Eat the City(78)

In parts of Europe, kosher winemakers had over centuries developed subtle, dry reds and whites in distinct regional styles. Often Jewish vintners would simply borrow a non-kosher facility, ritually cleanse its equipment, and staff it with yeshiva boys. Yet the Jews who came in a rush to America did not land in a region with highly developed winemaking traditions—they landed in the Lower East Side. And there they worked the grapes they had.

Then came Prohibition. Some argued that Jews should be made to bless grape juice instead of alcoholic wine, but tradition prevailed. Kosher wineries, as well as wineries that produced sacramental wine for Christian churches, were given special dispensation by the federal government to remain open, and rabbis were allowed to order limited amounts of wine for their congregants.

This inevitably led crooked and fake rabbis to go into business selling wine to fake Jews. Vintners would pay a rabbi a couple hundred dollars for the use of his certificate to hang on the door to the wine cellar, suggesting the wine belonged to him. Government agents descended on a licensed kosher winery on Third Street in a sting operation in 1921 and seized an outgoing barrel of wine, as a worker confessed that the winery did its principal “sacramental wine business among the Gentiles.” A few years into Prohibition, hundreds of shady wineries and wine stores dotted the Lower East Side, purporting to serve the religious community that had suddenly grown in size and enthusiasm. “Dry Agents Plan War upon Illicit Rabbis,” ran a newspaper headline. Even the long-standing kosher wineries dabbled in the black market; Sam Schapiro, whose winery would survive until the 1990s, sold sacramental wine legally to rabbis in the front of his shop on Rivington Street, and hard liquor illegally out the back door. “He was a bootlegger,” his grandson said years later.

Into this ferment, so to speak, came a new Jewish winery. Around 1927, Leo Star, the son of a Russian cantor who also sold kosher wine door-to-door to rabbis, rented a double cellar on Wooster Street to bottle kosher port and sherry. His friend George Robinson joined him, and George’s brother Meyer became their lawyer. Leo met his wife, Augusta, through her work as a secretary for the legendary Yiddish-speaking Prohibition agents Izzy Enstein and Moe Smith, according to their daughter years later. It is not now clear whether most—or any—of Leo and George’s early customers were in fact Jews. But the end of Prohibition left the partners with the Monarch Wine Company, which manufactured a kosher product suddenly not in demand. Leo and George decided to hitch their fortunes to selling a Passover wine they called Mount Zebo. That first year, storeowners sent back what they hadn’t sold after Passover. The second year, Leo and George refused returns, and their wine sat on the shelves, until surprisingly, months later, they began to get reorders. They could only conclude that non-Jews had developed a taste for their oversweet, rabbinically supervised holiday wine. So the kosher wine industry was born.


LIKE Jews, Italians took advantage of a Prohibition loophole. The law did not in fact prohibit all alcohol consumption—but allowed people to make limited amounts of wine to drink at home. Accustomed to a glass of wine with dinner, New York City Italians set about winemaking during la Proibizione, observes Michael A. Lerner, author of Dry Manhattan, “as they would make bread if the bread shops were suddenly closed.” Social workers in Italian neighborhoods estimated that Italian households spent as much as three hundred dollars a year for winemaking supplies, and court records show hundreds of gallons of wine were frequently produced in a single basement to be drunk and sold to neighbors for three to five dollars a gallon. In the fall, the gutters in front of tenements would be stained red by the dregs from winemaking, and shopkeepers would apologize for their grape-colored hands.

As people adapted to Prohibition, shipments of California wine grapes to Manhattan’s docks increased more than forty-fold from 300 carloads in 1917 to 14,000 in 1923. So many grapes clogged dock traffic that eventually, all wine grape deliveries had to be banished to New Jersey. There, on the piers just after dawn, hoarse-voiced auctioneers offered up grapes by the thousands of tons to be transferred to the Italian markets on West Street in Manhattan. As carts were loaded and ferryboats boarded, the grapes spilled out, creating what a New York Times reporter described as “a reluctant squidginess between shoe and wharf,” and leaving the docks smelling like a vineyard on the sea.

Any old grocery or pharmacy in Manhattan sold winemaking recipes and ingredients. At grape stands in the crowded markets, the vendors sang, “Marsigliana! Galante! Pir-i-go-ne!” The promise of alcohol sped up sales, as the sellers assured customers, “Succulent grape, signor. It makes sweet wine—and strong.” Grape deliveries marked the start of autumn in the city, and the season ended around Election Day, when kids used the wooden grape crates to make bonfires in the streets. “Ya’d wait for the wop to get his grapes,” recalled a man who grew up on the Italian East Side in the 1920s and ’30s. “They would get deliveries of grapes on the sidewalks,” he noted. “Whoosh! We’d grab ’em and run like bastards. The guinea would yell out, ‘You son of a bitch. You son of a bitch.’ ”

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“AW, jeez,” Sal Meglio will say if you ask him how he first started making wine. You’ll be sitting on a vinyl stool at the mirrored bar at the Red Hook VFW post, which Sal has tended for almost two decades. He’ll take you downstairs to show you his collection of homemade red in Absolut and Bacardi bottles, cut up some Tuscan salami, break off chunks of grainy Parmigiano-Reggiano, and offer you a sip. “Knocks you on your ass, right?” asks Sal’s friend Ralphie, pale-eyed, darkly bronzed, and tattooed with a ship at sunset. It’s true, it’s strong.