✍️ Dispatch: Confession of a Grape Thief

Lessons from my unremarkable experiment in winemaking

The first time I tried to make my own wine I stole the grapes late at night, without a flashlight. The liquid I produced -- it wasn’t quite vino -- ended up being so alive with mold that it scorched the grass where I poured it out.

There were around 20 vines growing in the garden of the building where I lived at the time. When I asked, a neighbor who’d been there a while advised me against asking for permission to pick the grapes. So, I went out there on my own, after midnight, for two consecutive nights, quietly picking, armed with kitchen scissors and a few grocery bags. I crushed the grapes with my hands, and let them ferment in my cantina in two red plastic buckets covered in cellophane weighed down by a heavy wooden plank.

A couple of weeks in, a thin, olive-green film started spreading across the surface in both buckets. I skimmed it off, but before long it was back, forming into little hairy islands of mold. That night I dumped the buckets into the garden, planning to try again the following year.

Days later, the grass was dead.

That’s me and Audrey: the label from the first drinkable vintage of Château Eric (EJL photo)

Two years and several wine books after that, I finally produced something drinkable and I bottled it in 26 half-bottles with a tongue-in-cheek label: Château Eric. Each bottle was hand numbered and signed. I claimed the grapes were “Malvasia di San Giovanni Decollato D.O.C.” The label featured my head pasted onto Gregory Peck’s body in a scene from Roman Holiday, Audrey Hepburn’s arms wrapped casually around “my” waist.

I gave most of the bottles away and advised people to drink them very cold to cover up the wine’s obvious defects: low alcohol and thin fruit that faded quickly.

I made three “vintages” of the stuff without much improvement, before a search for a vacation house landed me in the Castelli Romani, near Rome. It was a modest plot of land with the remains of a shepherd’s hut -- and around 3,300 actual Malvasia vines.

I never got around to refurbishing the old structure or seriously thinking about bottling my own wine. Instead, Vito, a local farmer, took care of the land in return for half of the grapes it produced. The rest were sold to a big regional wine producer, Gotto d’oro (I did the math: around 0.05% of their total production came from my grapes). In addition to cash payments, I received a few 12-bottle cases of wine each year.

A few plain, white-labeled bottles from the 2019 vintage (EJL photo)

The wine in those bottles was significantly better than what I produced at home, but it wasn’t anything to boast about; I still told people to over-chill the bottle. The labels were a lot simpler than the ones I made for Château Eric: plain, with only the word registrato and the date of bottling printed on them. My name (usually misspelled) was added by hand.

I sold the property three years ago, and you know what? I kind of miss those bottles. Not enough to shell out the €3.49 that a magnum of Gotto d’oro Marino Bianco costs at my neighborhood grocery store. But enough to feel a touch of nostalgia about the white-labeled wine that arrived each year without ceremony, never claiming to be something it was not.

If my years as a -- and I use the term lightly -- “winemaker” taught me something, it’s that, read correctly, a wine label can tell you more about what a wine wants to be than what it is. But that’s a subject I’ll return to in the future.

I still have a few potted vines from my former plot of land growing in my garden in Rome, where the challenge is to eat some of the grapes before the birds do. I also have some very good bottles in my cellar, which I’m thrilled to open on occasions that deserve them. And I’ve learned my role. I’m content to leave the winemaking to someone else.

A drop or two in each of these bottles came from my vines (EJL photo)

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These shorter Dispatch pieces appear every other Tuesday, in the weeks between the long-form features. Come back next week for another full essay.