The Fine Delicacy of Mangiapane’s Wine
The grapes are early this year. They droop lazily in the afternoon sun that sinks in deep perpendicular slabs across Anthony Mangiapane’s backyard in Waterbury’s South End. Mangiapane sits under the arbor and waits for them. He is a patient man.
People ask Mangiapane what makes his wine so sweet and he could tell them many things. He could tell them about the 50 years of pruning and tending. He could tell them about the lessons he learned from his parents, who squeezed thick, succulent plum juice into old oak barrels. He could tell them about the little leather notebook where he keeps all his secrets.
But he has the time and the heart to think poetically, and so what he tells them is this: “The vines are grown in the shadows of St. Anne’s Shrine. And at the end of the day the setting sun gives the grapes a light kiss before it descends into the horizon.”
That, he says, is what makes his wine so sweet.
Anthony Mangiapane is 83 years old and has lived here in the South End of Waterbury, for more than 50 years. He is short and stocky and wears Army green cotton shorts held up by matching suspenders clipped to an elasticized waist band. His black shoes shuffle across the narrow, neatly trimmed grass and he slumps into a white plastic deck chair under the arbor he has grown nearly too old to tend. He speaks in a gravelly whisper and his wry observations are so gingerly delivered that they are easy to miss.
Everybody made wine in his day. Now it’s a high-tech hobby, taught in college-level classes and embraced by young entrepreneurs. Mangiapane doesn’t make his wine for sale or for profit but there’s a certain pride in the process. He may be the only inner-city vintner left, which would be a peculiar distinction.
“I learned by observing my parents,” says Mangiapane, sitting cross-ankled, his short, stubby hands knitted neatly over his ample belly. “They had their own theories. They did it the old-fashioned method in open vats. Everything was by guess and by gosh.”
Mangiapane, a machine designer and draftsman for the bulk of his working life, moved into this tall, narrow house, with its old-fashioned oil stove and oak icebox, in 1948, after marrying his wife, Angeline, and moving into her parents’ house. His in-laws had a grape arbor, but most of his Italian relatives bought their grapes from the six or seven street vendors who sold the products from roadside stands or the backs of trucks. Nobody thought much of Connecticut grapes. But Mangiapane figured he could make a go of it and began tending to the thick, ropey vines that canopy over the green wood arbor.
In the back corner, Mangiapane points out the faded white letters he painted on the green pole that supports the arbor. “Fredonia,” it reads, to indicate the type of grapes planted there.
The tall houses around him snuggle close together, so close you can hear the neighbor’s conversations, and touch the clothes they hang on the line. When Mangiapane was growing up the area was mostly all French Canadian. Families lived in multi-generational triple deckers behind the city’s robust brick factories. Now the factories are gone, and most of the French, too. The area is largely Hispanic and transient.
But nobody steals his grapes any more, which was a problem back then. And his wife, Angeline, has nobody to give her homemade jam to. In the old days, she had plenty of neighbors who would return the glass pickle jars to her after they had finished the stuff. Now she saves the jam for friends and family, and guests, for whom she offers a saltine coated with the sweet jam.
Mangiapone limps up the narrow stairwell of his home. Upstairs, on a folding table in the kitchen, a wood frame holds a glass jug half full of amethyst-colored liquid.
Mangiapane grabs a plastic straw twisted in several roller coaster-like swirls. He sticks the long, thick straw into the jug and begins to suck on one end. As he does, the wine inches upward. Mangiapane places a glass beaker to his lips and tongues the straw into it. The wine snakes through the straw into the beaker. From a tattered, narrow box, he procures a thermometer-like stick, which measures the liquid’s sugar content. He aims for a 14 percent alcohol content. When it is nearly done, he pours it in plastic fruit juice bottles before he corks it in a wine bottle and labels it with his own particular code.
Every year, Mangiapane makes about 15 gallons of wine. He gives his wife first stab at the grapes because her jelly is a priority. He gets the leavings, which is fine. His wife never developed a taste for wine; but Mangiapane figures he’s been drinking it since he was five. Once or twice he’s had store-bought wine. But what’s the point, he figures.
“I think I’ve reached perfection with the wine you can make from backyard grapes,” he says.
Publication date: Tuesday, August 15, 2006 c. Republican-American