A Thousand Days in Tuscany (11 page)

“Buongiorno, ragazzi. Sono venuto a dirvi che la vendemmia a Palazzone comincerà domani all’alba. Io verrò a prendervi alle cinque.
Good morning, kids. I came to tell you that the harvest in Palazzone will begin tommorow at sunrise. I’ll be here at 5:00. Be ready.”

“Great, perfect, wonderful. Of course, we’ll be ready,” we tell him brightly but shamefaced, trying to slur the edges of our mischief. It’s clear he knows we’d had a bout of trouble, and I think
Fernando is about to explain some of it to him, when the duke says, “Listen, Chou, the next time you want to let off some steam, take the road to Celle. It’s less dangerous. In trying to find your own tranquility, you’re disturbing the local peace.”

Without warning, this man who’s yet to shake my hand is taking me, hard, by the shoulders, kissing each cheek, saying he’ll see us both in the morning. It’s stunning not only that he knows we’ve spent an unusual night but that he can scold and soothe and threaten with a few words and a single gesture.

“Adesso, io vado a fare colazione in santa calma.
And now I’m going to have my breakfast in sainted calm,” he says through wintry lips and assassin’s eyes, loping his way to the henhouse.

We try not to laugh until one of us begins to laugh anyway and when he hears us, he turns back and he’s laughing, too.

“Vi voglio un sacco di bene, ragazzi.
I want your happiness, kids,” he yells out into the faint plash of a September rain.

W
E HAD BEGUN
back in June to ask Barlozzo where he thought we could help pick grapes. In my journalist life, I’d traveled much of Europe to participate in one
vendemmia
or another—in Bandol in southern France, on the island of Madiera, and once, farther up north in Tuscany, in the Chianti—to collect information and
impressions for my stories. Each time, the farmer in me was inspired. I couldn’t imagine
living
here and not being part of it. And more ardent even than my yearning for it, Fernando’s was fixed. One way or another, the banker was going to pick. But Barlozzo had been restrained about the idea. Did we realize it was
un lavoro massacrante,
a murderous work, that began each morning as soon as the dew was dry and lasted until sunset? He said that neighbors gathered on one farm, picked it clean, moved together to the next to do the same. He said that there were often six or seven or more small harvests in each of these circles bound by friendship and a mutual need for the simple wine that was food to them.

“Whose grapes do you help pick?” I’d asked, hoping the directness of the question would stave off more scenes of Armageddon under the still-cruel September sun.

“Usually I go to help my cousins in Palazzone, though now they’ve got so many children and in-laws swarming the vines, they hardly need me,” he’d said.

“Well, is there other work we can do to help? Can we cook?”

“What you’re not understanding is that the harvest is ‘family’ work, open to neither the curious nor the admiring. But we’ll see. I’ll ask around.”

After his clearly stated cultural lesson, I’d just let the subject
sit. And the first we’d heard that we were invited to pick was this morning’s announcement that he’d be waiting for us at dawn tomorrow.

La vendemmia,
the grape harvest, is anticipated, celebrated more than any other seasonal event in the life of Tuscan farmers. The oldest cultivated crop on the Italian peninsula is the vine, the tendrils of its history wound about and grafted into rites pagan and sacred, into life itself.

Almost everyone has vines, either his own or his landowners’, either a hundred or so scraggly plants grown up among blackberry bushes or set between rows of feed corn or hectares and hectares of luxuriant and photogenic vines nurtured by masterful hands. Or, as it is with Barlozzo’s cousins, some configuration in between. Most often, except on the great parcels of land where mechanical means are sometimes employed, the grapes are cut, cluster by cluster, the clicking of the secateurs meting out an ancient, pastoral rhythm.

A strange sort of flat twig basket is hung from the vine where the harvester works, freeing his hands to clip the clusters and drop the fruit into it in a smooth two-step motion. When the basket is full, the fruit is turned out into larger plastic tubs, which are then carried to the small trucks or wagons that wait here and there among the vines to port the grapes down the road to the crusher. When I lived in California, I found that the innocent pleasures of wine were too often diminished by prodigies—real or self-imagined—bent on
deep-reading a glass of grape juice. There is no such blundering here. These farmers make their wine in the vineyard rather than in the laboratory the way commercial winemakers do. The fruit—undisguised, unmanipulated, and just as the gods send it—is the stuff of their wine. That and their passion for it. And this congress is all the alchemy there is. Rough, lean, muscled wines, wines to chew, thick rubescent elixirs that transfuse a tired, thirsty body like blood are these. No fragrance of violets or vanilla, not a single jammy whiff nor one of English leather, these wines are the crushed juices of the grape, enchanted in a barrel. As we tumble out of Barlozzo’s truck on the vineyard road, we see what must be thirty people standing and sitting near a small mountain of baskets and bins. To a person, their hair is tied in some form of bandanna or kerchief. Hat brims buck up against the vines and inhibit the work of picking. This other form of headgear holds back sweat, if not the sun’s violence. I decide to put my Holly Golightly straw hat back in the truck, hoping not too many of the harvesters have noticed the two-foot diameter flounce of its offensive brim. As I come back to join the group, Barlozzo hands me a neatly ironed blue-and-white bandanna, boycotting my eyes, the better for me to feel his scorn. I want to ask him why he just didn’t remind me of my inappropriate hat while we were driving to the site, but I don’t. Fernando is loathe to surrender his black Harley baseball cap and receives the duke’s tacit approval.

The other thing that separates us from the pack is that we have not come with shears attached to our belts. Suddenly I feel like a chef with no knives, a plumber who must borrow a wrench. But there are others without arms, and soon the
vinaiolo,
the winemaker, is distributing weapons and errant gloves to us as though we were on a breadline and had asked for toast.

The spirit of festival is thin among the vines and under the wakening sun as the
vinaiolo
assigns territory, demonstrates technique to the few first-timers. I can’t help remembering the California harvests I’d witnessed. The estate manager and the winemaker mill about the vineyard, variously nodding and shaking their heads, touching, smelling the fruit, writing in notebooks, racing with the grapes into the lab to test the Brix. Would there be a harvest today, or would we wait for tomorrow and the further concentration of the fruit’s sugar? Here it’s another story: when the moon is waning and the grapes are fat and black, dusted in a thick white bloom and sundried of dew—the residual moisture of which might dilute the purity of the juice—the
vinaiolo
snaps off a bunch of grapes, rubs one or two on his shirt sleeve, tosses them into his mouth, chews, swallows, smiles and says,
Vendemmiamo,
Let’s pick.

The work is beginning, but I have to use the bathroom. Two women in pinafores and corrective shoes with the backs cut out flutter about my needs, show me the way, ask after my comfort. I’m the
last one to slip into the leafy avenues of the vines. My partners are a man called Antonio, thirtyish and swaggering, and another called Federico, seventyish, chivalrous as a count. When they see that I know how to use my secateurs, holding the curved handles easily in my fist, that I can burrow deep into the vines to clip and drop the fruit into my basket almost as rhythmically as do they, Holly Go-lightly is redeemed. “
Non è la tua prima vendemmia. Sei brava, signora.
This is not your first harvest, my lady. You’re good.”

Less than two hours have passed and, drenched in sweat and rouged in grape juice, I am febrile, weak as a babe as I step out from the humid enclosure of the vines and into the light of the fiendish sun. It is the first collective rest of the morning and I can’t remember if I’ve ever been this tired. My legs feel just-foaled, not quite able to hold me as I try to stand. My body is seared but somehow exquisitely exalted and the all-absorbing sensation is not unlike a post-coital one. I look about for Fernando, who must be on the other side of the hill that separates the two fields. There he is, waving me toward him. Because they’re so beautiful, I can’t resist limping among the vines rather than along the sandy path beside them. Here and there among the green, succulent leaves, one or two are tarnished gold by the sun, crisped and beginning to curl. A symptom of autumn.

We go to join the rest who’ve collected about iceless tubs of mineral water set in the shade between two old oaks. There are
barrels of wine. There is no one actually swallowing the water, except the errant splashes of it that land in the mouth as they pour it over their heads and shoulders, chests, arms. They bathe in the water and drink the wine, and it all makes sense. I do what they do. There is a basketful of panini—thick cuts of bread stuffed with prosciutto or mortadella—and I eat one hungrily while Federico refills my tumbler with wine. I drain it like a true spawn of Enotria. I feel faint.

I manage to recall enough strength to return to the bending and clipping until I hear an accordian whooshing and voices singing. Only sun-inflamed I think I am and that the pleasant fit will pass until Antonio says, “
È ora di pranzo.
It’s time for lunch.”

Merciful lunch and a serenade. I find Fernando, unfolded flat between the vines he was picking when lunch was announced. He’s laughing, saying he’ll never move again. We follow the others to the place under the same oaks, if a little deeper into their shade, where a long, narrow table is laid with a green and blue cloth and set with great, round loaves of bread, bowls of
panzanella,
wheels of pecorino and a whole
finocchiona
—the typical Tuscan
salame,
big around as a dinner plate and scented with wild fennel. There are flat baskets piled with crostini smeared with a paste of
fegatini,
chicken livers. Someone taps into another demijohn of wine and people stand in line with pitchers while some let the stuff fizz directly from the spout into their glasses. Sitting on the packed earth among our colleagues, we and the sky and the sun are stitched together in a primitive agragrian motif.

On a far hillside there are women on ladders pulling fruit from a stand of fig trees. They seem painted, a Sapphic bevy at work. Glass breaking under velvet is their laughter, riding the air like a shiver. They carry the fruit back to us in the skirts of their pinafores, letting the figs drop softly onto the table. I take one and it’s hot from the sun. I bite it, piercing its honey juices, rolling them about in my still wine-wet mouth. I bring one to Fernando and he eats it whole with his eyes closed. Everyone is quiet for half an hour, sleeping, half-sleeping. The accordianist sings alone.

T
HE
VINAIOLO
MANOEUVERS
through the vines, saying, “
Per oggi, basta, ragazzi.
For today, that’s enough, kids.”

It’s only just after five in the afternoon, nearly two hours earlier than the usual quitting hour, and there’s a buzzing among the harvesters wanting to know why. The drift that circulates says it’s because we’ve stripped more than half the vines in record time and that the crusher, even though it will be fed all through the night, simply can’t accommodate more fruit than we’ve already picked. A great cheering rises up and the men strut about, hugging and kissing each other like a band of Latin desperadoes fresh from a raid. Grappa is offered all around midst the rush for autos or trucks and the milder spoils of a bath and a bed. The
vinaiolo
stands at the end of the drive where all our vehicles are parked and shakes hands with each of us, looks us straight in the eye and says thank you fervently, as if we’d
snuffed the fires of hell. And I think how artistic is the Italian’s glissade from mood to mood. Perhaps it’s all the olive oil.

We harvest with the same champion group in four different vineyards for nine successive days until all the grapes are in. The weather stays warm, energy and good humors prevail. Riding back home with Barlozzo in the truck on the last day, I tell Fernando my thighs have grown strong and firm, and he tells me he’s certain now that working the land is what he’s meant to do. Barlozzo says we’re once again lulling ourselves into the quaint thinking of the middle-aged in crisis. He says all we did was help our neighbors to pick a few grapes. The duke’s nimble restoration of equilibrium. I squeeze my Titian thigh and think maybe it’s not so taut after all. To heal his trounce, I suppose, he asks if we’re ready for the evening’s festival.

We can’t wait, we tell him. And as we’re jumping down from the truck, Fernando says,
“Tutti al bar per gli aperitivi alla sette mezza, va bene?
Everyone at the bar for
aperitivi
at seven-thirty, OK?” Even though the ritual of
aperitivi
is sacred, one of us always reminds the others.

T
HE HARVEST SUPPER
is staged in a vineyard we’d picked a few days before. It is the smallest one we worked but I think the most beautiful, sitting in a pine-hemmed field and sharing its estate with an olive grove. Long and slender tables, built of boards laid over barrels, are covered with starched white linens and set among the stripped vines. Makeshift benches flank either side of them. All the
light is fire. Torches have been pummeled into the red earth. In a space enclosed by a low wall of piled stones, a great wood fire burns. Candles are set down the whole the length of the tables, and yet more candles in paper sacks mark the pathways up to the farmhouse. Scents of new bread and new wine intoxicate the twilight and a dawdling piece of moon climbs the sky.