His wine was featured on ‘The Bear’ — and now it’s made in Philly

The day that Tom Caruso returned the keys to his Oregon winemaking facility was the same day the city of Philadelphia approved his application to reopen his winery 3,000 miles east.

On Aug. 3, Caruso opened Pray Tell Wines, a tasting room and winemaking facility, in a North Philly warehouse at 1615 N. Hancock St., just west of the Fishtown border. But Pray Tell isn’t a new brand; he started the label as a side hustle seven years ago in Oregon.

Following more than a decade of learning the ropes of the wine industry on the West Coast, moving Pray Tell to Philly — press, barrels, forklift, and all — represents a homecoming and a long-held dream realized.

Caruso grew up on Ninth Street and Oregon Avenue on one end of the block, his maternal grandparents at the other. He grew up running back and forth between the two houses. His first exposure to the world of winemaking was through his grandfather, Sal.

Salvatore Ricchetti was a nurse in Italy before he and his wife Ada emigrated in the late ’60s. She was a seamstress and he spent his days working in a steel mill. Every fall, they hauled out a hand-crank destemmer, a basket press, and a collection of glass carboys and jugs into the street. There in front of the rowhouse, Sal pressed the family’s table wine for the year.

Sal’s winemaking wasn’t precious, Caruso said, “it was how he socialized with his friends. In the same way they’d make a bunch of tomatoes into sauce,” Caruso recalls. “They’d make wine.”

“I was brought into that as soon as I could walk.” Caruso remembers snacking on the sweet, seedy Merlot grapes, which Sal called “mer-lot,” or maybe Cabernet Sauvignon, either one “probably ill-fittingly planted in New Jersey and Pennsylvania.”

Caruso remembers helping his grandfather hold the press handle and spinning it, once he was big enough. “I was happy and probably purple-stained.” He loved the tradition of it, the camaraderie, and that feeling of returning to the process as a touchstone. “It’s the fall and this is what we do,” and in a larger sense, this is who we are.

“When I worked my first harvest as an adult, I felt the same feeling, because it’s all these people putting all of themselves into that experience. I immediately gravitated towards it.”

Sal’s winemaking tradition carried through the years, until progressive ALS made it impossible. He died in 2007, when Caruso was a college student. A jug of his now decades-old wine sits on the shelf of the new Pray Tell tasting room, the vintage Carlo Rossi sticker turned to face the wall.

Among the first questions Caruso fields about relocating Pray Tell to Philadelphia is perhaps an obvious one: Why move a successful winery from the heart of Oregon’s wine country to Philadelphia?

“This has been a dream of mine since I got started.”

A freshly minted college graduate, Tom moved to New York, working in publishing and then at Brooklyn Winery. It was his first experience in a professional winemaking facility.

“I was working as a book editor and started falling in love with wine tasting at restaurants. I thought, ‘I would love to do this in Philadelphia someday.’ But I needed to learn to do it on a commercial level and not just the muscle memory of doing it on the street corner.”

He headed to California.

Landing at Morgan Twain-Peterson and Chris Cottrell’s Bedrock Wine Company, he worked his first harvest. It’s an intense period of late summer into early fall when wineries throughout the Northern Hemisphere pick, press, and ferment the entire grape harvest for the year. Big wineries run 24 hours a day to make it happen, receiving bins of fruit from the vineyards, sorting it, crushing it, and moving it. It’s an immersive experience of collaborative work, one with a lot of power washing and forklift maneuvering. When it concludes, the wine rests in barrels and tanks, quietly developing the flavors it will continue to reveal for years to come. Caruso was hooked.

Following several years in California he relocated to Oregon’s Willamette Valley. He worked for Antica Terra, Maggie Harrison’s esoteric and creative winery, through several vintages.

He launched Pray Tell in 2017 in a rented space with a roll-up garage door next to a yoga studio as a side hustle.

Caruso made Syrah and pinot noir, mondeuse and gamay; he crafted single varietals and blends combining fruit of different types from multiple vineyard sites to create unusual harmonies in the bottle.

Caruso focuses on sustainable growing methods and making wine with a low-intervention approach through hands-on labor. While some Willamette Valley winemakers judiciously follow a tradition of French winemaking practices that prize single vineyard expressions of individual or field blended pinot clones, Caruso’s vision is more expansive and curatorial.

His wines have earned critical acclaim and in seven years Pray Tell has emerged as a hot natural wine brand. One of his bottles just made a cameo in the third season of Hulu’s hit The Bear.

Bolstered by success, Caruso began to revisit the idea of coming home. “I had lived on the West Coast for a decade, and I was ready to be close to my family.”

He was encouraged by the growing interest in and support for wines made in the Mid-Atlantic, and is eager to replicate some of the collaborative winemaking community he found in the Willamette Valley with other wineries, including Mural City Cellars and City Winery Philadelphia. “The interest is there,” he said, “it felt like there would be a cool community to plug into.”

Paola Abruzzese, his mother, owns East Coast Tropicals, selling imported West African foods from a warehouse she and Sal bought in Kensington decades ago. They began making plans to reorganize and renovate the space to accommodate East Coast Tropicals on one side of the building and Pray Tell on the other.

Pray Tell opened to the public on Aug. 3. The space houses a temperature-controlled barrel hall and, up front, an open-concept wine bar that’s immediately adjacent to the production floor where Caruso will press the 2024 vintage.

While most wineries take pains to differentiate a polished tasting room experience from the activity (and inevitable stickiness) of the production floor, the two are immediately adjacent at Pray Tell.

“People will see grape sorting and pump-overs,” the action of the destemmer, and the physical work of winemaking, “we’re using a shovel or a rake to move fruit from point A to point B,” and that’s intentional. “The minute you open the door the press is right there. For better or worse you’re completely immersed in the winery. I hope people find it immersive and interesting.”

The goal “is to break down the barrier between winemaking and enjoyment. We don’t want to lose the romanticism, but we do want to educate people.”

The centerpiece of the hospitality side of the space is Caruso’s grandparents’ 8-seat joinery dining room table refurbished by his girlfriend, Sydney Adams. On Saturdays Caruso will use it to host a tasting: a big charcuterie board from DiBruno Bros., six to eight library wines and current releases, and wines from Caruso’s personal cellar from other global producers.

“Wine has built-in pretension,” Caruso acknowledges, and he’s hoping that “this way of doing it where you take down the curtain lets people see that it’s a food product, and that we can do it well here.”

And he’s confident that the winemaking side of the relocation will go well. He still has fruit contracts for 20 tons of Oregon grapes that he’ll ship east on refrigerated trucks, and he’s planning to bring in grapes from vineyards in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, and the Finger Lakes in New York. Caruso is hitting the ground running; some East Coast varietals may be ready for harvest within a few weeks.

Pray Tell’s lineup of wines will inevitably change, but Caruso sees it as linking another car to a train that’s already on the track, not starting over with a new engine. Fans can expect new vintages of familiar wines, and Philadelphia can expect a new winemaker’s interpretation of local fruit. “I want to be able to say, hey, what does a hybrid [grape] look like in our cellar? What if we blended Oregon- and Pennsylvania-grown grapes?”

What, pray tell, indeed?