La Vendemmia

This week we helped Erminia and her family harvest their grapes. This is one of the milestones of the rural year marking the end of summer and the beginning of autumn. The family has a small vineyard and we have helped with the harvest ever since we first arrived here six years ago. In the first year we had only just moved in and it felt like a great honour to be invited. Back then the event was overseen by Old Paolo, Erminia’s husband. He died two years ago and since then the responsibility of deciding when the grapes will be brought in has fallen to Young Paolo, his grandson, who lives next door to Erminia with his wife Elizabet and baby Domenica.

The actual harvesting is the work of a morning for ten or twelve of us, armed with secateurs and plastic bins. The day was overcast but warm. Fortunately there has not yet been too much autumn rain and the ground was dry. The grapes are small, white and sweet and some had already begun to dry out or go mouldy, but all but the very driest are snipped and dumped into the bins. Afterwards we went back to Paolo and Elizabet’s house for lunch, cooked by Erminia. As ever it was my favourite – orecchiette (discs of pasta) freshly made by Erminia, rabbit stew and polpette (little meatballs, though with not much meat). This was accompanied by “baratierre”, a kind of melon that tastes like cucumber and last year’s wine, which has a simple taste like alcoholic grape juice. For desert there was yellow melon followed by a short black coffee. Lunch was dominated by baby Domenica, not yet a year old, who stared intensely around her in wide-eyed amazement. Her smile and happy gurgles are infectious and put everyone in a good mood.

After lunch the men of the family process the grapes using an ancient press in Erminia’s Cantina. While Sue and I take an afternoon nap in our bedroom, we can hear the mechanical ratcheting noise as the handle on the press is worked, gradually winding the press downwards and forcing the juice onto the floor of the cantina and through a drain to a large cistern beneath it. This year most of the grape juice will be sold and only about a hundred litres will be reserved for family consumption. This is a sign of the times – money is tight and Old Paolo, who for a little man could certainly drink a lot of wine, is no longer around.

Dozing fitfully in bed I think of Old Paolo and the passing of another year, measuring my life away in grape harvests. There surely are a lot worse things to measure it with.