Eat the City(84)

FOR most of Sal Meglio’s career, there was a standard recipe for wine among the Italians of Red Hook, as though everyone had tasted everyone else’s and developed a consensus. People would mix twelve boxes of Alicante grapes, a couple boxes of Zinfandels, and maybe a couple boxes of Muscat to give strength, and judge the quality by how few glasses it took to get drunk, the faster the better. But as the rents rose and the old Italians left Carroll Gardens and Cobble Hill, the grape neighborhoods dispersed. Newcomers began to edge out Italians in home winemaking prowess: Yugoslavs, Greeks, Romanians. Tony Nito was no more, and his son Joey polled the family about what to do with the business. Sal was in his sixties, Joey was in his seventies, Sal’s brother who used to help out was in his eighties, and no one wanted to take over.

Look at the quiet, dead-end streets of the Red Hook neighborhood now and it’s hard to imagine a place where each street was a vital artery for goods and people coming in from all over the world. Sal stayed still but the world he knew disappeared. Now he guesses he knows no more than half a dozen people in the old neighborhood who still make wine. Sal’s not particularly religious; he goes to church for weddings and funerals. The ritual in his life for as long as he can remember has been winemaking. Every year he says he’s too old, he’ll quit. But he invariably joins his nephew and his brothers and cousins to make the next year’s batch.

During wine season at the Brooklyn Terminal Market, crates of grapes still stack in piles, as SUVs pull up carrying young families with their Italian-speaking nonnos, or grandpas. “You got a better price for me? I always get a special price,” someone will say. Quantities of grapes are stuffed into trunks, as carelessly and efficiently as if the drivers were long-haul produce deliverers. Even now, a few people still attach big wooden blocks to the bottoms of their youngest kids’ shoes and then drop the children into the barrel to crush. But most take shortcuts. There has been a switch from grapes to juice, to skip the step of crushing. The younger Italians think it’s convenient. The older Italians think it’s the enemy of tradition.

The great kosher wine industry of New York City may be mostly gone, but Jews still buy grapes at the Brooklyn Terminal Market, and in the Orthodox Jewish neighborhood of Borough Park, everyone seems to know a home winemaker. Ephraim Grumet, a diamond manufacturer, dumps yellowish grapes he picks in his backyard into the blender for a few seconds, then pours the entire mixture—seeds, stems, and all—into a five-gallon glass jug. He ties a clean bedsheet over the opening and leaves it alone in the basement. Months later, he siphons the wine off the top and bottles it in a jug. It turns almost a rosé color from the seeds and skins, which makes it pretty when he gives it away at Purim.


IN Red Hook, Christopher Nicolson rinses out an oversize wineglass and shimmies up the racks of barrels to the topmost one, four levels up, by the ceiling, and offers a sample of the fermenting juice, leaning down, glass in hand. “You’ll notice the smell is very exotic, like sandalwood, jasmine—kind of weird, curious,” he calls from his perch atop the barrels, like a flying vintner. Then he dips his glass into the barrel, takes a sip, swishes it around in his mouth, spits it out onto the floor, and dumps the remainder back in the barrel. “It’s antiseptic,” he assures, as he climbs down, carefully placing his steel-toed Uniroyal boots patched with plastic wrap and duct tape around the ripped sole.

The small, commercial Red Hook Winery where he works opened in 2008 in a squat, brick former cannonball factory, just a few blocks from Sal Meglio’s VFW bar—one of several new wineries in the city. Already Christopher’s wine is selling to renowned Manhattan restaurants such as Blue Hill and Momofuku. Two leading California winemakers—Abe Schoener and Robert Foley—direct the process from a distance, and Christopher does the hard work on site of loading grapes, measuring recipes, monitoring air pressure and fermentation, and punching down the fermenting juice.

Many professional vintners in the state still won’t make red wine out of local grapes because they are not naturally sweet enough—the specter of Manischewitz looms large. Rosé is the safe fallback. At Red Hook Winery, the winemakers experiment to discover the intrinsic character of Long Island–grown grapes. Every fermentation, they seek to uncover it, with rigorous experiments in grapes from Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc, Viognier, Cabernet Franc, Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Petit Verdot, Gewürztraminer, and Riesling vines.

As new grapes come in one evening in September, there’s a Willy Wonka feel to the whole operation: throttling, husking, desectioning, squirting, bubbling, frothing. Everything smells like purple grapes. Gooey stains of splatted grapes shape a gaudy mauve and violet on the stainless-steel machine that removes the stems and skins. Big silver machines are sucking out fruit juices and convection tubes are pumping the juices up across the room through various cylinders. There’s a spring in everyone’s step, all the way down the production line of volunteers who show up for the joy of making wine. Everyone seems happy. The B61 bus wheezes by, passengers staring out the window at the crates of grapes on the sidewalk. Colin Alevras, a bartender for Momofuku who has come to help shepherd the grapes through the machines, has a giant smile on his face as he says, “This is why New York is great.”

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AT the Jiji house on Ninety-Second Street, when the work is done and the weight of the harvest is called out—in recent years, 718 pounds, 712 pounds, 636 pounds—the backyard erupts in cheers.