Joseph Picardi/ Wine Flows Down Hudson Street
Angelo and Justina Picardi
Our father, Angelo Picardi, made some of the best home made
wine in the area which was much in demand in the
neighborhood and environs. At eleven years old I was
dragging a cart loaded with boxes of grapes down Hudson
Street in the wee hours of the morning and sending them
down a chute to my waiting father in the basement, turned
wine cellar. While the wine was fermenting the odor would
permeate the house and our clothes when our mother,Justina,
would hang them in the basement in bad weather. The nuns
and our classmates in St Joachim's would always know when
my father was making wine! Neighbors would always stop my
father or me and ask when the wine would be ready. Our
mother would tell us not to tell anybody about the wine
because my father sold it which we later found out was
illegal. It was the worst kept secret in Trenton. My
father sold the wine for our family's livelihood
especially in the winter when he was laid off from his
construction job. We were seven kids, two sick with
diabetes. My father was pretty easy going when he sold
the wine and sold to anybody who came to the door.
Unfortunately he sold to a State ABC agent. The fire
department came to the basement, broke the forty barrels,
and pumped the wine down the gutter to the "boos" of the
neighbors. The headline in papers the next day was "Wine
Flows Down Hudson Street ."
Note: This taken from Mercer County Italian Festival Site:)
2 comments:
Joe was my grandmothers cousin. Thank you for sharing. My grandfather also made wine and his basement was also filled with jars of anchovy-stuffed hot peppers in oil, tomato sauce and of course wine. good times for sure!
Hi nj1.
It was a fun story to share.
I remember how well Tomatos grew in our Burg yard and remember folks
with the peppers and the fig trees too and the vines in the yards the home made wine. The Burg had many folks who stayed old school even thru the 1990s. I love your Grandma's cousins' story:))
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