Grapes

It's no threat to Napa Valley, but Pennsylvania does lay claim to 43 wineries. Among the smallest is a four-person operation in Telford, Montogomery County - the Country Creek Winery, at 133 Cressman Rd. Two couples, Joy and Doug Klein and Paul and Donna Killian, own Country Creek. They make the wine, bottle it, and sell it on the premises - while holding down outside jobs. It's an extended-family operation: Doug Klein and Donna Killian are siblings. The Killians and Kleins have been making wine for three years.

When Ray Farber's daughter telephoned from California to ask what she should do with the grapes in her refrigerator, Farber didn't hesitate. " 'Throw 'em out,' I told her," he recalled. Never one to follow his own advice, however, Farber continues to eat grapes. When a television crew came to visit the other day, "I just picked up a handful and ate them all . . . and I'm still here," he boasted. Farber is in a position to know. As general manager of the fresh food terminal at the Food Distribution Center in South Philadelphia, he is at the epicenter of the storm over the suspected cyanide poisoning of Chilean fruit.

Thanks to cyanide-spiked grapes turning up in Philadelphia last week, Linda Bolanos' fourth graders now have a better sense of world geography than some of the contestants on Family Feud. Bolanos was feeling a little smug Wednesday night as she watched people on the television show try to come up with countries in South America. Such as: Saudi Arabia? The contestants should have asked Bolanos' class of 9- and 10-year-olds at the Erdenheim Elementary School in Springfield Township; they learned all about Chile on Tuesday.

The first batch of winter fruit from Chile is offloaded yesterday at the Tioga Fruit Terminal on Delaware Avenue. The freighter Choapa, the first of about 120 ships scheduled to arrive this winter on the Delaware River, docked with 360,000 boxes of peaches, grapes, plums, nectarines and apricots. Delaware River ports receive about 70 percent of the winter fruit; the rest goes to Los Angeles.

Few grapes suffer like the grapes in Douro, the rocky Portuguese valley where parchingly hot summers and rainy, cold winters are ideal for producing fruit with the intensity needed for sweet port. The region has been earning a growing reputation of late for its still red wines, too, thanks to new technology and renewed interest from talented winemakers. The finest of its new-wave reds, such as Chryseia, have rightly earned raves for their combination of ripe fruit and earthy zing - though at a hefty price ($66.

First it was cyanide-laced yogurt, then pesticide-poisoned apples, and now, the grapes of wrath. Just a bum harvest, or is this latest poisoning crisis - tampering with the fruit of the vine - an ominous sign that humans have gone completely nuts? Is nothing sacred? "Now it's like, what do you eat next?" said Linda Washington, 25, a wary shopper at the Super Fresh at 10th and South streets. "No apples, no grapes. I mean, you buy this stuff all the time. " Not a grape could be found in Philadelphia markets surveyed yesterday.

When the price of grapes skyrocketed about 20 years ago, one family's annual ritual of spending three September days picking through crates of dark purple grapes and then stomping them until they gave up their best juices to make a few barrels of wine was nearly scrapped. But Stephen Vasso, who had watched his Italian immigrant father make wine at the end of every summer, decided that, no matter the price, this was a tradition he was not going to allow to end. "Grapes went from $1.50 to $12 a box overnight," Vasso remembered.

Calm has settled above the sandy expanse where sinewy vines have been groomed by three generations. As dew falls steadily from tooth-edged leaves and shadows stretch with the rising arc of the sun, the pristine splendor evokes notions of the Old World. But that was another time, another life. A life before the Chisholm Ryder. In a Hammonton vineyard laced by trails of wrinkled asphalt, the bucolic scene is soon overcome by the din of a blue behemoth of conveyors and hydraulics on giant wheels.

You are poring over your company's latest corporate financial projections when suddenly it dawns on you that your mission in life is to move to the country, plant a vineyard and make world-class wine. You are not alone. An increasing number of dissatisfied urban professionals are "dropping out" and hitching their dreams to a bunch of grapes. While the exodus is not threatening to empty the board rooms of Fortune 500 companies, it's producing some lively activity in the grape markets.

The hemispheric fruit wars, which have pitted West Coast growers against Chilean exporters, are heating up again this fall. And there's a lot at stake for the ports of the Delaware River: They handle 70 percent of the Chilean fruit shipped to the United States and have come to depend ever more heavily on those cargoes for jobs and revenues. The domestic growers, who insist that their only objective is to assure that imported fruit meets the same quality standards as U.S. fruit, have chosen as a weapon the power of the U.S. Department of Agriculture to inspect many kinds of imported fruit as it is unloaded at the docks.