Eat the City(76)

Years later, his parents and four siblings came out of Iraq, a few at a time, hiding their gold jewelry and carrying heavy, rolled-up Keshan carpets. His father died while visiting Latif in Ann Arbor. Latif is not a religious man, but he said kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, every day for a year, mostly in the campus Hillel center, though sometimes, when traveling to a new town, he would open the phone book to look up some Cohen or Levy who could refer him to a Jewish congregation. When he moved to New York City, his mother bought an apartment nearby. His brothers ended up on Long Island and in New Jersey, his sisters in Los Angeles and Israel.

In 1964, Latif married Vera, a young, widowed English-literature grad student with two children. In time, they found the long, narrow brick townhouse on the Upper East Side, a place with many bedrooms, stained glass above the entryway, and above all, a yard where Vera could garden and their four children could play. Only the year before they moved in, the nearby Jacob Ruppert Brewery had shut down, ceasing to cast the smell of beer and hops across the neighborhood. Now the brewery stood empty, like a hulking brick reminder of lost industrial prospects. East Ninety-Second Street in the late 1960s was a place where a couple of City University professors could pay $69,000, take out a mortgage, and just about afford a roomy house to make a home.

For thousands of years, people had been drinking wine in the homeland Latif had fled in southern Iraq. The eighth-century Arab poet Abu Nawas, like Latif, was from Basra, and much of his oeuvre praises the joys of wine, “shining in its glass like a sun.” In fact, Arab writers created a whole genre called khamriyyat, or wine poems. But by the time Latif was growing up, few Muslims would publicly associate themselves with wine, as Islam forbids alcohol, and Christians owned most wine stores. The Cews of Basra were known not for wine but for aromatic araq, an anise liquor they distilled at home from the sweet, soft dates for which their city was renowned. Latif’s family didn’t drink much, but at meals his father would pour everybody a glass of the wine made from the family vine.

When Latif left Iraq behind, much of his past was lost, but in New York, he could share with Vera and their kids his family tradition of winemaking. It didn’t take long after his first experiments for Latif to begin the slow transformation of house into vertical winery. In the basement, he dismantled a ninety-nine-dollar mini-fridge and used its parts to cool a large wooden cupboard he insulated with fiberglass to refrigerate the fermenting grape juice. He installed a deep sink so he could wash old green bottles for reuse. He turned the brick-arched coal room into an air-conditioned wine cellar: “Wine cellars are supposed to have arched doors,” he notes. The vine yields roughly six hundred pounds a year, enough for Latif to produce more than a hundred bottles of white wine. He calls his label Chateau Latif—a play on the Rothschild Chateau Lafite.

Latif has a little mustache, white wavy hair that brushes his neck, and kind blue-gray eyes. He has only a trace of an accent in English, and it’s hard to imagine that he grew up speaking Arabic. He appeared recently on Al Arabiya television talking hesitantly in a stilted, formal Arabic about the fantastical Iraq he remembers, where Jews, Christians, and Muslims lived together carelessly as neighbors. He has imprinted his nostalgia for that lost world on his daughter, Jessica, a United Nations speechwriter who wrote a novel loosely based on Latif’s childhood in 1940s Basra. The first time Latif meets you he will pour you a glass of wine. He will call you family.

More recent immigrants to New York City would make other kinds of wine. The Fujianese from China would make a red rice wine, which they would serve in restaurants from unmarked plastic jugs. Ethiopians would purchase gallons of honey to make honey wine in glass beakers at home. Hondurans would ferment pan-fried, fibrous chunks of cassava mixed with sweet potato to be served in plastic cups at special occasions. People would make wine out of linden flowers and mulberries and lilacs and knotweed and amelanchier they picked from city parks. Latif could have been Albanian or German, Nigerian or Ecuadorian—the heart of his story would be the same, because the value of homemade wine for him lies in its way of connecting people, and of reaching back into the past for tradition.


“ALTHOUGH they were sweet in the mouth at first, they made it disagreeable and stinking,” wrote Jasper Danckaerts, a Dutch traveler, of the wild grapes he found in 1679 by the shores of Brooklyn’s Coney Island. In fact, he had his eye on a bit of property not far from Latif Jiji’s current house to cultivate European grapes, and wrote that the soil on the rocky hills east of Harlem “would be very suitable in my opinion for planting vineyards.” Yet elsewhere in Manhattan, European vines withered, every season they were planted, for decades. No one yet knew they were vulnerable to the grape louse phylloxera, but they knew that they were useless for wine. While visiting the homes of the people of New Amsterdam, Jasper Danckaerts drank wine imported from Madeira.

Local winemakers eventually came around to raising native American Vitis labrusca grapes and their hybrids, though they were sometimes derided, in comparison to Europe’s Vitis vinifera, as “foxy”—an oenologist’s term referring to an unpleasant muskiness, a sharp, extreme-grapey flavor, like essence of Welch’s. Around 1816, a woman named Isabella Gibbs from the Carolinas arrived with a cutting of a juicy purple grape, which she planted in her backyard in Brooklyn. The vine thrived, and its grapes came to be known as Isabellas. In Brooklyn in 1827, the horticulturalist Alden Spooner experimented with planting them. “They were much injured,” he complained, when his tenants planted potatoes in the same garden bed, but eventually the grapevines prevailed, fruited, and produced fifty gallons of juice, some of which aged into wine that was “pronounced very excellent,” he wrote. Another Brooklyn experimenter managed to eke a basic kind of wine out of immature Isabellas, some of them “white and not half grown,” adding extra sugar at the end to mask the bitterness and also a bit of brandy to raise the alcohol level. “The flavor I think fine,” he finally assessed. It was the ragged beginnings of a New York State wine industry.