MY FATHER AND THE WINE

5 1 R M Y F A T H E R A N D T H E W I N E I R I N A D U M I T R E S C U The making of wine binds me to my ancestors who were toughsinewed peasants and whose feet were rooted in the earth. – Angelo Pellegrini, The Unprejudiced Palate Now and then I click a link to find out what the hipsters are up to. The hipsters are raising chickens and slaughtering them at home, I read; the hipsters are distilling hooch. This is trendy and far out and probably how we should all live, despite being smelly and arduous. No doubt they have it right, the hipsters, and if they are fermenting cheese and spritzing meat into sausage casings in Brooklyn, then we will surely soon follow them in the lesser metropolises . But the romance of do-it-yourself is tainted for me. I cannot muster up the enthusiasm to kill my own rabbit and pickle it. There is a droning voice in my head that says, You do this because you never had to. You do it because you do not know the humiliation and occasional physical danger of an immigrant father who held on to his past using food. You do this because the ethics of the undertaking are clear to you, and you don’t – yet – 5 2 D U M I T R E S C U Y understand the exquisite liberation of food that comes from a supermarket. First, and last, and every time, above all things, was The Wine. It was never just wine, it was always The Wine, that year’s massive household production, the gravitational pull of which none of us could escape. This is not because my father came from the country. He was a city boy par excellence, but he could remember days when Bucharest had dirtier hands, or at least cleaner dirt on its hands. He used to tell me with a grin how when he was a child, chickens were always bought alive. The housewives would go out to the street with a knife and flag down a passing man to kill the bird they wanted to cook for dinner. Businessmen who wanted to display their machismo refused the knife and wrung the chicken’s neck barehanded. This was the old Bucharest, when my father’s father still had his sausage factory, when salami still hung in their attic to cure and my father was responsible for tending to it. It was when my grandfather still made his own wine. After we had moved through two new countries and multiple apartments in each, after we had finally settled in a house in the blandest cookie-cutter suburbs we could find, my father started to talk about making wine. Enough moving around and you’ll want to reach for a bit of what was good back home. Enough moving around and you’ll want to drink, I suppose. The decision to start making wine was helped along by the fact that alcohol sales are controlled by a government monopoly in Ontario, the L.C.B.O., leading to small selection and high prices for a liquid as essential to Romanians as milk is to white-bread North American families. My father saw this as the oppressive fruit of Canadian puritanism, and he set about staging his own private revolution. In this, he had the help of ‘‘the Italians,’’ purveyors of everything needed by the suburban vintner with Old World sensibilities: massive bottles, special corks to let the gas out, industrial quantities of grapes, and the facilities for turning them into must. I was in my early teens at this point, still excited by the enterprise and even a little proud. As my father studied the chemistry of winemaking with the assiduousness of the university professor he had once been, I designed wine labels on the computer with the title ‘‘Casa Dumitrescu,’’ and struggled to align a sheet of sticky labels in our dot matrix printer so that the graphic would come out right. It was not very good M Y F A T H E...

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