A Wine to Call Our Own

My father, Frank Tortorello, who started his apprenticeship in the cellar at age 7, describes the drink as peasant wine. “You wouldn’t talk about it revealing a hint of chocolate,” he said. “This stuff didn’t sneak up on you. It hit you straight between the eyes.”

A splash of cream soda seemed to bring out the best in the wine, my father said.

The winemaking procedure was as predictable as Sunday Mass at Our Lady of Mount Carmel, though with more ritual and less prayer. My grandfather, a grocery clerk, had inherited the equipment and the recipe from his father, who ran a saloon in the Belmont neighborhood during Prohibition. There was the scrubbing of the old whiskey barrels, the crushing of the grapes, the pressing of the skins. And then the wait.

The result would be two barrels of wine, each 46 gallons. My grandfather gave about a half-barrel to his mother, who lived on the bottom floor of the family row house on Crotona Avenue. That left another 60 to 65 gallons to share with friends, which my grandfather seldom did.

“He drank most of it,” my father said. “I’m sure he went through a gallon every week,” close to a bottle a day.

That particular family legacy doesn’t inspire a lot of nostalgia. So when I talked to my father a few weeks ago about reviving the Tortorello wine label, I proposed a new direction: growing our own grapes.

My dad agreed to provide the space for our vineyard, the sloping yard behind his 1840s-era home in Mount Kisco, N.Y. I would need to supply not just the grapevines but the enthusiasm. The dirt, my father said, is a heavy clay. And two towering hemlock trees cast the land into darkness in the afternoon. For a grapevine, which likes well-drained soil and 160 days of sunbathing, this isn’t terroir but torture.

“I’m not overly optimistic about the likelihood of success,” my father said.

I sought encouragement from Peter Hemstad, 51, a research viticulturist at the University of Minnesota. “It only takes about a half-dozen vines to make a five-gallon carboy of wine each year,” he said. That’s around two cases, or “enough to spread the joy around.” An extra vine or two would provide a margin of error.

Even a landless city gardener could have some luck sinking a cold-weather vine into a container like an EarthBox. An astounding grape plant in Santa Barbara County, Calif., Mr. Hemstad told me, once covered 12,000 square feet and threw off 10,000 pounds of fruit at harvest time. In other words, “over time, one vine will easily cover a deck,” he said.

At this scale, a table grape would be ideal. Mr. Hemstad likes Steuben, a seeded 1947 Cornell variety, for its easy nature and spicy flavor. “It makes the best juice or jelly in town,” he said. (The grape can even sneak a cameo in dessert wines.)

Of course, dessert grapes wouldn’t suit the stately grounds of the Tortorello Estate. The plan here was to plant the dormant vines six to eight feet apart, leaving another eight feet between rows. (April or May is the best time in New York; fall would also work.)

But scrub trees and a briar patch were squatting in our vineyard. Even after we had evicted them with a chainsaw (an essential part of any father-son field day), there wasn’t enough room to avoid crowding the vines.

My dad, who owns a small construction company, would be in charge of the posts and wires for the trellis. The alternative was that I could be in charge and my father would tell me all the things I was doing wrong. This option might have worked better after a few glasses of wine.

Trellising systems have names that sound like 19th-century con games: there’s the Geneva Double Curtain, the Hudson River Umbrella and the Four-Arm Kniffen. The basic concept behind all this pruning and binding is to swindle the vine into producing 5 to 15 pounds of well-sugared fruit.