The Fizz #69: Deanna and Alfie of Dear Native Grapes are dedicating a vineyard to New York wine history
In this issue, I speak to Deanna and Alfie, two growers and winemakers focused on bringing back New York's heritage grape varieties in the Catskills.
For the 69th issue of The Fizz, I spoke to Deanna Urciuoli and Alfie Alcántara of Dear Native Grapes. These inspiring growers and winemakers are looking back into New York wine history, to a time when the Hudson Valley was the center of American grape growing and breeding. The 1600s brought The French Hugenots to the area, who planted the first vines in New Paltz in 1677. In the 1800s and early 1900s, the Hudson Valley was a hub of vitis labrusca activity, and French American hybrids followed suit in the 1950s.
Heritage grape varieties are indigenous and native grapes to North America, many of which were used to make wine in the 1800s and early 1900s. Prohibition, which lasted from 1920-1933, effectively wiped out much of the work being done to grow cultivation and innovation around Hudson Valley winemaking. Today, we’re rediscovering native and hybrid grape varieties, and how beneficial they can be for the American winemaking and grape growing industry. Deanna and Alfie are active participants in that work, finding these rare grapes and establishing a vineyard dedicated to them.
In this issue, we talk about how Deanna and Alfie found their land, where they’re getting these rare grape cuttings, and how they’ve established community along the way. I’m so excited to stay in touch with these inspiring makers and how they will inevitably leave their mark on American winemaking.
Margot: I'd love to get started with just your history. Did you both grow up in the wine industry? Was that part of your family?
Deanna: Definitely not. We both come from a film background. We met in film school back in 2010. We were working on a film project out in New Paltz and fell in love. We were at NYU at the time doing a senior thesis project. We always knew we wanted to do a farm project. We just weren't really sure what that was or what it looked like. We were both working freelance on film jobs in the city at the time. Alfie has a very green thumb. We always had a balcony full of vegetables and flowers. It was always on the horizon—we knew that's where we wanted to get to. We just didn't know what it looked like.
Alfie: I had one of those weird callings since I was really little to want to work with grape vines. I started reading about it in high school, but never really figured out how to materialize it. When we were both living in New York City and working in film, we were talking about it a lot, and at the same time getting burnt out by the film production life. We started getting into natural wine at the time too, I'd say like about 2010 or so, that's when we were learning about it and going to different wine bars and understanding like, what is natural wine? Why is it special? Why does it make sense to us?
Deanna: That sense of place, growing a grape in the place where it's from, it was really inspiring. We were curious about what was native to North America, and it's so hard to find that information. Alfie started reading up on it.
Alfie: I was talking about the farm project a lot, but Deanna was like, you're talking about it but you're not doing anything about it!
Deanna: I’m a planner. I put us on an aggressive savings plan so we could save for farmland.
Alfie: She encouraged me to reach out to small wineries in the area and learn from them. I reached out to Todd and Crystal at Wild Arc Farm in the Hudson Valley, and they were open to me coming up and helping out. I came by a couple of times a month and tried to absorb as much as I could and figure out where we could start this project.
My family had a little bit of open land in Colorado at the time in this high and dry mountain valley, but it didn't have any water, which is very hard to come by in the west and very expensive. We did this epic road trip from Colorado to New York and on the way, I heard about this little vineyard in Colorado that someone told me we should check out.
I met the guy there and he said yeah, we've tried to plant like every kind of grape and it hasn’t worked out well, but this one grape just keeps surviving. My ancestors planted it here in the 1800s, and everything else has died except for this. It was Norton! That really sparked the idea of focusing on native grapes. On the way back to New York, we tried to find the places that were working with native grapes.
We stopped in Missouri at TerraVox Vineyards—they’re growing native varieties planted by a grower named T.V. Munson from the 1800s. They’re really, really old grapes and they're making wine there, and that was awesome. We stopped in Ohio and met up with some growers who were experimenting with other native grape varieties.
At the same time, we had a New Year's Eve party at a friend's in Maryland. we were staying at their house and everyone had the stomach flu. Deanna was really sick and I decided to go out for a hike to avoid the bug. There was a tiny little vineyard next to the farm that was getting ripped out and I was like, what's going on here? They said, we're just giving up. There's just no way to grow grapes here. They were these vinifera vines that were just getting pummeled year after year by disease and it was just so sad. That night we were both in bed and started reading about America's native grapes and what happened to them, and how they were the perfect way to make wine at some point in history. It just took us down a rabbit hole of trying to learn as much as we could about them.
We started seriously thinking about where we’d start this project. We didn't know that you could grow grapes without intensive chemical farming in the east, you know? Once we figured out that native grapes could be a great way to go, the northeast suddenly seemed possible.
Margot: Amazing. How did you find the land that you're on now? Is that land that you own?
Alfie: We initially started looking closer to the city, in the Hudson Valley, but pretty quickly we were priced out of that area. We kept going further and further out and that's how we found the Western Catskills, where we are now, in Delaware County.
Deanna: The land here was pretty untouched. The previous owner had used it as cattle raising, and they had never sprayed or done kind of any type of intensive agriculture. The land was just really fertile. Granted it's very rocky here. You've got about two inches of topsoil and then you hit rock. So it's a challenging site. It has a slight slope, good drainage and the kind of general feel of the landscape in this part of the Catskills is very agrarian, the community is very agrarian. We really like that. ,
Alfie: The geology seemed interesting to us because it's everything that the glacier ripped up 10,000 years ago. You have these really fertile river valleys and from there it just rises up to these steep foothills that have these hollows and nooks and crannies. The site we found was tucked in one of those hollows. We saw it and fell in love with it. It has expansive mountain views. It was surrounded by forest land and woods, and it was within reach of our budget.
In the last three years that we've been been here, we've seen every single type of weather batter our house and farm. Being in the hollow means we're also in a wind tunnel. That was definitely a learning curve.
Deanna: We bought the property, which came with a double wide house in 2019 and the goal was to slowly fix it up, but the pandemic happened, I had just changed from a freelance job to a full-time job. Alfie really wasn't working, and I was working from home, so we started turning things on in the house and making a plan. He jumped wholeheartedly into that project, and then I came up to be here full time too.
We got a lot of hands-on experience with fixing this place up and making it into a home, making it ours. Because we were here and on the land, we could walk it, we can talk about it and we can envision stuff and start mapping things out, measuring the property. Where should the first block be? How many rows should it be? How many vines should we order? You kind of have to be on the ground every day looking at it, immersed in it to move the project forward.
Alfie: Everything has been a massive learning curve that we're still on—farming in general. Thank God for YouTube!
Margot: It feels like you're coming from an enthusiast path into wine. You’re interested in wine, you discover natural wine, you discover hybrids, you decide to start growing and making wine. That’s a big jump—how did you bridge that gap? How did you get to a point where you felt comfortable actually planning a vineyard?
Deanna: It's not closed yet—there's still a lot of learning to do. We both have a mindset of just starting and doing it. I’m very type A, I'm very proactive. I like planning. You tell me you want to plant a vineyard, I'll make a roadmap to it. I really love planning and Alfie loves the reading and doing the research, so we compliment each other in that way where, he might find some varieties that he thinks are really cool. I’ll say okay how many of each, let's start looking at it from a practical sense. We just take it as it comes. It's just one foot in front of another.
Alfie: I think that being so naive about a lot of things helped actually. We were in the mindset of “we can do this”.
Margot: That’s awesome. Have there been people in the wine community that have been helpful for you or has it mostly be been like online research, things like that?
Alfie: Both. Todd and Crystal have been huge mentors to us and such great teachers and so open about everything. I call them and they're like, oh yeah, this is how we did it or I would do it this way. They have come out to help us many times too. A lot of grape growers have been supremely helpful and so willing to share their knowledge, share their plant material, which is huge. We're working with grape breeders in Virginia in Ohio and here in the Hudson Valley who have spent their lives studying and experimenting with different native and hybrid grape varieties, trying to create new varieties and have sent us cuttings. They want to get these grapes in more places so we can see how they do. That has been awesome.
Deanna: Alfie has a friend who runs a lumber company and he advised us on how to drill holes. We only have so much knowledge, but you realize the wealth of knowledge your friends and family, your community have. It might not just be in farming, but in planning or getting things done.
Alfie: in the last couple of years, we've also formed a really tight community with growers who are getting projects going or doing things in the same vein in New Hampshire or New York. Nico Kimberly from NOK Vino—we just have one of those relationships where we talk on the phone for hours every few months and catch up on how he’s been doing this or that. We send each other cuttings and share information, pruning techniques.
Margot: It sounds like you have a really supportive community. On your website it says you're working to find and propagate nearly extinct heirloom varieties from New York's Hudson Valley region. Can you tell me what that means? What does that work look like?
Alfie: The Hudson Valley was a central area of grape growing and horticulture in the 1800s. There was so much innovation in fruit production going on, in fruit invention, vegetable production, but especially in table grapes and wine grapes. There used to be a huge industry when it was the heyday of the Hudson Valley. Learning about the different grape varieties in this area was really enlightening, and at the same time, really eye opening. We have lost so much of that heritage since prohibition because all of that suddenly stopped and that industry got wiped out for a very long time and never truly recovered.
A lot of those varieties were simply wiped out. We came upon this book called Grapes of the Hudson Valley by this grape historian J. Stephen Casscles, who is based in the Hudson Valley. We found out that he was speaking at the Queens Botanical Garden, so we went to meet him and told him about our project trying to work with native grapes. He is like, are you guys hungry? [laughs] We ended up in Flushing at this amazing Chinese restaurant chatting about grapes. He has a home vineyard, a little home farm where he's been trying to propagate and save a lot of the varieties that are still accessible. Some of them—there’s only like one or two vines, many are incredibly rare and hard to find. He was gracious enough to send us a bunch of cuttings from some of the varieties that he thought could do well in our site.
The Hudson Valley and the Catskills are dramatically different from one another in terms of climate zones. He sent us the “bulletproof” kinds. We have a nice collaboration and project going where we're trying to expand on the nearly lost extinct varieties here, and see how they do in the Catskills compared to how they do in the Hudson Valley. From those varieties, we have one called Empire State. It's a white grape. We have one called Black Eagle, which we only have like four vines of. There’s only one vine on his farm and it’s basically impossible to find. It's a cross between Concord and Mission.
We have a variety called Golden Drop, we’ve never had the wine, but just by seeing old photos of it, it's a very tiny beautiful golden grape, a Labrusca hybrid as well. We’re trying to bring back these varieties. We have this book called The Grapes of New York written in 1909. It’s massive, that’s basically our Bible. It just has every single grape variety that was around at that time. This is 1908—what happened? Barely any of these exist today. It's a slow detective work—we read about one, we think it's interesting, we try and track it down. Maybe we can't.
Margot: Do you have a vision for the next however many years of your vineyard? Are you planning toward a certain goal?
Alfie: We want to be completely self-sustaining. We want to be able to produce all of our wine from the estate. We have this vision of being a winery that produces around 2,000 to 5,000 cases. Friends in the wine community, that seems like a number that they can sustain without having to expand too much or grow too much. It seems sustainable for a small team of people. We want to be able to touch every single grapevine. We're so invested in the farming of it and want to manage it ourselves.
Right now we have about four acres of grapes planted and we're going into our third year. We might see a little bit of fruit in some of the grapes, but we're still in the process of seeing what is gonna do well here because it is a harsh site. Whatever ripens here, that's what we're going to put our money on in our timeline.
Deanna: Yeah. We'll expand based on how they survive and anything that doesn't thrive here, it's okay. Thank you. Maybe we can give those vines away or send them to another good home, but we don't want to force anything because we really want to be hands off in our land management.
Alfie: We're making a small expansion this summer with another acre and a half of Delaware. We got a chance to make wine with Delaware the last two years from a small organic vineyard that we found in the Finger Lakes. Delaware is an early ripening grape to begin with. It's super cold hardy, it's a pre-prohibition variety, so it checks all the boxes for us. I think it's worth planting a little more of that because we already have it in the vineyard. We planted it three years ago. Those grapes are doing pretty well. We can bet on this one a little bit more.
Deanna: I just love Delaware. I think it's super complex and there's a lot you can do with it. It's very interesting to think about the different expressions that could come out of it over the next few years. We've gotten good feedback on it and it likes the site. So let's take a chance and expand that this year.
Margot: Amazing. I'm really excited for you guys. It’s a really unique and important project, to document that New York history. About land management—can you talk about your spray program right now?
Alfie: We are adopting a lot of learnings and philosophies that actually come from apple orchard management, but we're trying to adapt them to the vineyard. This grower named Michael Phillips, who recently passed away, did a lot of work with regenerative farming and holistic sprays for orchard management. It's all centered around materials and plants that you can find on the farm. Since his climate and environment is very similar to ours, we saw a lot of synchronicity there.
We're adopting some of his foliar spray recipes, which involve neem oil, that is helpful for boosting plants’ immune response prior to rain events and stuff like that. Combining that with kelp seaweed, which are materials that are found in the Northeast, herbs and plants that are local to our farm like stinging nettle and yarrow. We use these sprays as immunity boosters for the foliage. We haven't had grapes yet so it'll be interesting to see if those sprays are effective, but so far, we've had a positive experience with them.
We're experimenting a lot with mulch, which seems like basic, but we feel there’s a huge benefit for weed control and getting the younger vines established without disturbing the soil. We're doing a no-till program and, and so we have a lot of competition from the native perennials and grasses and herbs. Mulch keeps that at bay and at the same time builds soil structure. It feeds the mycorrhizal fungi that are in the soil already and helps with pest control. We have field mice and voles who sometimes like to gnaw at the trunks of the vines. They're not able to burrow through the mulch as easily as soil or compost or snow. We’re hoping to see a lot of pest control with the mulch too.
Margot: Amazing. I hope that works out for you! I’m so excited for the growth of your vineyard. Would love to get out there sometime and see everything you’ve planted!
Alfie: Yeah, thank you! We’re just so humbled and excited by people's response to this project. We're grateful that people are into it. We just released our first vintage a few weeks ago, and it was so nerve-wracking, but people seem to be into it, and that's so exciting. We want to make sure that these wines are accessible and that people get a chance to drink them and really think about the alternatives in the future of American winemaking.
Deanna: And also encourage them to plant a vine or two! We've had a handful of friends who ask—can we take a vine home? Can we plant it? Yeah, absolutely! Some of our vines are growing up on a rooftop in Brooklyn and some are growing out in suburban Massachusetts. We've had a lot of love and I think it's opening the general public's idea to what a vineyard is and how it could be a vine in your backyard that provides joy. I think that’s a really cool aspect of it too.
You can support these inspiring growers and winemakers by buying their wines on their site. Follow them on Instagram to stay tuned on what they’re up to.