Now this is a wine to die for.
A brave Brooklyn man is cultivating a massive, 50-foot grapevine a few short blocks from one of the world’s most polluted waterways, the Gowanus Canal.
There he produces a potent potable he’s labeled Vinum Nostrum, Latin for “Our Wine.”
“People are afraid of everything — from secondhand smoke to wine made near the canal,” said Joseph Mariano, 73. “I once fell into the canal — and I’m still here.”
Mariano, a retired computer programmer for the Department of Environmental Protection, has been an amateur winemaker since 1994, and said he’s suffered no ill effects from consuming his creation.
“I have no fear about it,” said Mariano. “It has a very unique flavor.”
The local soil — “terroir,” to wine snobs — imparts a fruity nose to the rich, amber-colored Gowanus spirit, with hints of pear, apricots and peach rising from a gallon jug of the still-fermenting 2011 vintage.
By next September, the stuff will be ready to drink.
Mariano is saving his only remaining bottle from 2010 — a rosé — to crack open on Thanksgiving.
Mariano said the wine is a labor of love — his grandfather, Angelo D’Amore of Bushwick, also dabbled in vine arts.
“I used to go inside the room where he made it, and smell it,” Mariano recalled. “I’m sure I used to drink it too.”
It must have rubbed off.
When Mariano and wife Linda moved to the neighborhood in 1976, he planted the Delaware-variety grape in his back yard.
He had little success until he began pruning the plant, allowing it to clamber up his three-story home to get better exposure to the sunlight.
Today, the hefty vine is secured by rope and protected from birds and squirrels by mesh netting.
When harvest time comes in late August, the prodigious plant is lowered to the ground with pulleys, and its fat pink grapes are harvested.
The 20 pounds of grapes yield about five bottles of the homegrown vino annually.
The total cost of the operation last year was $863.
The wine is not sold, but drunk in-house or given to friends and family.