There's not much of a problem in picking up a bottle of wine these days. Stop at a wine and spirits shop (no longer called a liquor store) or maybe at one of a growing number of grocery stores offering hundreds of selections of chardonnay, cabernet or merlot to sip with dinner.

Easy, but not quite Jesse Colaizzi's idea of the best way to enjoy the fruit of the vine.

Jesse, who grew up in Kilbuck and now resides in Ben Avon, prefers preserving the link to the process of winemaking started by the cavemen and passed down to today's basement vintners, who produce a product that they believe is purer and tastier than any that can be found on store shelves.

"My Uncle Michael made wine for the family, but when he moved to Florida, we were out of wine, so I was inspired to make my own. His was good wine, unlike anything you buy in a store," Jesse, 27, said.

Uncle Mike also provided the wine for Jesse and his wife Heather's wedding reception -- 30 bottles of cabernet sauvignon, 30 bottles of Riesling. That personal touch provided additional inspiration for Jesse to carry on with the hobby.

"My uncle told me a few things and then I went to the books. My first bottling was from a kit, a process that is nearly impossible to screw up. That gave me some confidence and I took it from there."

The day after Christmas, three six-gallon jugs of Jesse's cabernet stood ready to be pumped into 116 bottles, 750 milliliters each, and then corked, the final steps in a process culminating months of preparation to arrive at this point.

But for Jesse, it was worth the wait and the work that started when he purchased buckets of grapes that had been pressed in California, strained, sulfited, stored in six-gallon buckets, and shipped to the Strip District, where he always is among the first in line so that he can to get the freshest shipment.

"What I buy in the Strip is called ‘must.’ When I first get must, I treat it with yeast that I buy from a lab in Canada to create enzymes to eat the pectin and break it down to a simple sugar for the yeast to eat. Really, it's all just bio-chemistry."

From beginning of the process to uncorking at the dinner table, the winemaking takes about 16 months of adding yeasts, occasional stirring, transferring to five-gallon glass jugs, setting in the jugs for four months, and then bottling. A one-year wait follows, with bottles tilted toward the cork. With a smile, Jesse says, "I'll be surprised if we don't open a bottle next week."

It's a precise process, and Heather takes over as chief vintner if Jesse is working out of town.

"I do things only when Jesse's away," Heather said. "He really enjoys it, and that makes me happy. I never even liked wine until I had his homemade!"

While it sounds complicated, Jesse points out that the process actually can be traced back to pre-Ice Age man -- probably back beyond that.

An instructor of video production and editing and director of Point Park University's cable television network, Jesse said that he loves his job, but, "I like to work with my hands, and this is a very physical thing to do. It's something that people have done for thousands of years, since the days of the cavemen."

He speaks of beverage anthropologists who have traced the history of winemaking from the earliest days to European guys making wine in their basements, and he admits that he enjoys the science as much as he likes the actual product.

That science leads him to explain why homemade wine is better for people than store-bought.

In store-bought wine, he explains, "There is an optional step right before bottling, a second round of sulfiting that detracts from the taste. The first sulfiting is nature's way of killing wild yeast lurking on the grapes before they are pressed. The second sulfiting is an additive used for preservation that you do not get in organic bottling.

Jesse runs his winery at a fairly independent pace, but he accepts help from volunteers, such as his father, Ted, who did all of the corking in the current production batch. "It's his hobby. I just help him out, if he asks," Ted said.

Friends provide bottles that Jesse sterilizes before re-use. "Sanitation is the maker or breaker of the entire process. You destroy a batch of wine if some bacteria get in there that shouldn't be there," Jesse said.

Cabernet bottled and corked, Jesse offers a sampling of his personal stock of mead, a honey-based drink also known as ambrosia, and in mythology, called "nectar of the gods."

Next on his bottling agenda will be a small batch of honey and fruit wine known as melomel. He points to his blueberry wine aging on racks in the basement, and he reminisces about a grapefruit wine, admitting, "I botched it, but I'm willing to try to make anything."

He also sees his hobby as a philosophical statement. "We live in a culture where a lot of people do not think. I see making wine as a sharpening of my survival skills. Being able to make something from your own hands, from scratch, as much as possible, is a skill that is important to keep."