Iraqi Past Ferments in An Unlikely N.Y. Winery

"Part of it is being a refugee, not having my own home I grew up in," Jiji says. "I'm not able to go back to my past and touch it and re-experience it, so I try to do something here that becomes my creation, that becomes part of what I am."

As recently as a few generations ago, many New Yorkers made wine old-country style, but few used homegrown grapes. Instead, trucks used to (and sometimes still do) come in late summer to deliver boxes of grapes to people's doors. Business was fueled first by Italians, later by Croatians, Greeks and Lebanese. The grape delivery truck always charted a map of New York European and Mediterranean immigration.

But there are peculiarities of the transplanted urban vine.

"The Greeks, the Romans, the Arabs, they had short vines -- my vine is tall," Jiji will note. His vertical vine can cause problems. It's hard to pick grapes overhead. They're hard to see, grapes get crushed, juice streams down.

Drenched in grape juice and sweat, with BlackBerrys and cellphones cast to a pile on the side of the rooftop vineyard, a dozen pickers picked Saturday until they were tired from picking. The air filled with the sound of snipping. Pretty much no one had outside experience in winemaking. "It smells like the muscat grape-flavored Gummy," said Tori Lo, 21, a friend of Jiji's nephew.

"Grapes! Grapes!" someone yelled as a basket full of them came down by pulley. "Yelling 'grapes' doesn't help, there's grapes everywhere," someone else commented.

Genio Rodriguez, 48, an engineer and Jiji's crew chief, weighed incoming loads by standing on a scale with the plastic bags in his hands, and subtracting his own weight. The grapes were dropped in a tub filled with garden-hose water, transferred to a plastic laundry basket, dumped in a crusher, which separates out the stems, and then made liquid in a wooden press. A "chemistry lab" was set up in the far corner of the garden, where various helpers nervously added sugar and an agent to kill yeast.

The taste and quality of the wine varies from year to year, but also from bottle to bottle. It mostly has a mild, sweet flavor, and tastes much like the grapes on the roof. Some bottles develop a spiked grape juice taste.

The 2001 vintage, for instance, is "very well balanced, but it still has the Latif character, its crispness," says Rodriguez, who recounts that he became fascinated by wine at age 16, when he worked as a mover for a Queens Mafioso who gave him a few bottles of fine wine.

Jiji's vine has also been put to multiple uses. He used to keep the grape leaves and his mother would stuff them with meat and rice. Each year, there is grape juice.

Jiji has also sent the seeds and skins left over from winemaking to an Armenian friend, outside the city, who uses a still to ramp up the alcohol content and make something entirely different.

"That's 500 pounds exactly!" called Rodriguez on Saturday as he weighed the last of the grapes and calculated the record-breaking total. The back yard erupted in cheers.

Soon the yard would be hosed down, the winemaking apparatus dismantled, the golden wine-to-be moved to its basement cooler. There would be toasts over dinner to the harvest, to the work.

"It's an institution," said Jiji, sitting at a table, his family and friends around him. "I'm very proud."