In an era in which flavors are created in factories and industries earn millions by manufacturing palatable textures, Leonardo Busciglio, an inventor in Bearsville, uses old-fashioned tools to craft gourmet delicacies prized by food connoisseurs throughout the Hudson Valley and Manhattan. Busciglio's property is part home, part workshop, and part small farm, and the products of his life are honey, wine, and smoked fish.

A tall, dark-haired 53-year-old of Lithuanian desent, his given name is Leonardo, but his friends call him Lenny. He is also known as Lenny B. Just don't call him Leonard. "I feel honored to be named after the father of invention. Why would anyone take off the o? How would people feel if I cut letters off of their names?" he asks, referring to former schoolteachers and credit card companies.

Most of Busciglio's utterances express excitement at the possibilities of his projects, but there is also an undercurrent of outrage toward any person or organization that would impose unfairness on others: He is acutely aware of local and world politics, and of price-gouging oil companies in particular. (He will later explain how he received a grant from Vermont to work on a project to convert water into hydrogen gas using power from the windmill in his backyard. "It's the wave of the future," he says.)

Bottles of Busciglio's homemade wine, named for a friend: "Gizmo Petit Sirah."

When Busciglio was five he learned the mechanics of plumbing from his father, "the best pipe man in New York City." At 12, his parents moved the family from Brooklyn to an old farm in Bearsville, and he spent his youth learning how to fish and hunt. His earliest mentor was his neighbor Nelson Schultis, a lumberjack and outdoorsman who turned him onto bees and taught him how to smoke fish with a wood fire. At 15, Busciglio befriended Jack Soltanoff, an internationally recognized authority on natural health. Soltanoff introduced Busciglio to herbal medicine, and Lenny found it was easier and cheaper to cure his ills (like asthma) through remedying vitamin deficiencies than by seeing doctors. As an adult, Busciglio is full of youthful energy and is the center of a large social circle that congregates around the smokehouse at least once a week. His phone always seems to be ringing.

Busciglio once dreamed of becoming an artist, and for a time he supported his pursuits by working with his father. Although money never particularly interested him, at a certain point he realized it is easier to sell food than art and he began directing his creative energy into the art of edibles. It seems a perfect blending of his passions, and as one friend says, "Lenny knows the metaphysics of trout."

On smoking days, friends and friends-of-friends begin arriving at noon, and if they are helping Busciglio make wine they might stay until 5am. All kinds of people come: Busciglio's girlfriend, Cathie, is always there. (The couple met 10 years ago, when she used to sell his bee propolis at a health food store in Woodstock. "It was the propolis that brought us together," Cathie says. She sold the tincture as a cure for colds. "It works every time.") Carpenters, musicians, masseuses, actors, writers, and farmers are also in attendance. But the rule is: You have to be invited. "It's the local, local social club," Busciglio says.

Wine begins to flow with the first guest's arrival. And wine there is in abundance—homemade in huge stainless-steel tanks and later transferred into bottles and 30-gallon French oak kegs. The stacks of empty grape crates, labeled "zinfandel, Madera, California," form a wall much higher than a person. The wine is for personal consumption, but when his recipe is right, he plans on opening a small winery. 

Busciglio likes to look after people, and no friend of his will ever go hungry. Musician pals who are between gigs receive the Starving Artist's Discount, which means they come, they eat, and they drink. In return, they may strum their guitars and blow their harps around the fire and infuse the fish with energy.

1.5 tons of beeswax stored in blocks and ready to be formed into candles.

When Lenny lights a fire in the gigantic outdoor woodstove, smoke seeps into the air. It is soothing: the faint smell of smoking fish and the crackling and popping of the wood. As guests sample the huge spread of sandwiches, quiche, eggplant parmesan, venison chili, and salad Lenny's mother has made, Lenny pulls last week's trays out of the smoker to scrape, scrub, and prepare them with olive oil; the 250 trout have already been cleaned, brined, and washed. He is precise and takes no chances: "I do hot-smoked fish, the old-fashioned way," he says. It's a similar process to the one his grandfather used as a young man in Lithuania. No additives or preservatives are added, and in the end it is purely fish, salt, and smoke, safe for a month.

"The art of smoking is in the fire," Lenny says, while explaining how he balances the flames with the smoke through every kind of weather. "Cooking with wood is different from cooking with gas or electric, and that's why the flavor is so good," he adds, as he checks the internal temperature of the smokehouse and marks it on a chart for the FDA and the New York State Board of Health. Twice a year the premises are inspected, and one year a health department official brought a group of people along to take photos. "He called me the last of the woodhouse smokers," Lenny says. "He wanted people to see how it's done."

Lenny isn't as famous as his cousin, the late tennis champion Vitas Gerulaitis, but he's a celebrity in an underground sort of way. Says one friend: "I use Lenny's name all the time. It opens doors for me." People know and remember him for any one of the products he sells. There is: honey—a sweet distillation of the Catskill Mountains; Baba's honey-mustard—a Lithuanian recipe passed down from his grandmother; vials of propolis—dark brown like tar, the bees use it to coat mouse intruders in a mummy-like fashion, people use it for its antibacterial properties; pure beeswax candles—they fill a room with a warm, summery, buttery essence; and, of course, fish—smoked and always mouth watering. Guests who are standing by the moment Lenny pulls the trout from the smoker are rewarded with morsels of soft and warm flesh that slips easily from the bones. The flavor is gentle and smoky and impossible to imitate.

Busciglio tends the smokehouse's woodstove.

"The farmers have been eating like gourmets for years and the gourmets are just realizing it," says Lenny with a wry laugh. Fine local restaurants (such as the Emerson, the Reservoir Inn, and the Red Onion) serve his smoked trout and incorporate his honey into regionally inspired dishes. The Swedish Hill Winery presents the fish between sips at wine tastings. Caterers and delis place orders from New York City. He adds: "I might not make a million dollars, but I like doing this because it makes people feel good. Just from a taste, people forget their worries, and the troubles in the world. Even for just a little bit. Even for just five seconds."

He rises from his chair and heaves a shovelful of sawdust onto the fire. It's a windy day and the smoke billows around him. In the distance, way up high, the blades of his windmill whip against the sky.