A VERY GOOD YEAR.(The Talk of the Town)(Latif Jiji's grapevine)

One day in 1977, while his wife, Vera, was out doing errands, Latif Jiji, a professor of mechanical engineering at City College, stuck a small grapevine in the ground in the back yard of his town house, on East Ninety-second Street, between Park and Lex. The garden was ostensibly his wife's domain, which is why Latif did his planting on the sly, but it didn't take long before the vine, having absorbed all those rich Upper East Side nutrients (smog-flavored rain, decomposed poodle droppings, roach-killer runoff), grew conspicuously large.

"The way I look at it is Freudian," Vera, a retired English professor, said the other day. "A man gets a little stick, and it comes to dominate everything."

The grapevine is now a hundred feet long, stretching from the yard to the back of the house, up four stories, and across the roof; another few years and it should begin its descent toward the front stoop. It yields an average of more than four hundred pounds of Niagara grapes--that is, common green grapes--each year, enough for the Jijis to make about a hundred bottles of their own white wine. They call it Chateau Latif, and believe it to be the only Manhattan vintage in existence. "The Greeks, the Romans, the Arabs, they did short, horizontal vines, no more than six feet high," Latif said. "But not me. I have the tallest vine."

Latif, who is seventy-seven, grew up in Basra, Iraq, where his father was an amateur vintner. The fact that Latif ended up on the most densely settled island in North America, on a small lot situated above the I.R.T. subway, was not about to stop him from carrying on the family tradition; his wine would make do with a Park Avenue terroir.

"It's got a hint of carbon monoxide, No. 6 train, and hot-dog water," Jeff Ourvan, Latif's son-in-law, said, as he popped a ripe grape in his mouth. Ourvan was up on the roof, participating in the family's annual September harvest, dropping sticky bundles of grapes into a ...