In midst of the city, a pressing tradition

Grapes there for the picking, and wine-making

Mario Borges and his grandmother, Nair, check on a 55-gallon drum of fermenting grapes on the patio of their family-run Neighborhood Restaurant in Union Square. (Josh Reynolds for The Boston Globe)

Despite its many hills, Somerville's no Napa Valley. Still, the sticky-sweet smell wafting onto city streets of late reveals that it's harvest time for the 2008 vintage.

Somerville, it turns out, is jam-packed with small home vineyards. There are three on a short stretch of Elm Street outside Porter Square. Six in two blocks next to the Market Basket. Four at a single intersection behind Inman Square.

Some peek out from the backyard. Many create a living carport at the side of a house. The ripe fruit has a thicker skin and softer pulp than muscular supermarket grapes, plus two pointy seeds.

The city has a long history of winemaking, with the vintners often Italians or Portuguese, said Joe Badolato, with an Everett-based business, Wine Grapes in New England.

"We grew up," wrote East Somerville garden coordinator Leanne Darrigo in an e-mail, "with vines in the backyards of almost every Italian relative I can think of. My grandfather, his brothers and cousins would press wine down in the cellar every fall," and age it in homemade oak barrels.

Mayor Joe Curtatone's father made wine at home on Prospect Hill, said city spokesman Tom Champion. Even during Prohibition, said Champion after checking with a lawyer, it was legal to make wine at home for personal use.

The grapes at 46 Houghton St. predated his family, said 13-year-old Aiury Cavallo. His grandmother makes jelly when she visits.

Probably the city's best-known vineyard covers the patio at the family-run Neighborhood Restaurant, a popular brunch spot.

Manuel F. Borges is in charge at the ripe old age of 86. "He does it every year," said grandson Mario Borges, 33, who expected a yield of about 150 gallons this fall. "It's just a little homegrown thing."

He showed off the simple operation on Sept. 18. White grapes and squash still hung from the trellis. Pressed red grapes sat in two tarp-covered blue plastic barrels. "It'll ferment eventually and then he'll drain it out and put it into new containers and let it sit," possibly adding sugar, Borges said. The family stores the wine in an upstairs hallway.

Methods have changed, Badolato said. Nowadays home vintners become chemists, tracking the mix's sugar content and acidity.

Since the restaurant can't serve the wine, chefs use it all in the kitchen. Cooking your way through 150 gallons of wine? "We're Portuguese. We cook with a lot of red and white wine," Borges said.

They can serve the jelly it makes - 50 pounds that week alone cooked in a single huge pot.

But while Manuel keeps pressing away, the city's grape-growers may be a dying breed.

The vines at 69 Oak St. date to the mid-1960s, several years after her family emigrated from the Azores, said Maria I. Matos, 78. She said her husband is now too frail to make wine. "Before, he make a great wine - delicious," she said, sounding surprised that anyone would assume otherwise.

Now, Matos said, "I just eat!" (She quit making grape jelly years ago for a different reason - her family didn't like it.)

Over on Franklin Place, Darrigo said landlord Bernardino Freitas started his vine more than 30 years ago but no longer makes wine, though he too eats the grapes. She wove lights into the canopy for her teenage daughter's recent birthday party.

Badolato said that though business is booming, half his customers are new to the hobby. "The old-fashioned way of doing it - everything is dying."

And some don't use their grapes at all.

At 39 Houghton St., grapes hung heavy over two cars and a patio. No one harvests them, said renter Stephanie Cruise, 31: "Usually just people on the street will walk by and grab them." They fall on the cars and "make quite a mess."

One person posted a request on the Freecycle.org e-mail list begging people to take grapes from her East Somerville backyard.

Borges said that a longtime wine-making friend of his grandfather's had lamented recently that his son doesn't care about the practice, and he expects the tradition will end with him.

That won't happen with the Borges family.

His grandfather, Borges said, is "passing it down to me and my aunt. He wants everybody to learn."