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Corrado’s in Clifton sells grapes from around the world. And all the supplies to make wine

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Corrado’s in Clifton sells grapes from around the world. And all the supplies to make wine

The Corrado family has sourced wine grapes from around the world for decades. Pick your favorite, juice them on their press and make wine at home.

“People have been making wine for thousands of years; it’s not hard to make wine,” says Jimmy Corrado, whose family has run Corrado’s Market in Clifton for over 50 years. 

That’s heartening to hear because scanning over the tons of crates overflowing with wine grapes from around the world in the cool back room of the Corrado’s Wine and Beer Making Center, I’m inspired to try. After plucking a fresh chardonnay or cab Franc grape, popping it in my mouth, tasting its concentrated sugars and the tannic coating it leaves on my tongue, I’m imagining my success. 

Then, Corrado adds, with a laugh: “Making good wine is a bit more difficult, and making great wine is even more difficult.”

If you’ve ever had an inclination to make wine at home, Corrado’s is the place to explore that urge. Every year in late September and October, it receives hundreds of crates of fresh wine grapes from its network of growers around the world: California, Italy, Portugal, South Africa, Chile and more. The shop also carries everything you need to set up a winemaking operation in your home — from the grapes and yeast to fermenters, barrels and everything in between.

“If you have nothing and haven’t made wine before, you can come in here and I can get you set up for a couple hundred bucks,” Corrado says, “…or a couple thousand bucks.”

Indeed, as with other home culinary hobbies, you can get a rudimentary set-up or go down the rabbit hole. But wine-making at its core is a pretty simple exercise, especially if you have experience with at-home fermentation, pickling, baking or homebrewing. The simple version goes: Get grapes, juice them, ferment them with yeast for one to three weeks, siphon out the dregs of fermentation and bottle your wine.

Good wine starts and ends with the grapes. At Corrado’s, you can sample the grapes and inspect them for quality — Corrado says this year’s harvest yielded a lower amount of overall fruit but maybe the best quality in the last five years — and then the market team will press the grapes into juice, which you’d then take home in buckets. Or, you can buy the grapes and press them yourself at home. (Caution: that’s going to be messy. Bonus points if you stomp them with your feet in a wooden bucket like in the olden days.)

As you get more involved in the hobby, the fun of winemaking unfolds in the details. You can change fermentation temperatures and durations, yeast strains, grape varieties, aging conditions and more. You can ferment with the stems on. You can blend varieties you think might complement each other or, why not, two you think would be disastrous for one another. 

The experimentation is the point, and when you hit something you like, it’s up to you whether you want to share that information or not.

“There are guys who come in here and say, ‘My brother’s coming later, don’t tell him what I bought.’ Some try to keep it a real real secret, but others… you can come in here on a Saturday and talk to 12 different people and get 12 different ways to make wine,” Corrado says. 

On a recent weekday afternoon, a man from Staten Island named Baur was observing his red alicante grapes being juiced in the massive on-site press, occasionally standing to fill five-gallon buckets with the aromatic, frothy, magenta liquid. “I go by the taste,” he says of why he chose this variety out of the dozens of grape options. With a what-can-I-say? shrug, he adds, “I like good wine.”

An immigrant from Malta, Baur has been making wine since before Corrado’s existed, taking recipes from when his father made wine. As it is for so many others, Baur’s wine-making hobby is a family affair.

“Now I got my son into it, so he makes small batches too,” he says.

Corrado’s, too, is a family business — it began with Pietro Corrado selling produce at a Paterson farmers market in the ’30s before the family opened its Clifton market in the ‘60s. Many a Corrado family member has since worked at Corrado’s main grocery, garden center, pet store and/or in the beer and wine shop. 

Corrado’s forebears were able to source grapes from the same Central Valley, California, growers they were getting produce from decades ago, which then allowed them to serve an influx of largely European immigrants in the Clifton area looking to make wine.

“[My grandfather] got into the produce business, and the community at that time in this area was mostly Italian and these poeple wanted to make wine at home,” Corrado says. “They wanted to continue on what they had done at home and we were able to because of our relationships with farmers bringing fruits and vegetables in. We were able to source grapes from them and offer it, and it’s continued to grow year by year.”

Corrado says grapes take about a week to get from field to Clifton: they need to be picked, packed, cooled and shipped to North Jersey, where they rest in boxes in a large, refrigerated room. The duration of the harvest season varies from region to region, but Corrado expects to get grapes through at least mid-October. Go now and you can peruse familiar varieties like pinot noir, cabernet sauvignon, chardonnay, merlot and syrah; lesser-known varieties like malvasia or teroldego; and grapes associated with specific regions like barbera, sangiovese and riesling.

As Corrado says, it’s hard to make great wine, so no one’s expecting you to be Robert Mondavi in your wine-making pursuit. But though we tend to talk about the varietal, vintage, maker and terroir in discussing a wine’s quality, none of that is really lost when making wine at home in New Jersey from grapes sourced from afar: The folks at Corrado’s can tell you about the grower and growing conditions of any grape you choose to use and how the growing season went. And you’re the maker, so you can spin any yarn you want about your process.

That’s not to say homemade wine is expected to meet anyone’s standards of quality outside your own. In fact, the limitations you have as a home winemaker, or the family recipes you might follow, often make for a better story and a more interesting wine.

“Back in the ’30s and ’40s, the only barrels you could get were whiskey barrels, so they were buying bourbon barrels and putting wine in them. And over generations it became tradition; now you can buy a brand new wine barrel but we still sell whiskey barrels because you have a guy whose grandfather came [to the U.S.] in the ’30s and that’s what grandpa used and that’s what he wants to use.” 

In other words, when someone asks, ‘What’s that note of Jim Beam in this zinfandel?’ you can say, ‘Sorry, family secret.’ Or, better yet: In discussing your vinous creations, you might get to share a story about your family from another generation over a glass of wine that you otherwise wouldn’t have shared. That’s about as good as it gets. Corrado, who does indeed make wine at home himself, agrees.

“It’s like anything else,” he says. “If you make a cake or bake cookies, you want to share that with friends. There’s a lot that comes with doing that or any hobby where you’re producing something. It’s very rewarding.”

Go: Corrado’s Wine and Beer Making Center, 600 Getty Avenue, Clifton; 973-340-0848, corradosmarket.com/grapes-for-wine-making

Matt Cortina is a food reporter for NorthJersey.com/The Record. Reach him at mcortina@gannett.com.

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