Eat the City(79)

With a sheepish smile, Sal will tell you that he doesn’t drink his own wine often, but when he does, he has a habit of calling up the neighborhood widows. They know his routine, says Sal. “They’ll say, ‘Sal, you drunk again?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Is your wife in Atlantic City?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘You’re all alone tonight?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Okay, talk to you later.’ ”

“And they hang up!” says Sal, looking both indignant and forlorn. On the subject of wine, however, he is more assured. “You gotta see how it goes down the side of the glass,” he says in the fluorescent-lit cellar, tilting his glass to swish a film of wine around the sides. “Goes down nice and smooth.”

Sal is clean-shaven, pale, and wearing a pastel blue plaid short-sleeve cotton shirt. His thinning white hair is combed back and gelled down. “You’ll never see me without a crease in my pants,” he likes to say, sticking out his skinny leg in light blue jeans—creased. He never leaves the house without a handkerchief. He never wears sneakers. An heir to Old World tradition does not take short cuts.

For most of Sal’s life, he worked for a family business importing California wine grapes for Brooklyn Italians, and he has been making wine himself since he was far too young to legally drink it. His father and mother came from the islands near Naples to Carroll Street, an island of Italians in Brooklyn. By the time Sal was born, the year after Prohibition ended, his family had moved to the heart of nearby Red Hook, a place with liquid edges and an overpopulation of longshoremen. His family rented the upper floor of a two-story, brown-brick box of a house on the main drag of Van Brunt, a few blocks from the piers where Sal’s father worked as a winchman.

It was the Depression, and most everything was scarce. Yet in those days, you could almost live off the urban landscape. Sal’s mother would grow tomatoes in the backyard, and buy more from a horse-and-wagon street vendor, for a year’s worth of sauce. She would pour the sauce into quart-size glass soda bottles, cork them, and boil them in a fryer. She would collect pinecones and cook them on the stove to burst the shell and bare the seeds—pop, pop, pop, and out came pine nuts. Sal and his brother would roast coffee beans in a steel drum over a backyard bonfire fueled by wood they found in the street. Sal would ride his bike onto the ferry to Staten Island to go clamming or foraging for mushrooms. When he came home, his mother would make pasta with clam sauce. She would test the mushrooms by sautéing them with a shiny quarter—if the mushrooms were poisonous, the quarter would change color. (It never did.) Sal would pick persimmons and apricots straight off Guido the Undertaker’s trees. His mother would grind a week’s worth of sausage and throw the links over the clothesline in the yard, and if it transmitted the raw, pink smell of meat to the laundry that hung there later—no one noticed.

Even when there was no food but macaroni and beans, there was always homemade wine. Sal’s mamma used to give him a bit mixed into a glass of cream soda. His pappa used to pull a gallon jar out from under the bed and take a swig in the morning before his feet even touched the floor. Sal’s father made the wine himself, down in the cellar, standing in a barrel in his red-soled black rubber work boots and stomping down the grapes, with Sal’s older brothers assisting. “One guy would throw in the grapes, half a barrel full, and my father would be crushing,” says Sal. “They had a little hole where the juice is coming out, and you catch it with a pot.” He would make four fifty-three-gallon barrels a year, along with a ten-gallon barrel of vinegar.

In Red Hook at the right time of year, you could walk down the street and smell the rich aroma of fermentation coming from most every home. Un giorno senza vino è come un giorno senza sole, goes the saying: A day without wine is like a day without sun. Landlords would give Italian families a spot in the cellar to keep their barrels. A kid sent downstairs to the barrel to fill a gallon jar to bring to the dinner table would tiptoe across the earthen floor. “You’re not even supposed to talk around it! Makes it vibrate,” Sal says. “Wine likes darkness and quiet.”

“Air is wine’s worst enemy,” Sal tells me, his light hazel eyes wide and magnified through his glasses. Sometimes air would do the wine in. In time, the barrel of sweet red wine might turn acid, like vinegar, or moldy—to illustrate, Sal draws a diagram on the real estate section of the Daily News: “There’s the wine,” he points out as he draws a flat line in blue ink. “There’s the air,” he says, making little wavy lines coming down into the wine. “There’s the white mold,” he adds, carefully drawing little balls on top of the liquid. He looks up at me and shrugs his shoulders. “People would drink it anyway.”

More circumspect winemakers, Sal says, would siphon off the wine from the barrel, bottle it, seal it with wax, and bury it in the backyard. It’s hard to say how many wine bottles you might dig up in Brooklyn yards today. In the eighties, a friend of Sal’s was gardening and hit his trowel against a five-gallon damigiana, or glass jug, containing some nicely aged red, which he took as a gift from Italians of yore. Sal helped him drink it.


IN the Red Hook of Sal’s childhood, there was a don with one glass eye on Van Brunt Street, whose hand had to be kissed during visits. Crazy Joey Gallo, the mobster for the Profaci family, later known as the Gambino family, also lived nearby. Al Capone had gotten his start as a small-time criminal in the neighborhood, and the Mob leader Albert Anastasia still ran Murder, Inc., and the local waterfront. Grain barges from the Erie Canal and vessels carrying coffee, cocoa, and oil clustered just offshore, waiting to pull into the port. In the mornings, thousands of longshoremen would hurry to the docks to shape up, or present themselves to the hiring boss, who would pick out men to work that day. In the winter, dockworkers like Sal’s father would stuff their denim coveralls and flannel shirts with newspapers to add another layer against the cold.