2008; Green harvest and other adventures…

July 2008

We arrived at the vineyard for the first time since January and there were at least ten men working on the house. Andrea, our contractor and Manu’s brother, had been working steadily since we last left him and one third of the house is complete: three bedrooms and two bathrooms. Although the rooms were without doors they had windows. We are going to be comfortable living in the house, although we are living in the middle of a construction site. Big trucks pull around to the back of the house to unload materials such as wood, and cement blocks and workmen are always around. One evening, right before dinner, we had five of our subcontractors all ending their workday at the same time. Some came to be paid, and some came to discuss the job. One had been working on some small part of the plumbing for the pool. They are all friends with one another and in this case, they were all about the same age—early 30’s or 20’s. We had a glass of wine and ate some salami together and admired the house and the view. I had just made a fresh loaf of bread for our meal so I cut some pieces for them to eat with the salami.

While the subcontractors come and go, Andrea is always with us. He arrives by seven in the morning and doesn’t leave until late evening. He eats lunch and dinner with us. No matter where he is working in the house, he can sense when the plates go on the table for the meal. I turn around to find him sitting in his chair waiting patiently to be fed long before anyone else in the house even thinks to come to the kitchen. Andrea loves women and the attention of women, so he and I get along well. He’s a bit of a gossip and loves to tease Manu, so we also have a lot in common.

The renovation of our wild unruly vineyard began in April when Walter and his two men came to install the new wood poles in the oldest part of the vineyard on the west side of the hill. Walter also planted rose bushes at the end of each row that received new poles. Rose bushes are planted as the farmer’s canary in the coal mine; the farmers think a parasite or disease will attack the rose bush before it attacks the grapevine, giving the farmer some time to come up with a remedy. I’m not sure it really works but it is a charming custom. I thought it was sweet of Walter to think of that but Manu told me that he had instructed him to do it. I still think it was nice of him to remember.

We decided at Christmas to purchase some grapes (sfuso) from a neighbor and make a very simple white wine from an indigenous grape—the Cortese. Walter found a great batch from a local farmer who tends his vineyards not far from our land and together with Walter we crafted the taste that we wanted. Piemonte has good indigenous whites but their production is limited since most of the land is now given over to the red wines. The Barolos, Barbarescos, Nebbiolos, and Dolcettos, all indigenous reds, fetch a higher price on the market but we wanted to showcase a regional white to our market in the US and we wanted a nice refreshing white “vinello” (young wine) that we could enjoy in the summer at the vineyard.Oreste, our caretaker, comes and goes on our land, driving the tractor up and down the vine rows to cut the grass, re-tie errant vines, and look at the ripening of the grapes to help us decide when to start the green harvest. When he is working in the vineyards, Oreste almost always wears shorts with black socks, a short sleeve dress shirt and a small green and white striped sailor hat. The hat makes it easy for us to spot him from a long distance, somewhat reassuring since we have no blinds on the windows and our otherwise absolute privacy allows us to probably bare more than we should around the house. We spoke to him for the first time one evening shortly after we arrived when we met him coming out of the church in the town piazza. He knew we had arrived but kept his distance to let us settle in. He asked if he and his wife could come by for a visit the next evening after dinner. When they came, Oreste and his wife brought us peaches, zucchini and purple string beans. The peaches came from the tree that is right on the border of our property. We have peach trees too but one is too old and doesn’t produce much fruit and the two others are only four feet high and don’t give much fruit either.

Manu and I have to do the green harvest—trimming grape bunches so each vine branch supports no more than two. This channels power during the last month to the remaining bunches to enhance the wine quality. We are going to start with the old vines at the top of the vineyard, the plot that Walter and his men renovated in the spring. It will take us at least eight hours to complete the green harvest on this vineyard. It would take two farmers with experience and skill about half that time. We have no tools so we purchased our grape clippers and some other agricultural equipment one Saturday morning at the open-air market in the middle of the city of Alba. Mine are so beautiful and serious looking I don’t want to get them dirty.

August 1, 2008

We were very lucky when we dug the hole for the pool, which will be located right on the crest of the hill along the back side of the house. The big digger bit into the earth and we discovered only a small part of what needed to be dug out to be marne arenarie called tufo in local dialect, which is a volcanic rock made of incredibly hard, compact sand. If the digger had to excavate any lower or if there had been more of the tufo in the spot where we wanted the pool, it would have been impossible to dig it out. As it was, it took the digger as long to dig just that piece that it found as it took to dig the rest of the hole.

We weren’t so lucky several days later, when Andrea and the digger with its driver were working to grade and smooth the soil around the house and the pool. The digger went under our American grapevine arbor, which is ten feet from the back of the house and just five feet from the edge of the pool, to smooth the earth out and banged against something hard. There was some type of concrete mass buried below the arbor and Andrea decided to jackhammer it. The digger driver had Andrea tie a rope around his waist, securing him to the arm of the digger. Andrea worked for only five minutes with the jackhammer when he slammed through the 40 feet deep and 10 feet wide cesspool buried directly under the American grape arbor. The stench was awful—it was 75 years of accumulated waste from the farm and the house fermenting in this concrete pit. A

local company came with a truck to pump the pit but now we have to fill it up with our construction debris. Oreste is building a house for his son a mile up the road and now a truck is coming almost every evening with construction debris from that site to sink into our well. We are hoping our American grape vine lives through all this knocking and banging.

August 3, 2008

We finally worked the green harvest on the western vineyard. Oreste was starting to hint around and ask us if we had done it and we were just a little ashamed that we hadn’t. There is a lot to be done on the house and the property but the grapes can’t wait. This is the perfect time to do the final green harvest since the actual harvest will be some time in September. In this last green harvest we eliminated grape bunches so a final shot of energy goes to the grapes that remain. I was nervous as we walked down to the vineyard with our new clippers. It takes steely nerves of an experienced farmer to callously sever a beautiful ripening bunch of grapes from the vine and toss it to the ground. Manu and I each worked a row our own and I noticed Manu had less bunches on the ground than I did. We had a lot of discussion about the technique; I was pretty sure we weren’t clipping off enough bunches. The vines in this vineyard vary from 80 to 100 years old so their output overall is less than newer vines. Manu argued that we can trim fewer bunches since the yield is naturally less, but I still think we were too conservative.

August 8, 2008

Oreste and his wife came to the vineyard this morning to re-do the green harvest. After surveying our hard work on the upper vineyard, Oreste said we did a poor job of it; we did not clip off nearly enough bunches. When I saw Oreste and Silvana walking in our fields I put on my boots, grabbed my clippers and joined them. Manu and I both need to learn to be more analytical and hard-hearted. Oreste went through the process with me yet again as we worked our way down a row—when you see three bunches on a vine, trim one or two off. Clip off the tip of a bunch if it is runty at the end; and trim off the new growth from the base of the vine. It seems simple when watching Oreste do it. We are no longer paying Oreste by the yield, which is how he is paid by everyone else he sells his sfuso to, and how the former owners of our vineyard paid him, but with a fixed salary, since we want to encourage him to think quality not quantity for our wines. It is funny that our roles with Oreste have become completely reversed—he has to keep reminding us now that we want a quality wine, not a huge quantity of grapes. He is much more hardhearted than he used to be but I was gratified to see that Silvana, his wife, has the same difficulty that I do in cutting and winced and shook her head as he trimmed.