“The Coffey Family Winery” by Mary Anne Coffey

In the early 1960s, Mom decided to make her own wine. She had discovered that one could make a few gallons legally for home consumption. So she persuaded Dad to build an arbour by the back door and ordered Concord grape vines. Unfortunately, both we kids and the neighbourhood raccoons loved the deep purple grapes, especially after a touch of frost in the Fall made them sweeter. The two or three vines just didn’t produce enough for both snacking and wine-making.

Undeterred, Mom bought two 10-gallon brown crocks with lids and all the other gear she needed and collected a regiment of used wine and liquor containers of all sizes. At a local produce store (There were a couple of large ones on Yonge Street) she obtained bushels and bushels of Concords, and thus began the Coffey Family Winery.

In that era, Toronto was a conservative monoculture when it came to alcoholic refreshment. Liquor could be purchased only at the LCBO store from a limited selection. For wine, you could get Mogen David, an unpleasant brew that Mom gave us as a tonic when we were ill. To make a purchase, an adult filled out a slip of paper with the requested bottle, and a bored male clerk went on a search-and-retrieve mission. After presenting the liquor to the customer as if to say, “You really want to buy this stuff? Last chance to change your mind!” he placed it in a plain brown paper bag, much like hiding a “girlie” magazine or contraband.  The message was clear: drink and be damned.

Fortunately, the hard-working, post-war Italian immigrants who built the subway in the 1950s brought their practice of making wine and tomato sauce with them and enlivened Toronto’s culinary scene in the process. Spaghetti and pizza began to appear on restaurant menus, although at home we only ate Spaghetti-O’s out of a can, and rarely, and I didn’t have pizza until much later.

Still, with the arrival of the Italians, the making of wine at home became an existential possibility, which Mom embraced. Although the Irish are known as a hard-drinking people, we had no family history of liquor-making or alcohol abuse. 

On the contrary, Mom urged us, in good Irish Roman Catholic tradition, to take the Pledge. I promised at the altar rail not to drink alcohol until I was 21(the legal drinking age at the time). So the creation of a Coffey home winery was both culturally and religiously ironic.

I don’t know where Mom found the recipe, but people have been making booze for thousands of years from all sorts of things: potatoes, wheat, grapes, honey, dandelions, corn, berries of all kinds, and from the smell and taste of Mogen David, out of well worn, dusty old boots that had slipped in donkey dung. So how hard could it be?

Mom washed, stemmed, and crushed the grapes into juice, and strained the resulting must through several layers of cheesecloth before pouring it into the crocks with yeast to ferment into wine. Then the sediment was removed again and again (more cheesecloth) and the wine eventually bottled. The filled bottles were placed under the kitchen table to rest for a few days so any remaining sediment could settle. It wasn’t a difficult process, but involved a number of time-consuming steps and a great deal of effort.

Then one lovely Fall morning, we all went off to Mass as usual. On our return, the smell was the first indication that all was not well in the winery. The house smelled…fruity.

Mom never quite knew what it was about that recipe. Somehow, a tiny bit of yeastiness slipped through her multiple cheesecloth defences and reinforced fermentation. Fermentation produces the desired alcohol, but also releases gasses—in this case, under pressure—like the bubbles in champagne that long to escape. It wasn’t that the corks blew. They didn’t. No, the entire sides of the heavy glass whiskey bottles exploded outwards, blasting a delicious-smelling purple lake across the kitchen floor.

Although she took it in good spirit and laughed as we mopped up the mess, that explosion signalled the abrupt demise of the Coffey Family Winery. If we wanted wine after the explosion, it was back to the LCBO and Mogen David for us.

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Mary Anne Coffey teaches academic writing at York University in Toronto, and is beginning to write short memoirs.

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