A Vineyard Grows at Ground Zero
The day I saw the towers fall, I never thought I’d plant wine grapes in their place.
I’d been called for jury duty and after failing to find a legal spot for my dead mother’s Cadillac near my bachelor pad in Greenwich Village, I threw up my hands, prayed to the parking ticket gods and headed toward the C train. A flaming orange hole in Tower One greeted me when I turned onto Sixth Avenue.
“Don’t take the subway,” a friend who’d been in the 1993 Trade Center bombing advised me when I called her from a payphone. I threw up my hands and set off on foot. At Canal Street, a boom and an acrid plume poured out of Tower Two.
“Those two buildings are connected,” a cabby at a filling station said knowingly. “A fire in one spreads to the other.” Got it. On to jury duty!
It soon became clear that everyone else was heading in the opposite direction. As I neared the part of town that would by the afternoon be called “Ground Zero,” a cop stopped me.
“Where the hell do you think you’re going?”
“I have jury duty,” I said, producing my summons.
“You know what? Jury dismissed.”
I came home to find a parking ticket on my dead mother’s Cadillac. I turned to look back south and saw Tower One fall in real time. I went inside and checked the “not guilty” box on the parking ticket and on its back wrote for the first time, “due to the events of September 11th…” Then I poured myself a tall glass of Burgundy, turned on the television and watched the other tower fall. And that was that with this so-called “Ground Zero.”
Or so I thought.
If the towers were still standing today, they would cast an afternoon shadow over my garden and growing wine grapes would have been impossible. But the towers are gone and my partner Esther is here and these things have made all the difference.
When Esther bought our place on the corner of Broadway and Maiden Lane a year after 9/11, she had a premonition that by choosing an apartment with a terrace, she was inviting a gardener into her life. This premonition proved correct. Though it would take me some time to find my way to wine.
I started unambitiously at first. I followed my neighbor Mark’s habit of cramming the terrace with potted flowers from a nursery in New Jersey. By fall it would all be dead. In a place where so much life had ended, this didn’t sit well with me. Moreover, for the first time in my New York life, I had committed to a woman. I was a perennial, not an annual damn it!
What plant, I wondered, would endure and grow year-after-year? What could withstand the harsh dark and cold that descended on us in December when the sun disappeared for the winter behind the Federal Reserve building? The choice was obvious: wine grapes from the Finger Lakes.
Bred by a Seneca Lake-based nursery, the vines I mail-ordered were advertised as “cold-hardy,” able to withstand temperatures south of -30°F.
It was a full two years before one spring morning, I got on a ladder and inspected the growth on my Frontenac vine by then had spread up from a wine barrel and down the terrace’s western wall. Was it? Could it be? Grapes!
Like all baby things, baby wine grapes are cute and full of hope. And unlike my human two-year-old sleeping just inside the apartment, the Frontenac did not poop or need toilet training. It just needed trellis training, which I did over the course of the next year.
To the east, around the picnic table at the center of the terrace, I’d planted Seneca Lake Concords. They, too, had started to bear fruit. These I trained upward to a latticework fashioned from dry-cleaning wire hangers.
Another year later, the vines had expanded and intertwined and created what the Greeks call a klimataria and which was probably the model for the Jewish wedding chuppah; a living shelter under which one can raise a family. Beneath this shelter, we went on to celebrate my son’s early birthdays, Esther’s Ph.D. defense, the publication of my first book and my father’s retirement.
The first few years I made jam. I had no idea how to make wine. As luck would have it, one year when the grapes came in, a relation dropped off a home wine-making kit that never quite worked for him. I followed the directions meticulously. I boiled, I sterilized. I made my palm simulate a peasant’s heel, squishing my grapes down into an Igloo drinks cooler. Then I bottled it all up and waited. Six months later, I poured out my first glass, which bore an unsettling amber color.
It tasted like turpentine.
As luck would have it once again (like it always seems to have with this project) a winemaker came into my life. In my real career, I’m known for writing books about seafood and the ocean. I happened upon Christopher Nicolson while reporting on his community supported fishery in southeastern Alaska. Miraculously it turned out that salmon fishing was just half of Christopher’s portfolio. The other half was winemaking. He’d spent three vintages with Ted Lemon at Littorai on the Sonoma Coast and two vintages in Tuscany with both communist hippies and an old-school Tuscan landowner. Best of all (and, of course) he lived in Brooklyn, where he currently serves as managing winemaker at the Red Hook Winery.
That fall, after we’d both returned to New York, he started consulting on the Ground Zero wine project. He told me when to pick. He handled the maceration, and rather than introduce industrial yeast, he was patient enough to let a natural fermentation arise. At his aging facility, next to massive casks of professional wine that he’d crafted, he placed a tiny bottle of my terrace product. And there it sat for three years.
In the meantime, my “vineyard” expanded. I took cuttings from the mother vines. In springtime I planted them in garbage cans and other makeshift containers. As of this writing, there are ten active vines spread throughout the terrace.
And as the greenery spread, I started researching and writing about the potential hidden in our urban roofs. If every New York building pursued a rooftop vineyard or a garden of some sort, we could potentially lower air conditioning use by 75%, reduce air pollution and improve the rivers next door by limiting stormwater runoff. Noise could be reduced by 40 to 50 decibels and, as I’ve noticed on my terrace, wildlife might feel more comfortable moving in.
How to promote all this through my world-changing wine? I cast about for a name and a designer for its label to make the whole project pop. The children’s book author and illustrator Elisha Cooper came forward with a painting that showed a burgeoning vine in the foreground and just the vaguest shadow of the towers in the background. The name came easily at a terroir called Ground Zero: Château Nul. I sat and waited for some Wall Street tycoon to put in a bid for this one-of-a-kind vintage.
But an occasion arose to drink instead of sell Christopher’s meticulously fashioned Château Nul. At the age of 86 my father passed away peacefully in his sleep. Underneath the trellis, I poured out tiny glasses for two dozen close friends and family. After a Buddhist prayer, we drank to his memory. It had a slightly acidic, but still very palatable taste. A hint of bitterness appropriate for the occasion. We spread my father’s ashes in a thirty gallon vessel. Then we planted the latest cutting from the mother vine.
In a few more years, I hope it bears fruit.
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