've always reasoned it was because of the sulfites.

I did read, some sort of a report recently that refuted the notion that

it was sulfites, that it was some sort of a different chemical compound

Sponsored by the national sulfite association

Possibly, possibly, right.

But, uh, yeah, I've, my experience, my personal experience

has been it's the sulfites.

Uh, Like I say, it's the sulfites.

I have never in all my years, and it's been probably 10 years now that

I've been drinking Vinomondo wine.

And all my years of drinking Vinomondo wine, I've never had a day after headache.

I might feel a little sluggish.

But that's my own fault for not drinking water and staying hydrated.

But it, I don't feel any sort of ill effects after the day after

Sweet.

For our audience, we're going to take a quick break and thank our sponsors.

When we come back, we're going to talk to Brett a lot more about the

philosophy of Vinomondo and what you can expect when you come here.

We'll see you after the break.

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Hello everyone and welcome back to Total Michigan where we interview

ordinary Michiganders doing some pretty extraordinary things.

I'm your host, Cliff Duvernois.

Today, we're talking with Brett Scharnhorst of Vinomondo

over here in Port Huron.

And before the break, we were talking about how you've got this career in IT.

You're in project management.

you're now discovering this world of wine at Vinomondo.

And all of a sudden, Vinomondo is like the owners are like, yeah, we want to retire.

We want to get out and get out.

And the best way I can describe it is you had this Homer Simpson moment

where you're just like, hey, let's do, Let's let's buy this place, right?

So talk to us why, why would you think about, cause you didn't

grow up on a vineyard, right?

You didn't grow up growing grapes.

So my question is, is why would you think let's buy this place?

right?

Well, you know, I like you said I I grew up in total suburbia.

I'm in classic suburbia.

so what would make me think about something like that?

Well Um First of all, it's the product.

I just have total faith in the product.

When I came upon this and I tasted the wine, I said, I can do this.

This is something we could do.

I had a lot of talks with, with Jackie, my wife.

And I can't say enough wonderful things about her because she has been so

patient with me, through this journey.

And she's right there, right alongside me with it.

And, she's just a wonderful, wonderful person.

But we've had many talks about this and she's supported, she's

been supportive through all of it.

we just kind of felt that, this would probably be a decent way to go.

you know, We can enjoy wine at the same time, we're

presenting it to everybody else.

and the way, It just kind of evolved.

It just kind of seemed to fall into our laps.

I, I just don't know how else to explain it.

It was, it's such a, uh, it's such a contrast to go from I.

T.

to the world of winemaking.

people when I tell people that they just kind of look at me and go, really?

that's kind of a different avenue to take.

But it's it's a lot more laid back I guess in a manner of speaking.

It's it's just a means of just sitting back and just looking at the world

and just saying, you know what?

I'm, just going to take it easy.

The wine is good.

Life's too short to drink cheap wine.

Amen to that.

Yeah Yeah

What is the Vinomondo experience when they walk through that door?

What can people expect?

What can they have?

Maybe to take a step back, I mean, how Vinomondo got its start was it was just a,

a straight up wit, wine kit sales winery.

A gentleman by the name of Sal Vitale opened it up.

It was just, uh, one little section of this building we're in right now.

He didn't do any sort of winemaking whatsoever.

That lasted a year, maybe two.

I don't know for sure.

and then the, The new owners, the people we purchased it

from took over the Healy's.

And that's when they got started into this concept of doing batches.

And through the course of the next, 15 years or so, uh, they expanded it.

So that's when the tasting room got added on, which is what we're sitting

in right now, the tasting room.

We also added on the kitchen.

I say we, they added on the kitchen.

provided some, you know, light finger food fare.

And then they would, provide events and things like that.

You know, uh, birthday parties, bachelorette parties,

things of that nature.

In addition to providing the, the retail area where you can buy bottles of wine.

There was a gift shop out there.

And then of course the batches.

going to shift the focus a little bit away from being a boutique.

We wanted to get the wine up.

And first and foremost, we wanted to get it up front and

get that exposed to everybody.

So getting back to your question now, what is somebody going to expect when they

come walking into Vinomondo Wine Room?

Well, first of all, you're going to come walking into our retail area, you're going

to see a lot of wine all over the place.

And, as time evolves, we've got plans for the future that we're going to

have, you know, wine on the walls.

You know, right now we've got it on shelving units, but we're

going to put it up on the walls.

You're going to come and you're going to be surrounded with wine.

You're going to be greeted by somebody, and the first thing we're going to ask

you is, Do you want to try some wine?

You're welcome.

We got some wine for you to try.

If you want standard question, right?

I mean, you're here to try some wine, right?

So at that point, you know, you have a choice.

You can, come into the tasting room.

If you want to do a flight, sit down, enjoy yourself, have a good time.

Or if you're just kind of meandering around you, you're not sure what you want.

So at that point in time, we would ask you, well, what is it you like in a wine?

What is it?

Do you like in general, if you come to me and you ask me,

what kind of wine should I get?

I'm going to look at you and I'm going to say, what do you like to taste?

what flavors you like.

if you prefer sweet, if you prefer dry, then I can guide you in that direction.

And then we can help you find the wine that it is that you enjoy.

And then, you can sample some wines.

Like I said, we do offer a number of small tastings, you know, just

get a feel for whatever you like.

At that point then you can either purchase a bottle if you want.

Or you can come into the tasting room.

We can sit down, you can get a flight, you can try five different

wines in a flight if you want.

Or if you know what you like, you get a full glass of wine if you want to do that.

If you want to drink an entire bottle here, you can do that as well.

We'll get you a bottle to open up and you can, and you can drink it here.

Then, if you really like the wine that much, here comes the batch concept.

What you can do is I'll take, for example, the Tremita Riesling we've got right here.

That's one of the ones that's available in batch.

If you say, I want to, I love that Tremita Riesling so much.

I can't get enough of it.

And I just, 12 bottles, that's pricey.

Well, I'll tell you what, let's go with a batch then.

Because that cuts down the cost per bottle of of your wine.

And so how that works then is you tell us, I want to get an

order of the Tremita Riesling.

We go ahead and note your order.

We go ahead and order the materials to make that wine for you.

It's not something we keep on hand.

We don't have vats of wine sitting here ready to be bottled.

We want you to have fresh wine, right?

So we will go out and order the materials necessary to make that wine for you.

It takes about eight to ten weeks.

We take it through the entire fermentation process.

In the back here, we've got these white buckets, we've got

carboys, uh, we go ahead and make the wine here on the premises.

And then it goes through its fermentation process.

Takes about eight to 10 weeks.

And then when it gets through the fermentation and the filtering

process, we call you up and tell you your wine's ready.

Come on in and bottle it.

And when you come in and bottle it, , that is an experience in

itself because it's really a joy.

You, you really don't know how fun it is to do it until

you've tried doing it yourself.

We've got a bottler, an automated bottler, bottling machine that sits right there.

You put the bottle in it fills it up, it stops automatically.

You take the bottle out of there, you turn it around, there's a pneumatic

cork, or you put it in the corking machine, drop the cork in, shut the door.

It automatically pushes the cork in for you.

Done.

You take the bottle out of there.

You move over to another table.

You put a foil on top of it.

We've got a hot air gun.

You shoot the hot air gun at this foil.

It automatically shrinks, shrink wraps to it, shrinks it down.

Done.

And then comes the label.

Now, most of our wines, not all of them, but most of them come with standard

labels that you can put on there, or you can get your own label if you want.

The labels that we've got available just run the gamut.

We have had people come up with some, incredibly inventive label labels.

some it's not that much.

It's, you know, it can vary anywhere from, a dollar to a few

dollars per label, It's such fun.

It's just so much fun.

And we can do the labels here on the premises as well.

Everything can be done right here on the premises.

Which is probably one of the most important things to, you know, get across,

is that we don't bring anything in.

This is all Michigan made stuff.

We do it right here.

We bring the supplies in from elsewhere, but we're making

the wine here on the premises.

I can imagine that the appeal for some people doing this is if you're going to

have a bridal shower, or some kind of like a wedding rehearsal dinner, or something

and you wanted to create a gift that was completely unique with like your label

on it or You know or like a retirement dinner or I mean the when I was going

through the labels and reading all of them that you had back there It was amazing.

Just how many different occasions Uh, customized bottle of wine.

You can just, like, elevate

Yeah, yeah, that's right.

Now, the bottles you see in front of us here, these are 750 milliliter bottles.

But we also offer 375 milliliter bottles, which are the half bottles,

right, which are half the size.

We call them split bottles.

but they're half this size.

And they're perfect for weddings.

Like you said, in fact, is Jackie and I.

We just did that for one of our kids, this past August for his, his wedding.

you can do, uh, you know, and so instead of having 28 bottles in a full

batch, you can get 56 split bottles.

And you know, you fill those up.

And then, you can put a label on them, congratulations on

your wedding and what have you.

And then you can put them on the tables at weddings and we

have a lot of people doing that.

We've had, companies come in.

And they will purchase carboys of wine and they will give the wine, bottles of

wine to, customers, to, their employees.

We've had people come in and, they will just, buy, purchase

bottles of wine for their business.

So it's, it's very diverse.

There's a lot of different applications that you can use for this.

And again, it's great wine.

And you were talking before about cause it was just a cute little story you

were talking before about the bottling the actual bottling of the wine.

And you were sharing a story about how you had eight people

Oh, yes.

Yes.

So we've had some repeat customers who come in.

I mean, they've been repeat customers longer than Jackie

and I have even been involved.

So we're talking about over 10 years.

They've been the repeat customers of Vinomondo.

And they still come around today.

We've gotten to know these people very well.

But we do have instances, you know, where it's become a huge social event.

When they come in to bottle wine, we can set up a bluetooth speaker back there.

They can play some music.

In this instance that you were describing, you know, there were

eight ladies that came in, they were bottling the wine, they're sampling

the wine and they're singing along.

And they're playing the same song over and over and over.

It was great fun.

they had a blast.

And it, and that's exactly what it's about.

It's about having fun and they were enjoying the wine and then,

they came in here and sat down and had something to eat afterwards.

but that's what it's all about.

You know, the bottling experience is all about having fun.

And I, I, putting it into words just doesn't do justice to it.

It's just a great thing to do.

And it's a lot of fun.

Doing it by yourself, it's probably not quite as fun.

But you bring people in with you and it's a huge blast.

It's just a blast.

I don't think that's ever been uttered on the show before.

The words wine and fun in the same sentence.

Well, I don't know.

Some people might argue

argue that.

And I'm not saying it's not.

I'm not.

it's just an observation on my part.

So take it for what It's worth.

Brett, if somebody's listening to this and they want to come and check out

Vinomondo on your website, stop by, try a sample of this headache free

wine that you have here, what would be the best way for them to do that?

Your website?

VinomondoWinery.

com

And we also have a Facebook page.

We've got an Instagram page.

And we've got a, uh, ex formerly known as Twitter page.

best way to So, really the best way to keep up on all the doings that we've

got going on is, uh, our Facebook page.

Sweet.

Brett, thank you so much for taking time to chat with us today.

Really appreciate it.

Thank you, Cliff.

Again, it's great to have you here.

Awesome.

For our audience, uh you can always roll on over to Total Michigan.

com and click on Brett's interview and get the links that he mentioned above.

We'll see you next time when we talk to another Michigander doing

some pretty extraordinary things.

We'll see you then.