Drinking In the Past : San Pedro Merchant Carries On Old World Winemaking Traditions

In a little-noticed nook in downtown San Pedro, next door to the A-1 Meat Co. and across the street from a senior citizens center, Tony Marabella spends each fall doing what he has done at harvest time for more than half a century: crushing and pressing the fruit of the vine.

Ferdinando DiBernardo is one of Marabella’s steady customers. The 92-year-old retired fisherman, who has been making wine in his garage for as long as he can remember, buys 50 gallons of grape juice from Marabella every year.

This annual exchange, which the two men have repeated for at least 40 years, is more than a simple business transaction. It helps keep a dying tradition alive.

“In the old country, yes, they drink a little bit,” DiBernardo acknowledges after uncorking a bottle of last year’s burgundy and pouring a sip into a small juice glass. It is potent stuff--more than twice the alcohol content of store-bought wine, by the estimation of DiBernardo’s son, Fred.

“I got a big family,” the old fisherman declares. “Sometimes I got 30, 35 people at my house for dinner. I put wine on the table. I enjoy! But,” he insists with a shake of his forefinger, “I’ve never been drunk in my life.”

San Pedro was built on the backs of men like DiBernardo, immigrants from Italy and Yugoslavia who came here because the fishing was good and the balmy weather reminded them of home. And they brought their winemaking talents with them; longtime residents say that 50 or 60 years ago, there was so much wine being made in San Pedro that you could smell it in the streets.

And although the custom has dwindled over the years, evidence of it remains.

Many homes in the seaside community, including DiBernardo’s, were built with cellars--an unusual feature in Southern California--expressly for making wine. There is an older section of town called Vinegar Hill, so named, according to a local historian, because residents were in the habit of throwing their leftover wine sediment into the gulch below, where it created a terrible stench.

And there is Marabella’s business, the Marabella Vineyard Co., founded in 1932 by an uncle of Marabella’s wife. Years ago, Marabella had a handful of competitors. But today, he is the only grape and grape juice supplier left in San Pedro. It is a position he retains with a sense of pride and duty.

“The old-timers,” he says, “they get used to homemade. They drink store-bought, they get sick.”

Old-timers are the mainstay of Marabella’s business, says John Daume of The Home Winemaking Shop in Woodland Hills, who believes he is the only other grape supplier in Southern California.

“He’s done that for a zillion years,” says Daume, who caters to a younger clientele. “He’s into the Old World approach to winemaking where we’re into a more up-to-date approach. Tony, he’s making nice wine like they did 50 years ago.”

Indeed, while Daume runs wine-making clinics where his customers can have their Chardonnays and Zinfandels analyzed, the 65-year-old Marabella dispenses over-the-counter advice from his barn-like building on 8th Street, just on the edge of Vinegar Hill.

The place, cool and dark as the inside of a wine barrel, hasn’t changed much over the years. It is chock-full of oak presses and redwood fermenting vats, many of which Marabella says have been around since the 1930s.

A 1966 black-and-white photo of Marabella pressing grapes has been taped to the wall of his cubbyhole office. The whole scene is straight out of a Norman Rockwell painting, complete with a sign above the entryway that says: “Grapes & Juice Sold Cash No Credit.”

The grape supply business is seasonal. Marabella sells about 300 tons of grapes and juice each fall, 200 of it to individual customers and 100 to wineries. The juice goes for $2.50 a gallon, the grapes for $400 a ton.

“I could probably make more money renting this building out than working,” Marabella says, and given San Pedro’s booming real estate market, he may be correct. “But I enjoy it. A man’s got to have a place away from home.”

During the off-season, Marabella farms his 200-acre vineyard in Rancho Cucamonga and opens for business on Fridays and Saturdays, mostly to answer questions from customers and to operate a small store.

On a recent Friday, customer Maitrano Francesco dropped by to pick up some corks and to pay Marabella for the ton of grapes he purchased back in October. Despite his no-credit policy, Marabella says he doesn’t mind when his customers pay late: “This is a small town. I’m not afraid.”

Francesco, who emigrated from the Italian fishing port of Gaeta to San Pedro 18 years ago, says he is fermenting 150 gallons of wine this year in the cellar of his house on 18th Street. “I no drink every bit,” he says in broken English, explaining that he shares the wine with friends and family.

And though 150 gallons may seem like a lot of wine, Marabella says it goes quickly; some immigrant families consume half a gallon a day. To them, wine is an essential component of any meal, as much a part of the dinner table as forks and knives.

No one seems to know how much wine is fermented each year in the garages and cellars of San Pedro. But those who still make their own wine--and those who quit years ago--say the tradition is clearly dwindling.

“We used to crush a ton of grapes every year,” recalls Tony Perkov, whose family has been in the restaurant business in San Pedro for 45 years. “Everybody in the neighborhood made wine. Every household. Now, there’s a few families and I don’t even know who they are.”

Paul Marinkovich, 77, has been making wine for 60 years; he learned the art from his parents, who owned a vineyard in Yugoslavia. But, says the retired restaurateur and one-time fisherman, he is one of a few.

“Not very many people that I know make wine anymore,” he says. “The old people don’t drink wine anymore, not too much anyway. And the young ones, I don’t think they are interested in making the wines. If they drink wine, they buy it.”