He shows off a wine press with an internal bladder that inflates to crush the grapes against the walls of the chamber, extracting more liquid that a conventional corkscrew press. “Leonardo invented the corkscrew,” observes Busciglio. “He’d be happy to see this.”
Busciglio describes himself as “a plumber and an inventor.” At Onteora High School, he was an artist, but after graduation, he couldn’t figure out how to sell his work without going to New York City. He had learned his father’s trade and ended up working with his dad on water mains in the city when he was in his 20s, but he didn’t like the urban environment.
In 1988, he began to apply the lessons he’d learned from Shultis to make a living selling smoked fish and honey. “I decided to do something I really enjoyed, that could make people forget their worries, at least for a few minutes. I went into the art of food.”
In the back of his house, he set up a store, still run by his Lithuanian mother, Grazina. For a while he raised his own fish in a back-yard, windmill-powered, aquaponic greenhouse, until it collapsed in a snowstorm. The insurance claim provided seed money for the winery. Now he buys fish from Idaho, grapes from New York State and California, apples from New Paltz. Lately, the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park has been ordering 50 fish a week.
Busciglio is happy to be keeping alive the traditional methods he learned from Shultis, who saw how much he liked to fish as a boy and showed him how smoking the fish would preserve it for several weeks. He was so excited by his new skill that his parents bought him a gas-powered smoker from Sears. “But the fish didn’t taste the same,” he recalls. “I finally built my own smoker, fueled with wood and sawdust like Nelson’s, like the old-timers did it 150 years ago. He was a good teacher, and he liked to share his knowledge.”
Busciglio also learned beekeeping from his mentor and sells honey from his own hives. In fact, he credits the bees with inspiring him to make wine.
He once harvested some honey from a comb that had not yet been capped with wax by the bees, a procedure that happens when the honey is sufficiently concentrated to keep from spoiling. When the batch of honey, with a higher moisture content than usual, was stored, it began to ferment into a natural and delicious mead.
“I think that’s how people discovered fermentation thousands of years ago,” says Busciglio.++
Woodstock Winery wines are available from Lenny Bee’s Smoked Fish ‘n’ Honey store at 403 Wittenberg Road, Bearsville; at restaurants including the Red Onion and Violette’s; at Woodstock Wines & Liquors and Miron Liquor & Wine in Kingston; and at the Farmer’s Market in Woodstock every Wednesday.
