Schapiro's Wine Mural

Lower East Side

& why it made the Carpe City list

Street artist Chico painted the Schapiro’s wine mural in 1997. You can see it peeking over the rooftops at the corner of Essex and Rivington Streets.
Antonio “Chico” Garcia is a legend on the LES. He has been painting community murals in the neighborhood since the 80s.
He moved to Florida in 2009 but pops back up on the LES from time to time, can in hand, to bring a little color, and a little positive inspo, to his home turf.
The mural advertises/honors The Schapiro Wine Company, which produced and sold Kosher wines at 126 Rivington from 1907 – 2000.
They outlasted several Kosher wineries in the area, like Birnbaum and Kedem (there were once more than a dozen on the LES).
Yes, the LES was once a Kosher Napa Valley…
- For all those years, Schapiro’s had what you might call a unique slogan: Schapiro’s Kosher Wines: “The Wine You Can Almost Cut with a Knife.”
- Why would you need cutlery for your vino? Because it was so sweet and thick!
Kosher wines are traditionally extremely sweet (have you tasted Manischewitz recently??).
Schapiro’s best-seller was the concord grape variety. The recipe was concord grape + sugar water.
- We’re talking barely fermented grape juice… the wine was aged Sept – January.
- The New York Times asked Norman Schapiro about this in 1996. He told The Gray Lady, “People ask me what the vintage is. I tell them ‘Thursday.’”
Speaking of grape juice…

During Prohibition, Napa winemakers turned to grape juice sold in “Wine Bricks” to make a buck and save their vineyards.
Wine Bricks were hefty rectangles of concentrated grape juice that anybody could ferment at home.
This way, winemakers could continue to grow grapes without running afoul of the law.
But what if you didn’t know how to ferment at home??
Ah, the genius of warning labels: It was, of course, illegal during Prohibition to use the wine bricks to make wine, but growers knew that was the whole point, so they placed detailed warnings on their packages about how not to ferment grape juice.
The label instructed users to dissolve the concentrate in water, but not to place it in a jug, and leave it in a cool dry cupboard for 21, lest it ferment and become wine!
But what about Prohibition, you ask…?
Schapiro’s was unaffected.
Why? They produced Kosher wine, which fell under the designation of “Sacramental Wines,” which were legal under the Volstead Act.