He grew up in New York City, worked for corporate giants and sold Communion wine to Catholic churches across the country, but it wasn't until Domenic Carisetti started working the small vineyards in Niagara and Orleans counties that he garnered his nickname.

The Dominator.

He was given the name at a trade show about five years ago, when four salesmen blurted it out all at once as Carisetti walked into a room. It seemed to fit a guy who estimates he's made 300 million gallons of wine in 35 years on the job.

Carisetti is the go-to guy for grapes in Niagara County. He has had a growing following as a winemaker since his commitment in 2004 to help foster the Niagara Wine Trail.

With 11 wineries so far, the trail is dwarfed by those in the Finger Lakes, which has more than 100, and Southern Ontario, with more than 80. But it has doubled in size during the last three years, and a 12th winery opens this month.

Carisetti has had a hand in five of them.

"Domenic has the capability of taking an OK grape and making it great," says Peter Smith, the owner of Niagara Landing Wine Cellars in Cambria.

"He is the creative one, a pleasure to work with," says Smith's sister, Jackie Connolly, winery co-owner. "He knows his trade, and how to use it to his best advantage."

Carisetti has the pedigree of a great winemaker. He cut his teeth in the vineyards of Northern California. He has worked at the Taylor and Canandaigua wine companies. He has a master's degree from the University of California at Davis, a place that is to winemaking what Syracuse University is to sports broadcasters, the Wharton School to corporate titans, MIT to computer wizards.

"Domenic has been the integral part of our success," said Ann Schulze, who, along with her husband, Martin, owns Schulze Vineyards and Winery in Burt. "Dominic and his winemaking skills are what bring people back."

Carisetti helps the Schulzes annually make up to 1,000 cases each of 18 wines, including Vidal blanc ice wine — a Gold Medal winner this year at the Riverside International Wine Competition in Riverside, Calif.

He jokes that he used to waste as much wine in a day at Taylor as he now makes in a year.

That's fine with him. At 58, he's doing what he enjoys. A devout Catholic, he also likes his nickname, though it belies his winemaking philosophy.

"If I told you I did it by myself, I'd be lying," he said on a recent afternoon, between "capping" one-ton bins of recently harvested Concords, a process that helps separate juice from grape skins as fermentation starts.

"The only things I carry are a pen and a calculator," he said. "God does all the rest."

Video: Carisetti talks about this years harvest and offers wine-tasting tips

Getting started

Carisetti got to Western New York in fits and starts. Smith, a third-generation grape farmer who sells most of his crop to Welch's, got the ball rolling in 1999, when he decided to spin off part of his business into a winery, the first on what would become the Niagara Wine Trail. He'd just opened, had a falling out with a partner — the guy who made the wine — and turned to Carisetti for advice.

Smith said he recalls Carisetti saying that he could "make wine in his sleep." So, according to Smith, he told Carisetti, "Well I can grow grapes in my sleep."

A friendship began.

Carisetti consulted with Smith and his new winemaker to help keep the winery afloat. Smith turned to Carisetti again five years later, after the departure of a second winemaker. A sometime venture has turned into a full-time gig during the last three growing seasons.

This time of year, you'll find Carisetti in the vineyards or his winemaking rooms up to 12 hours a day, seven days a week. The last of the grapes have been harvested in recent weeks. He's had only two days off since mid-September.

Carisetti started his work on the trail by making the vintages for Niagara Landing and the Winery at Marjim Manor in Burt, in both cases at Niagara Landing's VanDusen Road site.

As the wine trail has grown, his work has grown along with it. He showed Leonard Oakes and his son, Jonathan, the winemaking business so the family could get up and running with its winery outside Medina last year. He helped the Schulzes start the process three years ago, and still helps the couple make their wines. He's the winemaker for Victorianbourg Wine Estate, which opens this month on East Lake Road in Wilson.

His interest is structured wines: reasonably priced vintages that have complexity and are ripe for a good marketing hook. Local artists craft many of his labels. He's unafraid to experiment with grapes and other flavors.

Take Chocolate Dream, a cream sherry infused with chocolate that Carisetti introduced to the Niagara Landing owners by serving it over creme brulee and raspberries.

Carisetti has great range. Niagara Landing specializes in sweet wines, including a port that fetches $24 a bottle and Vidal Blanc ice wine that goes for $40. Marjim Manor is big into fruit wines. Schulze features sparkling and carbonated wines, as well as some of Carisetti's most popular drier varieties, including award-winning Cabernet Sauvingnon, Cabernet Franc and Meritage, a combination of the two reds. Victorianbourg will specialize in dry varietals.

"There probably is a little more care" that goes into making wine on the wine trail than for a giant company, Carisetti said, although the standards are high in both. "When you're a small winery, you always have to put your best foot forward," he said.

Big Apple beginnings

It seems an unlikely way to make a living for a guy from New York City.

Carisetti was the youngest of five children, including one brother and three sisters, all but one of whom was at least a dozen years older. His father, Andrew, a second-generation Italian-American, was a carpenter; his mother, Maria, an Italian immigrant, a homemaker.

The family lived in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, a "melting pot of nationalities," Carisetti said. Irish, Poles, Jews, blacks, Indians and fellow Italians, "we had it all within a four-block radius," he said. All supported each other as their families scraped to make a living during the 1950s and '60s.

The diversity and work ethic of Carisetti's neighborhood — along with his Christian faith — helped shape the winemaker.

"I've tried to be accepting of everybody," he said.

It would be easy, romantic, for Carisetti to say that he gleaned an interest in winemaking from the Italian dinners of his childhood, where the reds and the whites flowed freely. His father made wine in the basement, he said, "but so did 10 million other Italian fathers."

The opportunities that come in a big city are what brought Carisetti to wine. His brother, Peter, 14 years older, landed a job with a Seagram's Co. wine subsidiary, Browne Vintners, while Carisetti was at City University of New York, studying archaeology. After his junior year, Domenic got a summer job, thanks to his brother, in the mailroom of the Browne corporate office in San Francisco. A year later, the younger Carisetti was enrolled in the vaunted UC-Davis food service program.

In 1975, he was offered a job as assistant winemaker at the Taylor Wine Co. in Hammondsport. An illness forced the company's winemaker to retire the next March, and Carisetti found himself at the head of a winemaking operation that was shipping out 6 million cases a year.

He was 23 years old.

He worked for 11 years at Taylor, helping craft standards that included Lake Country wines, sherries and ports, and Great Western varietals and champagnes. He jumped ship in 1986 to take a job as winemaker at Canandaigua Wine Co. (now Constellation Wines), crafting J. Roget champagnes, Arbor Mist and Sun Country wine coolers, even Wild Irish Rose.

While at Canandaigua, he had time to put his faith into practice. He got a part-time job with Catholic Charities of the Southern Tier to help a program that mentored single moms, and quit his winemaking job in 1997 to focus on the faith-related work.

In 1999, he opened his own small winery, Anawim Wine Cellars, whose name, translated from Hebrew, means "The poor for whom God cares." He hired workers with disabilities to help make his single product, altar wine, a type of rose. The Catholic Diocese of Buffalo was among his customers in the two years the winery was open.

During that time, Carisetti also helped coordinate emergency services for Steuben County residents struggling to keep up with electrical bills, and was consulting in the growing upstate New York wine trade.

"It was so much work," he said, "and I felt myself pulling away from what I do, which is make wine."

A growing trail

The Niagara Wine Trail presented a new opportunity five years ago. He moved to Medina three years ago, and a few weeks ago, moved into a farmhouse within a mile walk of Niagara Landing.

Cynthia West-Chamberlain, his latest "cellar rat," has been at Carisetti's side throughout this harvest season. A computer marketing specialist laid off last year, she's looking for property along the Niagara Wine Trail — and plans to work with Carisetti on the winemaking side of her venture.

The growing number of visitors to the trail are "pleasantly surprised" at the quality and price when making their first trip, West-Chamberlain said. She credits Carisetti, other winemakers, and owners and employees who work together on promotions, and share the excitement over their relatively new enterprises.

Watching the wine trail grow has been a source of satisfaction for Carisetti, who has two children: a son, Michael, 25, a civil engineer in Virginia; and a daughter, Maria, 17, who lives in the Southern Tier.

So has sharing his knowledge with others who share his passion for wine.

He's especially proud of Jonathan Oakes, who -- at age 23 -- has taken over winemaking at the Oakes family vineyards.

Carisetti has become a benevolent Dominator on his stretch of the Niagara Escarpment, a leader who throws a dinner every year to thank his bosses and give out a few "Dominator's Cellar Rat" T-shirts.

It's a show of respect for those who have been at his shoulder, mostly outdoors, throughout the growing season, particularly during the rugged days and nights of fall.

"If we didn't love it," he said late last month while working in a dark chill outside Niagara Landing, "we wouldn't do it."