Eat the City(75)

During Latif’s own first attempt at winemaking, he and his daughter Lissa pummeled grapes with their hands and produced sixteen half bottles of a drinkable wine. Later the family used a tool Latif devised, something like a potato masher. Eventually, as Latif grew more serious about the process, he got a mechanical crusher and presser. “It was never virgins dancing barefoot on the grapes,” says Vera.

As the vine meandered its way to the top of the fifty-foot-tall townhouse, Latif built an arbor on the roof so it could continue to grow horizontally, spilling its grapes in a shady overhead canopy. In the spring, bundles of hard, bright green orbs begin to dangle, like someone’s plastic centerpiece, or the idealized Form of the grape, too perfect to be the real thing. By early August, the grapes are pale green and thin-skinned, with a translucent, fatty quality, already giving off the scent of ferment and wine.

Timing is critical. Latif used to decide the fruit was ready only when the starlings began to nibble at it and a heavy winey smell wafted down to the upper floors of the townhouse. Now he works more scientifically, rubbing a sample grape against a refractometer. White hair flying all mad professor, eyes narrow against the light, he reads the displayed sugar content. He looks toward me, and pauses. “The sugar levels are high,” he says. It’s time to set a harvest date.

“Wine making alert,” says the subject line of the email he sends to notify his crew.

On harvest day, the workers—Latif’s children, friends, children’s friends, children’s children, and friends of friends—are organized into teams, each with a dedicated task. On the roof, the pickers stand on crates, reach overhead, and snip and shear and pull. The grapevine makes a curtain so thick that it shuts out the high-rises of Midtown from view and creates a cool, green-tinted haven.

“Smells like the Muscat grape-flavored gummy candy,” says a twenty-one-year-old neophyte, frowning at the vine.

Hurrying up to the roof, Latif contrasts his achievement with those of the great winemaking civilizations. “The Greeks, the Romans, the Arabs, they had short vines—my vine is tall,” he says, out of breath from the stairs. “Do you have scissors?” he asks me. “Here,” he says, grabbing a rusty black-handled pair someone had discarded.

It’s hard to pick grapes overhead. The vine weaves around itself, braiding in its fruit, so no one bunch is entirely free. You have to drag fat, delicate grapes through narrow openings in their own wood—you are fighting the vine itself. Your eyes fill with dripping grape juice. Your hands get sticky and black from wet bits of wood. Your arms tire. Your crate slips underfoot on the grape-slickened tar.

Latif fusses over tactics and execution, interrupting himself to greet friends of friends with kisses. He directs his longest-limbed child, Brian, an arts consultant, to grab particular hard-to-reach bunches and shun others: “Don’t reach too far!” As his capable daughters, now in their forties, sort out a rope pulley system to lower a basket of grapes from the roof, he cautions them: “Don’t lean out!”

Kids on the roof scream, “Coming down!” as they lower the first basket of grapes into the backyard. “Ready?” they call, after it lands.

“No!” the men on the ground answer, too late.

Down in the yard, the crew chief, Genio Rodriguez, a cook, weighs incoming loads of grapes by standing on a scale with the plastic bags in his hands and subtracting his own weight.

Fresh water fills a laundry tub from a garden hose, and Latif’s ten-year-old grandson, Jake, swishes his hand around, making currents, washing fruit that becomes slick, pale, and glassy. “It’s raining grapes,” he complains, as people picking bunches on the roof spill a shower of large green drops with the impact of ball bearings.

Another grandson pours the clean grapes into the hopper of the Italian-made crusher and de-stemmer while Jake turns the crank. Two rollers smash the grape clusters, and the whole mess falls into a trough where propellers separate out the stems from the pulp. The pulp goes into the presser, where thin juice streams out, clean and sweet, to be sent over to the chemistry lab deeper in the yard.

Latif himself hovers over the lab, a rickety patio table set up in the back, where a few of his most trusted aides work a hydrometer, a calculator, a bag of supermarket sugar, and an agent to kill yeast.

After juice, sugar, tannins, pectic enzyme, and the yeast-killing agent have been combined in precise proportions, the mixture will be sealed into five-gallon glass demijohns to ferment and seethe for a month, then it will be bottled and aged for about a year. A good harvest makes as much as a hundred and fifty bottles of wine.

By the end of the day, the vine has been plucked clean, as though plundered by a flock of starving birds. Down in the dining room, the kids drink sweet, fresh grape juice. A few of the workers spike theirs with grappa a friend made from the seeds and stems left over from last year’s winemaking. Latif retrieves a bottle of last year’s wine from the basement, Vera raises her glass, and he pours.


LATIF left Iraq in 1947 to attend college in Michigan. Just days before, the United Nations had voted to partition Palestine, and the streets of Baghdad had been full of crowds yelling, “Down with the Jews! Down with the Zionists!” As the propeller airplane took off into the hazy air, Latif watched the runway of the Baghdad airport recede into a gray stripe in the brown desert. “I said to myself, ‘I will not see this again—I’m not going back.’ ”