Seasons in Basilicata

by David Yeadon

  “Soon…” Vito paused and took a generous tipple of his 150-proof grappa, “…very soon there’s juice everywhere—in the baskets, over your hands and clothes. And the smell of ripe fruit, ah! What a smell in the early morning. When the bigonce were full Paolo would drive them to the crushing barn and the vats, where Carmela and Laura would start crushing them with thick wooden poles, like big clubs. Paolo then took the empty bigonce back to the vineyard, and they’d get filled up again, and on and on until lunchtime. Everybody was exhausted so the women brought out a real pranzo (lunch) of pasta and prosciutto and pancetta and those big loaves of bread—really big loaves, a meter wide—you don’t see anymore now, and of course lots of wine. Oh, it was all so good.”

  Vito seemed to be lost in his own reverie. No one said anything. He sipped the last of his grappa and began again: “Then, after lunch, a little siesta. Not too long though. And back to the vines for more grape-clipping and filling paniere and bigonce and crushing in the barn. And that wonderful smell! It was like the juice wanted to turn into wine right there. The air would make you drunk, and the sun was hot, and everybody was covered in juices and laughing, and the children throwing grapes and covering their faces and heads with juice and skins and…”

  VITO

  Vito paused again. The memory seemed too poignant for him to continue. His face and body sagged a little, and he said softly, almost in a whisper, “Such good, good times. The family all together. All the other families helping, and then that magnificent cena dinner at night, when we’d all washed and sat down to all those big antipasti plates filled with our own cheeses, artichokes, tomatoes, and big, fat sausages full of garlic and fennel and big bowls of penne with porcini mushrooms, the best ones, and tiny, crunchy pieces of ham cooked in dark sugar with a sprinkling of thick, thirty-year-old aceto balsamico tradizionale, and saltimbocca, and big cauldrons of goat stew sometimes, and if we were lucky with our hunting, cinghiale steaks, or even, on very special occasions, porchetta (roast suckling pig) with lots of rosemary and garlic! Ah, such good, good times.”

  Laura could see he was struggling to control his tears and she came and stood behind him, stroking the massive shoulders of her capo della casa (man of the house). She finished the story for him, quietly. “Yes, they were good times. But now our vineyards are all gone.” Then she laughed. “But at least we are still here and a lot of our family…and still many, many good friends.”

  “And our old wines.” Vito added with a moist-eyed grin.

  “Yes, still a few of those left in our cantina,” Laura said, giving her husband a huge hug.

  At Last Giuliano’s Own Vendemmia

  Slowly we were beginning to understand and celebrate the larger rhythms of life that gave structure and richness to each of the seasons there. After Vito’s brief introduction to the subtleties of the grape harvest came one of the richest times of all for almost everyone in those remote hill villages: the great fall grape harvest and wine-making rituals. A real ancient, time-honored vendemmia.

  “ONCE I USED TO have my own vigneto [vineyard],” Giuliano said with a wry, slightly sad look on his face. “But now I don’t. And normal, in the past, when I didn’t ’ave my own vines, I got grapes out of Sicily. Real beautiful fruit. Montepulciano grapes. And I made my own wine. I always do that. You can’t trust all that stuff in shops. It’s best do it yourself and make your own vino d’uva (wine made entirely from grapes without commercial additives). Like most people around here, like my cousin Salvatore. I use his grapes now. Very nice. Mainly Sangiovese and a few Malvasia for sweet wines. He’s got vineyard near San Mauro Forte. And we’re cutting tomorrow. Why don’t you come along, help out, an’ ’ave a good fun time with us?”

  I had every intention of helping and having a good time. Truly I had. Giuliano said they’d be starting around nine o’clock and should go on until around lunchtime. “And then I guess we’ll all have a nice merenda [picnic] in the vineyard,” I prompted. “With wine and cheeses and salamis and maybe even a large pranzo with roast chickens and boiled beef…”

  “Oh, no, no. Sorry, David. None of that. This is small vineyard. We’ll be finished by noon, so we all come back and have lunch at my ’ouse.”

  “Oh, okay,” I said. Rosa’s cooking, I thought, would be more than adequate consolation for the absence of a pranzo and even a cena, the huge, traditional, postpicking celebration dinner.

  AT AROUND TEN O’CLOCK I was at San Mauro Forte, in the lush green foothills covered with olive orchards and vineyards, with my head spinning once again from all the hairpin curves of the drive from Aliano. I walked from the gateway to the vineyard, where Giuliano’s truck was parked, and then through the high rows of vines, with their hundreds of fat, dew-moist grappoli (clusters) of deep-purple grapes, to where I heard voices.

  “Hello,” I called out.

  “Ah, David. Buon giorno! Come on. Have a glass of vino with us.”

  “Great,” I said and emerged upon a timeless scene of half a dozen weary, juice-splattered grape pickers sitting in the shade under an arbor of apple and bay laurel trees, treating themselves to a tipple or two before launching again into the back-and neck-straining work, especially in vineyards with those pergola (arbor) arrangements of vines strung on wires between narrow wooden or stone pillars. Like this one.

  “Not too much for me,” I said to Giuliano as he sloshed deep red wine from a label-less bottle into a chipped cup. “I’ve got work to do.”

  Giuliano gave me one of his endearing, almost-toothless chor tles. “Ah, well, y’ see, David. There’s not so much work to do because…we’re finished!”

  “Finished!? You said it would take until midday, and it’s only…ten-fifteen!”

  “Yes, azright. But you see my cousin here, Salvatore—Salvatore meet David, and David, this is his wife, Carmela. You see, this is their vineyard, and they invited some extra friends, so it got done much faster. So…” That oh-so-Italian “what’s to be done” shrug once again.

  “Well, I can’t leave here without filling at least one cassetta.”

  Giuliano winked at his cousin, who smiled and nodded and agreed to show me the subtle art of secateur use and where to cut the grape bunch stems and how to lay each cluster carefully in the cassetta (alas, not the romantic old-fashioned wicker canestra kind, but the more practical, modern, square, yellow-plastic box type). The trick was to do it gently, without bursting the grapes—so fat and juicy you could tell they were just dying to ferment themselves into their true earthly manifestation—bold, deep-red, country wine.

  It was a short but interesting education. The cassetta was soon filled with its fifty-odd pounds of gorgeous-looking fruit, and I carried it to join the dozens of other brimming yellow boxes all ready to be taken off in Giuliano’s truck, divided up between the families, and then crushed for the initial fermentation in their separate cantine. In Giuliano’s case, his garage. Salvatore gave me a quick rundown on the productivity of his small, less-than-two-acre vineyard. “We should get around twenty-five quintali—each quintale is a hundred kilos—so that’s around twenty-five hundred kilos, over five thousand pounds, with around sixty to seventy liters of wine for every quintale. So, what’s that?”

  “Around seventeen hundred liters or so,” I said. “I think.”

  “Si. Corretto. Seventeen hundred. Maybe a little less. But enough to keep our families happy for another year, eh?”

  “Was that your wine I just drank?” I asked.

  “Why, of course,” Salvatore said, surprised by the idea that we would drink anything else while on his land.

  “Then I think your family should be very happy!”

  “Ah, yes, bene, grazie. You must have some bottles of my new wine when it’s ready.”

  I nodded an enthusiastic “yes” and decided not to tell him that I’d already placed my order for a couple dozen of Giuliano’s brew, too.

  LATER IN THE AFTERNOON I was standing outside Giuliano’s cantina with Rosa, Donato, their son-in-la
w, and Vito, their son, a strappingly large young man in his mid-twenties with Giuliano’s big grin and Rosa’s cautious eyes. Giuliano emerged from the cantina, proudly pushing out what looked like a enamel-plated, wheel-less wheelbarrow with a lawn mower–type engine attached to it and a screwdriver-mincing device that ran along the bottom of a V-shaped container. “My macchina da macinare,” he said proudly. “The best grape crusher in Accettura!”

  “The only one in Accettura,” Rosa mumbled. “And it’s a real noisy.”

  “Oh, yes, the only one like this in town,” Giuliano said.

  “How do the other winemakers do their crushing then?” I asked. “With their feet?”

  “No, no. Not anymore. They have something like this, but they have to work it by hand. Not so good that way. This much better.”

  He was obviously very proud of his macchina and kept stroking its cream, green, and red enamel-coated flanks and emphasizing once again that it was the “only one like this in Accettura.”

  Close by stood forty yellow cassette stacked five high and full of those gleaming purple Sangiovese grapes.

  “Okay! So, va bene. Let’s go!” Giuliano said and flicked the On switch, immediately filling the narrow street where he lived, right across from his large garage cantina, with a cacophonous racket.

  The macchina was linked by a long, transparent hose to a Jacuzzi-size plastic vat in the center of Giuliano’s cantina—large enough to hold the six hundred and fifty to seven hundred liters of wine he hoped to extract from the thousand kilos of grapes waiting in the cassette outside.

  Donato carried the first cassetta to the macchina and slowly poured in the bunches of grapes. With a roar, some crackling and spitting, and a very slushy-mushy sound, the screw-mincer churned the grapes into pulp in seconds, sending the juice, skins, pits, and pulp through the hose and into the vat at a remarkable speed. The larger stalks flew out the back end of the macchina. A second cassetta followed quickly, and then a third. The time-honored process of wine making was finally under way. The great vintage of 2002 was about to emerge. Giuliano looked very happy, scurrying about up and down a stepladder among his dangling strings of air-dried red peperoncini to check on the rapidly filling vat and then outside again to advise the others on the pace of grape-pouring from the cassette.

  Already the rich aroma of grape juice and pulp was emerging from the cantina and mingling with the din in the street and the ever-growing piles of stalks, which Vito kept whisking away in emptied cassette.

  When we were about halfway through the pile of forty boxes, Giuliano beckoned me inside. “This is best bit,” he said, chuckling. “Now we find out what kinda wine we gonna get this year.” He placed what looked like a large thermometer into a narrow glass cylinder of just-pressed grape juice that stood on an old upturned wine cask. “This measures grape sugar. Tells you strength of your wine.”

  We both watched as the little measuring device bobbed in the juice, then slowly steadied itself, and finally remained still. Giuliano peered intently at the numerical etchings on its glass surface and then let out a great, “Yesss! Look, David! Look! Twenty-three sugar content. That’s about fifteen-percent-strength wine. Very good. When it’s finished we’ll lose maybe one percent. So we have thirteen point five to fourteen percent wine. A good year. Very good year!”

  This was rather surprising, as most vintners had been bemoaning the lousy summer and forecasting mediocre vintages at best for the year. In fact, throughout Italy, 2002 was generally considered to be a poor year for wine, but in this little part of Basilicata, things looked far more promising.

  The macchina continued its roaring and squirting and pulping. I climbed the ladder to watch the juice and fruit pouring in and the thick, red, aromatic scum moving slowly across the rising surface of the juice.

  “So, what happens after this?” I asked Giuliano.

  “Is very simple. I leave this juice here for eight or ten days, depending, to ferment and then I drain off the wine—our vino buono—the “free run” wine. And then to get more wine we use the torchio [press].” He pointed to a sinister-looking, circular, vertically slatted device bound by steel hoops in the corner with a huge double-handled screw for tightening the press. Vivid images of the Spanish Inquisition came to mind. This machine was used to squeeze all the juices from the skins and fruit. “That’s big, messy job. Takes me whole day sometime just for three hundred liters or so. Anyhow, and then it goes into my barili [barrels, often oak, but in his case metal] and these damigiane [demijohn] bottles over there in the back room, to age and ferment just a little bit more. And then, in three or four months, we come in each day and pour some from one of the big damigiane into liter bottles and we start to drink and enjoy it!”

  “And what happens to all that sludge, the skins and whatever in the torchio?” I asked.

  “We call that the mosto,” Giuliano told me. “Well, some people add water and make a kind of weak wine—maybe five to six percent—with a little fermentation and an extra squeeze. It’s called strizzo. You have to drink that right now. It doesn’t last.”

  “And then?”

  “Well, in the old days you could take the mosto—like giant fruit-cake—and distill it to make grappa. Some peoples still do. It’s not hard, but it’s not legal. It’s very controindicato. I use for pig feed or vigneto [fertilizer].”

  “Fantastic. At last I think I’m beginning to understand the homestyle wine-making process. But are there any little additional tricks you use? Your wine’s got such a deep rich body?”

  “Well…” he hesitated a little and then gave one of those “oh what the heck” kind of shrugs. “Well, there is one little thing. Rosa and I usually take about thirty liters of the wine before we bottle it—about five percent of total, no more—and put it in big pan and boil it down on the stove in the ’ouse to about fifteen liters. Then we let it cool and pour it back into the big container of wine, the six hundred liters, stir it up and…well, that’s all. It helps give a little extra body. A bit more flavor.”

  GIULIANO’S VENDEMMIA EQUIPMENT

  “Interesting idea,” I said, wondering how this little innovation would be regarded by the great vintners of Bordeaux and Burgundy.

  “’S’my own idea,” Giuliano said, grinning his irascible grin.

  I COULD HEAR THE same grin over the phone when I called him ten days later.

  “So, it’s today, Giuliano, day ten? The torchio begins?”

  He responded with one of his chortling chuckles and reminded me that he’d said “about” ten days.

  “So, when should I come over then?”

  “Say three days? We let everything sit and ferment bit more for another three days, and then you come. Saturday. Good day for torchio. Vito is ’ere and maybe Donato too.”

  “And Rosa?”

  “Ah, Rosa, she always ’ere.”

  “And me? What’s my job?”

  “And you. Yes. You wanna help too? Good. Then just sit and watch and drink my wine, eh?”

  “We’ll all sit and drink your wine. As usual.”

  “Va bene. See you Saturday. ’Bout ten o’clock.”

  I WAS THERE promptly this time (unlike the vendemmia at Salvatore’s vineyard which I almost missed), ready to join in the fun and the pressing of the mosto.

  “Usual,” Giuliano had told me, “we get ’bout another two hundred liters out of that stuff. Sometimes more. ’Pends on the pressure you give it when y’ do the squeezin’. Y’ gotta be careful though. Do it slow. An’ the wine’s not so good like the first run.” He gave me a nudge and tippled an invisible glass of wine into his mouth “But nobody notices, eh?”

  I agreed. I’d sampled his previous years’ vintages—first run and torchio pressing—and I couldn’t tell the difference. Both were bold, full of body and fruit, and while not “long in the taste,” certainly of enduring impact and strength.

  The cantina looked much the same as it had two weeks before, with its dangling ceiling strings of brilliant r
ed peperoncini, salami, pancetta, coppa, soppressata, pecorino, and cascades of wizened, sun-dried tomatoes, which bore an unsettling resemblance to some deep-fried witchety grubs I’d eaten (or at least tried to eat) in the Australian outback a few years back. I seem to remember they tasted a little like peanut-flavored popcorn. Not bad, if you didn’t dwell too long on the gooey source of the flavor.

  There were two changes this time though. The huge red maturing vat had been drained of its first-run wine (now almost fully fermented, even after such a relatively short period). What lay at the bottom was an intoxicating, redolent three-foot-thick porridge of leftover “stuff.” The second change was the four-foot-high torchio (press), with its vertically slatted sides (similar to a barrel with gaps between the staves) bound by steel hoops, was now standing in the center of the cantina like a round altar awaiting sacrifices.

  Giuliano had already scooped in a first load of mosto from the tank with his six-foot-long, three-pronged wooden fork—actually a thin tree trunk—filling the torchio almost to two thirds, and had pressed the mosto down as tightly as possible with his hands. He was now proceeding to place a circular lid on the press and then a series of thick, square blocks of wood on top of one another to spread the compression force evenly. And quite a lethal-looking device it was: a great steel contraption that fitted over the top of the round torchio and the wood blocks. Giuliano was now beginning to pump the torchio’s lever to initiate the squeezing process.

  “You do it all by hand?” I asked. It already looked like hard work, and he’d pumped the four-foot lever only half a dozen times.