Eat the City(81)

Of course, grapes sell only in the autumn, as they’re picked, so Joey and Sal developed a tripartite business plan. As the grape supply thinned, Sal would sell Christmas trees out of the storefront. In January, Sal, a skilled mechanic, would fix up used cars for Joey to sell out of the same space. In September, Joey and Sal would again revert to the grapes. If Italian American manhood came to mean, in part, making wine in the basement, Sal helped make many an Italian American man.

Red Hook was a larger neighborhood then, including the present-day Carroll Gardens and Cobble Hill. But houses were knocked down to make way for highways in the 1940s, and workers with cranes and derricks and earthmoving machines dug giant trenches, which left mountains of dirt, where Sal would go sledding in the winter. Eventually, the highway overpasses, coughing exhaust and shuddering from compression brakes, split the neighborhood in two. Soon after, Brooklyn’s cargo shipping industry moved across the river to New Jersey and left the longshoremen without jobs. Most of the winemaking families moved away. Carroll Gardens and Cobble Hill prospered while Red Hook was forgotten, hemmed between highway and water, an isolated hook of land jutting into the East River.


THE perception of taste is a function of moral ideals as well as of physical sensations. Philosophers have debated for millennia what good taste means. With wine, there is no consensus.

A microscopic fungus called yeast eats sugar and makes alcohol and carbon dioxide. Grape juice left alone contains yeast that will naturally turn it in to something like wine. But humans intervene, in processes more or less complicated, to achieve certain balances of flavor and alcohol. Some view the process as high art. Others view it as no more than a means to an alcohol end. Some view the whole thing—the crushing of the grapes, the drinking of the wine—as tradition.

Sal Meglio and Latif Jiji and even Leo Star and Meyer Robinson did not aim to make critically acclaimed wines. Their wines tasted good to their makers and the people whose glasses they filled.

“You and your group represent zilch population-wise!” said one of the Manischewitz sons-in-law to a reporter who cast aspersions on his wine. Americans liked his wine, and that’s all that mattered. He muttered it again: “Zilch.”


LATIF Jiji has transformed each step of the winemaking process into an annual ritual. The Making of Labels: Family and friends gather around the dining room table with paint, glitter, and glue to create handmade labels for the next vintage. The Cleaning of the Bottles: Latif rinses the previous year’s bottles to prepare them to hold the coming year’s wine. The Bottling: Latif siphons the wine from demijohns into bottles, leaving behind the chalky sediment. The Pruning of the Vine: He leans out windows to trim the weak and dead branches. Finally, the Harvest. Latif keeps a record each year in a blue-lined school notebook of how many pounds of grapes were plucked and who helped. Friends and family participate in the bounty; until her death, his mother used to stuff the grape leaves with meat and rice, just as she had done with the leaves of the vine that grew in their house in Basra when Latif was a child. A friend distills the leftover pomace to make grappa, just as he had in his native Armenia.

Latif’s vine is more than a hundred feet long now, and still inching its way across the roof. The vine is so substantial that it is visible on the satellite view of Google Earth. A thick rooftop grapevine, it turns out, can lower electricity bills. Dry, brittle, and grapeless in the winter, it allows the sun to heat the roof and upper floor. In the summer, thick bunches of grapes provide shade that helps keep the house cool.

The taste and quality of the wine varies from year to year, but also from bottle to bottle. Some bottles develop a spiked grape juice taste. Mild and sweet, the wine usually tastes much like the grapes. The 2001 vintage is “very well balanced, but it still has the Latif character, its crispness,” says Genio Rodriguez, Latif’s crew chief and closest critic, who has cultivated an interest in wine since age sixteen, when he worked as a mover for a Queens mafioso who gave him a few nice bottles as partial payment.

In the Upper East Side, clusters of black Lexuses sleek as panthers move through streets full of art dealers and tax lawyers and face-lifts. There’s nothing out there to suggest Latif’s rambling, fairy-tale vineyard.

Standing on Latif’s roof and looking out, it seems that all the backyards are under construction, everyone expanding their houses, maximizing their living space and property values. Cement decks take up entire backyards in a city of cement. Shallow reflecting pools decorate yards where no one goes to reflect. When a neighbor of Latif and Vera recently renovated his yard, he cut the roots of Latif’s vine, which had twisted their way under the fence into his soil. The vine did not sprout as many leaves or grapes that year, or the next. But the following year the vine came back, bushy with grapes, and made a record harvest.

One day outside, Latif, leaning forward on his patio chair like some kind of backyard oracle, says to me: “There is magic in this vine.”


A month after Prohibition was repealed, Meyer Robinson filed a certificate of incorporation for the Monarch Wine Company, Inc. Meyer’s brother George Robinson and his partner, Leo Star, were ready to promote their Mount Zebo label. But George got sick and died of leukemia, and the blue-eyed, mustachioed, jokester brother Meyer took his place as a partner in the wine business. In time, Meyer married Roslyn Gross, a beautiful, fun-loving flapper, the daughter of a well-off Jewish flour miller who had managed to extract his family and his wealth largely intact from Vilna, Poland. Meyer and Roslyn moved to a two-bedroom apartment in an Art Deco building in Flatbush with pretty etched-glass mirrors in the lobby. They had a daughter, Gale, and a son, Samuel.