Barbara Gratta/Gratta Wines
One set of Barbara Gratta's grandparents came to the US from Calabria, the toe of the boot of Italy. The other grandparents came from across the Italian peninsula—Bari.
In this episode, meet Barbara. Today, she owns, operates, and makes wine at Gratta Wines in the Bayview. But her journey began in White Plains, NY. All four grandparents came to Brooklyn in the 1920s. They all eventually moved north to raise families away from the bustle of New York City. Barbara's grandparents were a big part of her early life, the extended families getting together often for "big Italian Sunday dinners" (yum!). These involved aunts, uncles, and cousins as well as the older generation.
Barbara and her immediate family lived upstairs from her aunt, uncle, and cousins. Because of this set-up, she says it was more like one big family. And every week culminated on Sundays, with as many as 30 people coming in and out of these get-togethers. The sauce was on the stove starting early in the morning. And if more people came, it simply meant more pasta. If, like me, you're thinking of the "Fishes" episode of The Bear, you're not far off.
Saturdays were spent going "up the street," which meant shopping at places like Sears or Macy's. Maybe they'd stop at White Plains Diner for lunch. But they always ended up back at her grandmother's house for cake and coffee.
Her mom's youngest brother went to school with Barbara's dad's youngest sister. They came from different towns, but all ran in the same circles. And thanks to this, as well as a tight-knit Italian-American community in the area, her parents met. They got married in 1958 and had their first kid, a son, in 1959. Then Barbara was born in 1960.
The family is Catholic, but that manifested more in traditions than any religious sense. They went to church on big holidays, and Barbara shares a story about her grandmother giving her money for the Easter Sunday collection. But she and her cousins pocketed the money and spent the service on the church roof. After she was confirmed, around eighth grade, her parents gave her the choice whether to keep going or not. Barbara chose to hang up her career with Catholicism at that point.
By the time Barbara was in high school, her immediate family moved to Florida, in the Sarasota area. She says it was a hard time for her, being torn from all the people and places she knew. There wasn't a lot of Italian culture in her new home. Her mom searched for ingredients to make the food she was accustomed to. She spotted a sausage truck one day and followed it. Only through this was she able to maintain some semblance of her cultural past.
Barbara stuck around after high school down in Florida. She got a degree in physical therapy and worked for about 10 years on the west coast of the state. Still, neither she nor her two brothers (one older, one younger) loved it there. Barbara left Florida around 1989 or 1990 for California.
Her first visit, before she moved to San Francisco, was a vacation with a coworker in the mid-Eighties. They stayed in a hotel on Van Ness near The Bay. They did what tourists do—Fisherman's Wharf, drive over the Golden Gate Bridge, that sort of thing—and didn't travel to any SF neighborhoods. The visit involved a quick drive down to Monterey to see a former coworker of theirs. The entire trip left her wanting to visit again someday.
When the time came to move here, her job set her up with a place to live for a few months. Barbara kept renewing these contracts every three months. She started in the southwest corner of The City, within walking distance of Joe's of Westlake in Daly City.
We end Part 1 with stories of Barbara's early friends in SF showing her around The City.
Part 2 picks up where we left off in Part 1. Barbara had just really become settled in San Francisco and was in what would become a decades-long process of learning the place (I can totally relate, btw). She hung out in the Castro more than the Mission, which in those days was a lesbian mecca. Café Flore (nowadays known as Fisch and Flore) was a favorite.
Eventually, though, Barbara moved to the Mission. The company she had been contracting with hired her and that provided the security she needed. She called an apartment at 19th Street and Dolores, across from Dolores Park, home. She's quick to point out how different the neighborhood was back then. "You wouldn't wanna walk through that park at certain times of the night," she says.
By the time Dolores Park Café and Bi-Rite opened and that area slowly gentrified, Barbara and her partner moved west to the Castro. They lived there for a few years before finally relocating to The Bayview, the neighborhood Barbara has called home since 1999.
Barbara's foray into winemaking started, as many things do, as a hobby. A coworker's husband was making wine at home with friends, and he asked her why, as an Italian-American, she had never tried it. It was a "challenge accepted"-type of moment.
1997 was the first year Barbara made wine. That coworker's husband served as her mentor for about two years. Having grown up out east, part of her winemaking education involved learning to enjoy good California wines. The first wine she made was the first one she fell in love with: Zinfandel.
The basement of her apartment on Dolores was a perfectly moldy, dank, dark space for making wine. They began with garbage-can-size containers of juice, and she and a friend took turns caring for the fermentation. They'd have bottling parties with their partners. They split the haul—six cases each.
The next year, that friend bailed on her, and Barbara was solo. The year after that, 1999, she found a new grower. It was an all-Zin affair until 2009, when she added a Cabernet Sauvignon to her repertoire. For the first decade or so, the wine was shared with friends, at dinners, at parties, that sort of thing. Her friends loved her wine, but she wondered whether they were just being polite.
Then opportunities arose for folks in The Bayview but outside of her circle of friends to try her wine. Art 94124 Gallery was one such opportunity. Barbara served wine at an art opening there and got excellent feedback. She'd already secured a permit for making wine at her home in The Bayview. We go into some depth discussing the permit process. After that, Barbara bumped her volume up to half a ton.
She took her wines to a weekly market outside the Bayview Opera House, now known as the Ruth Williams Opera House. It was early in the time of pop-ups, 2012 or so, but that's what it was. The Bayview Underground Food Scene convened every Thursday at the opera house from 6 to 9 p.m.
But when the opera house underwent renovations and the market moved to Pier 70, in Barbara's words, things "went downhill." Fewer people were willing or able to make the trek to The Bay. Eventually, it fizzled.
But through that group, Barbara had met a baker. In 2015, the two decided to open up in the space where Gratta is today. At first, the wine bar was in back (where it still is today), but the front was her business partner's bakery. Today, that space is an Italian goods retail shop that Barbara runs.
Seven years later, the bakery moved out. In 2017, Barbara had taken over the space just next door to the south, the idea being that it could serve as her winery. They moved everything from the garage in her home to the space where it is today (also the space where we recorded).
Today, Gratta Wines and Market comprises a wine bar in back, groceries and a deli up front, and winery next door. They're located at 2022 Lane Street/5273 Third Street. And they're open Tuesday–Thursday 3 p.m.–9 p.m. and Friday–Saturday 12 p.m.–10 p.m. Barbara hopes to have the winery fully opened by this spring. Follow Gratta Wines for updates.
We end the podcast with Barbara's take on our theme this season—Keep It Local.
We recorded this podcast at Gratta Wines in the Bayview in December 2024.
Photography by Dan Hernandez
