Eat the City(77)
Vineyards flourished for a while in parts of Brooklyn and Queens. In the Bronx, people made blackberry wine from berries growing in the wild, and in other parts of the turn-of-the-century city, people fermented dandelions, elderberries, and rhubarb harvested near their homes. At least one vineyard survived until 1901, on several acres in the Queens neighborhood of Long Island City. Presenting a misty, romantic image of Queens rarely seen since, the New York Times noted that the vintner, an elderly Frenchman named Monsieur Thiry, who made claret, red wines, and a bubbly akin to champagne, loved to walk “with a basket on his arm and half a dozen children at his heels, clipping here and there a precocious bunch for the table, and handing out every second one to a small boy or girl.” But Monsieur Thiry quit when he realized it cost him more to make wine than buy it. As the last large tracts of open space in the city filled with buildings, the era of the vineyard was over, but the age of winemaking was just taking off.
New York is a wine city with two dominant roots: kosher Jewish and Italian. Of course, at one time, many of the city’s European immigrants made homemade wine, and some non-kosher commercial wineries thrived. But eventually Jews and Italians were distinguished by the sheer size of their populations—by the turn of the century, 290,000 Jews and 250,000 Italians lived in New York, a city of only about three and a half million people—and their distinct enthusiasms for fermenting the fruit of the vine. A handful of the Jewish wineries persisted for half a century or more, and Italian wine grape sellers and tiny local vintners became community institutions.
In an Italian house, homemade wine was as vital to a good meal as a plate of pasta, and you were more likely to find a glass of vino by your plate than a glass of water. The Jewish laws of kashrut, from the Bible and later the Talmud, required that wine used in religious sacrament be produced by observant Jews, leading to a cottage industry of kosher city wineries. For most wineries, it made sense to set up where the grapes were. For kosher wineries, it made sense to operate where the Jews were.
“There really isn’t much to say about wine made in New York City,” said one expert in the wines of the Eastern United States. “It’s not good wine.” For the most part, New York City winemaking has not been about quality wine, but about expressing tradition.
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NO rule of Jewish law says that kosher wine shall be sickly, stickily sweet and taste of children’s Robitussin and grape Kool-Aid. But the story of kosher wine in America is unfortunately and inextricably tied to that of the peculiar Concord grape, whose juice has a foxy flavor that requires vintners to add copious amounts of sugar to make palatable wine. The Concord was cultivated in the 1850s, just before the great Jewish migration from Europe, by Ephraim Wales Bull, of Concord, Massachussetts, neighbor to Emerson, Hawthorne, and Louisa May Alcott (who jumped his fences and helped herself to his fruit). “I looked about to see what I could find among our wildlings,” he wrote. Noting that the birds preferred to eat from a particular grapevine, he propagated select cuttings, in a move that was to sweeten the Passover seder for generations of American Jews. A few decades later, as Concord grape production doubled from one season to the next, its wine was praised as the best in the country.
In the kitchens and basements of the narrow, dark, airless tenements going up all over the Lower East Side, Jews flooding in from the shtetls of eastern Europe crushed these purple grapes and fermented their juice to use for kiddush, the prayer over wine. Upstate New York growers experienced a bit of a grape rush to supply them. “Scores of speculators” and “agents of winemaking houses” bought hundreds of tons of Concords, which they sent to the city in uncovered whiskey barrels. The sturdy, reliable Concord fruited early and never failed, and yielded as much as three and a half tons per acre, the newspapers boasted, a favorable record against the Catawba, the Delaware, the Worden, the Brighton, Moore’s Early, and the Hartford Prolific.
Never mind their foxy flavor—Concords were cheap and abundant. The bubbis, or Yiddishe grandmothers, brewing up wine in their kitchens didn’t know from grapes—they just added more sugar. The wineries followed suit. Sam Schapiro’s wine business launched informally out of his basement in 1899, and later developed the slogan “Wine you can almost cut with a knife.”
And drink with a prayer: “Blessed are you, the Lord our God, King of the Universe, Creator of the fruit of the vine,” goes the blessing recited over the wine in Jewish homes each Friday night, when everyone at the table takes a sip as they enter the holy Sabbath. A full four cups of wine must be blessed, and drunk, at the Passover dinner during the ritual telling of the story of Exodus. Sips of wine punctuate a tale of slavery, gruesome plagues, flight in the night, and freedom—and by the end of the long dinner, the uncles are red-faced, the aunts are giggling, and the cousins are playing footsie under the table. On some holidays in the Lower East Side, when wine was brought into the synagogue, “pious old graybeards leap and dance and drink much of it, to show their joy in God,” wrote the novelist Michael Gold.
By the turn of the twentieth century, Manhattan was full of home winemakers, the Times noted. “The Hebrews do not seem to be so particular as to the method of making their wine”—pressing grapes between fingers, twisting them in a bag, squeezing them in a clothes wringer, or stomping them with bare feet—“as they are regarding the condition of the utensils which the grapes and the juice are likely to come in contact with.” Then, as later, American kosher wine was more concerned with ritual contamination than with bouquet or mouthfeel.