It&rsquo;s probably not the best thing for Michael Amigoni&rsquo;s grapes that the gray sky has opened up at dawn, just as he arrives at his 10-acre vineyard southeast of Kansas City.</p><p> But here he is in a blue rain slicker, coordinating a crew of grape pickers who shrug off the downpour as they wrap themselves in ponchos and black plastic-bag leggings.</p><p> Neat arrangements of leafy vines stretch across the rolling site from a gravel farm road on the west to a hilltop red barn and beyond. Amigoni designates three rows of plants near the vineyard&rsquo;s entrance as the starting point for this day&rsquo;s harvest. Each row is 250 feet long and planted with 50 gnarly vines five feet apart. Clusters of round purple grapes hang heavy amid the lush green and bronze foliage, and the harvesters will kneel down and snip them off with pruners throughout the day.</p><p> Amigoni plans to harvest as much as four tons of grapes on this drippy day. Wineries and vineyards around the area have been picking grapes for weeks now. But Amigoni&rsquo;s muddy harvest is different from most around these parts. The grapes his workers are tossing into blue tubs represent a risk and a challenge few, if any, other Missouri winemakers have taken up.</p><p>While most Missouri wines come from hybrid grapes devised to conquer the state&rsquo;s tough weather extremes, Amigoni is growing <em>Vitis vinifera</em>, or grape varieties associated with the great wines of the world. For starters, he has Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc. He also is experimenting with Petit Verdot, a blending grape associated with Bordeaux wines, and a year ago he produced the first known Missouri barrel of Mourvedre, best known for its role in the wines of France&rsquo;s Rhone valley.</p><p> &ldquo;Most people said you couldn&rsquo;t do this type of grape here,&rdquo; Amigoni says. &ldquo;That was a challenge to me.&rdquo;</p><p> Amigoni, a stocky, good-humored man with dark hair and vivid blue eyes, concedes he&rsquo;s something of a rogue in Missouri&rsquo;s wine world, where a serviceable grape known as Norton rules. But it&rsquo;s a status he relishes, and the wines he&rsquo;s making from these grapes for the Inland Sea label are beginning to create a buzz.</p><p> But that&rsquo;s getting ahead of the story. For now, the rain is coming down, and grapes are ready for picking.</p><p>&bull;&bull;&bull;</p><p>24 Brix. That&rsquo;s the license plate on Amigoni&rsquo;s Ford F-150, parked along the roadside as the rain comes down. Winemakers know the term as code for the sugar density of grapes, and growers aim for 24 percent sugar as an ideal time to harvest. Two weeks earlier, Amigoni harvested a couple of rows of Cabernet Franc that registered 24.</p><p> &ldquo;That&rsquo;s something of a miracle,&rdquo; he says, &ldquo;given the rain and cool weather we&rsquo;ve had.&rdquo;</p><p> Today, he says, the Cabernet Sauvignon is more like 23, but still ballpark. The rain threatens to dilute the product even more, but Amigoni doesn&rsquo;t seem concerned. There&rsquo;s too much work to do</p><p> First the crew members unclip the protective netting that minimizes, though doesn&rsquo;t entirely eliminate, unauthorized grape sampling by birds and other critters. Amigoni, with an entrepreneurial spirit and multiple revenue streams in his sights, developed the netting system and markets it on the Internet. He has attracted eager fruit growers from the Bahamas to Hawaii. This year, he says, he has sold 3.2 million square feet of the polypropylene mesh, nearly double the sales of the year before.</p><p> After the netting is pulled up and away from the fruit, the snipping begins. As the small tubs fill up with bunches of grapes, the workers announce <em>uvas</em>, or &ldquo;grapes&rdquo; in Spanish. Amigoni transfers them to larger tubs and eventually hauls those back to his truck. He dumps the grapes into one of the eight half-ton plastic bins that sit in the truck bed and an open trailer. His hands sift through the pile, quickly tossing out leaves and stems in a process known as &ldquo;mogging,&rdquo; the word stemming from &ldquo;material other than grapes.&rdquo; Every now and then, there&rsquo;s a small cluster of green grapes, a secondary growth called a Christmas bunch, because the fruit won&rsquo;t be ripe till the holiday. Out it goes, onto the ground nearby.