Ed tries the frittata, bolstering it with spring garlic, but the asparagus taste almost disappears, just a crackle of the bony stem to remind us it is there.
On the street in Arezzo, I see another of these woodsy women. The word strega, witch, comes to mind, or that old source of wisdom in the South, a conjure-woman. Who could resist? I buy some from her basket, too. A crescent-shaped knife lies in the bottom, its blade worn thin. She is almost toothless, bundled in sweaters with bits of straw sticking out of the wool. “Where did you find so much?” I ask. But she just raises her finger to her lips; her mouth is sealed on that subject. She limps away and I notice she is wearing bright white running shoes. She hoists herself up to the arcade level on the Corso, where sophisticated businessmen at a caffè table madly buy her asparagus.
Usually I roast asparagus in the oven—arrange the stalks on a baking sheet, drizzle with oil and salt and pepper and run them in the oven. That's the best asparagus can taste. Without contact with water, even steam, the asparagus retains all succulence and texture without absorbing a watery taste, or worse, going limp. But wild asparagus turned tough as string in the oven, so I learn to steam them very slightly, then roll them around in olive oil. The quality of the oil is crucial; without the best, I'd use butter. With each bite, I imagine the woman foraging in the countryside, her secret hillsides above the vineyards, the years she has attended to this ritual, the surety of her thumb against the curved knife.
When I show Beppe, master grape pruner, the patches of asparagus on the land, he's pleased. He cuts off the dry arching branches. “Like this, cut low under the dirt and more will come next year,” he explains. When he leans to show me, he discovers that someone already has begun this pruning process. Old wands have been cut on the diagonal, not snapped off. The mysterious forager. Or some spirit who lived here a century ago and revisits in spring? Or some canny soul who sells both flowers and asparagus at the market? A woman with a curved knife? Beppe starts to eat a raw asparagus and hands me one: a taste to sharpen the teeth. I'm beginning to like this spring treat.
I've been surprised during winter visits to find the food so truly different from what I'm used to in summer, the season I'm usually here. Now, as spring continues to unroll, almost every day brings some new taste. At Matteo and Gabriella's frutta e verdura, I see a basket holding something I've never seen before. Gnarly dwarf kiwi? Moldy walnuts? No, mandorline, Matteo tells me, a special treat in the Val di Chiana, the expansive valley below Cortona. Matteo bites one then holds out the basket to me. Ah, bitter and sour, not like anything I've ever tasted. I know immediately that I will like this new almond in its casing. He eats the whole thing slowly, fuzzed skin and all, relishing the crunch. Beneath the sage-green exterior, there's a neon-green layer, then a yellow layer, then the tender, embryonic nut, still soft and delicately touched with the taste of almond.
At home I go out on my own land where wild almonds grow, but none seems to be the right variety of the mandorline. The shells are hardening. I crack one with a rock and taste the nut: hint of rose, hint of peach, and the aftertaste which reminds me that prussic acid also comes from almonds. When ripe, these almonds retain their intense perfume but the acid tamps down to a twist of bitterness.
The land is a mystery to me. After seven years, I think I know it and then, suddenly, I don't. I am watching the season's benefactions. Rivers of wild irises are about to debut along the terraces. These we share with the forager, too, and with the porcupines, who feast on the rhizomes. Symbol of Florence, the iris used to be widely cultivated in Tuscany for the use of its dried root (orris) for the sensuous, deep violet-grape scent in perfumes. Such an unlikely wildflower. In San Francisco, I buy tight bunches of five at the grocery store, the attenuated buds barely able to open. Now I'm almost alarmed to see so many just volunteering and blooming with blowsy abandon.
As we walk back toward the house after the asparagus expedition, Beppe pulls up a slick, thick-leaved plant. “Boil this. It's good for the liver.”
“What's its name?”
“In this moment, I do not recall. Look.” Beppe points to a spreading ferny plant with tiny fan-shaped leaves. “Morroncello.” I have no idea what this is. The dictionary does not tell me. I'll try it—another new greeny green of spring.
Very early, I hear voices in the road below the house and look out to see three women, hunter-gatherers, gesturing up to our land. They must see some new plant, I think. They're down there a long time and I don't see any movement toward the side of the hill. Finally, they walk on.
While dressing, I hear a skid of brakes, and two beeps of a horn, but when I look out, a blue Fiat is speeding on down the road. We're going to Petroio today, the home of handmade terra-cotta pots. As we start down the driveway, I sense something. Coming closer, we see the road littered with large stones. We look up. The tall stone wall which supports the shady part of our garden has collapsed in the night, leaving a fifteen-by-fifteen-foot gap, uglier than missing front teeth. We push the stones off the road and go up to look. The lovely clear springs surging forth from the hills saturated the ground, undermining the wall. Sins come back to haunt. The fey builder we hired to reconstruct the major terrace walls six years ago did not leave enough drainage holes. Our long yellow picnic table leans precariously where the wall tumbled.
We call our trusted Primo and he comes immediately. “Mah,” he shrugs. “Walls fall.” He comes in the house and calls his crew.
We don't know what else to do, so we take off for Petroio, over in the Siena province. We want to buy large terra-cotta flower pots for the walls—those still standing. We go into the perched, medieval town first for something to drink but everything is closed and the car barely can squeeze through the narrowest street we've yet encountered. Just outside town are several fabbricanti, manufacturers, with hundreds of pots of all sizes. One is as large as a California hot tub. The place we choose makes theirs by hand. We've bought the mass-produced ones before and they're attractive too. A ruddy, actually terra-cotta–colored man comes out looking puzzled. We ask if we may look and he explains that he sells only wholesale. Fortunately, he likes to talk about pots. We're taken in a warehouse above the kilns, hot as a sweat lodge. The jars for olive oil, glazed on the inside, come in many sizes. They make herb pots, garden columns, sundials, classic urns and amphoras. Flower pots of every shape known and others unknown are stacked in rows. These handmade ones have rounded edges, a touch of honey color that looks warm and alive, and an occasional thumb print. He shows us the initials or signs of the maker on the bottom.
When he leans over to move a pot, his glasses slip from his pocket and fall out on the floor. One lens breaks out of the frame but does not shatter. We all kneel in the fine clay dust to look for the tiny screw. After the owner and I give up, Ed continues to search until he spots it in the shadows. Twisting the screw with his little fingernail, he repairs the glasses. We thank the owner for his time and start to leave.
“Wait, how many did you want?” he asks.
“Oh, a few—just for flowers at our house.”
“Not for resale?”
“No. Three or four.”
“Well, you see, I'm not allowed, but three or four, what's the harm?” He gives us a price list and says to deduct forty percent. We select an urn to go with three along our wall and three large pots, all with garlands and swags. When we start to pay, we find that we don't have nearly enough money. He says there's a Bancomat in town so we head back toward the twisted streets, this time parking outside and walking in. Petroio means “large villa,” and the town is hardly larger than a huge castle. No one is about. We walk all over the tiny town and see no bank. The oldest church, San Giorgio, is closed tight. We spot a man walking his dog and he leads us to a doorway we wouldn't have found. No sign at all and the Bancomat is hidden away in a little closet opening.
Back we go to the shop, where the owner helps us pack the pots in the car. We take off and I fish the map from under the seat. “We're ne
ar the Abbadia a Sicille, supposed to be a refuge and inn for pilgrims on their way to the Holy Land. Embedded in the wall is a Maltese Cross and an emblem of the Knights Templar—”
“Are we avoiding the wall?” Ed interrupts. No need to answer.
Primo's men are loading the Ape (pronounced AH-pay, which means “bee,” and is a useful small vehicle, something like a covered scooter with a pick-up bed behind it). They've neatly stacked the fallen stones along with bags of cement. A new bottom row already is in place, boulders with cuneal openings for water to escape. Up top, we find they've dug trenches and laid pipes from the hillside to the terrace edge. I point my two forefingers to the ground. “Let it not happen here. Again.” Such a useful gesture.
The streams now have channels, creating several waterfalls over the edge. We squish up to our ankles. “Tutto bagnato,” Primo says, all wet. Everyone passing stops to view the disaster. A woman tells us that many years ago a small child fell in a well here and drowned, that her cries can be heard at night in the house. This news is unsettling. “That's why the house was abandoned for thirty years. I was afraid to walk by at night when I was a girl.”
“We've never heard cries,” Ed tells her. I wish she hadn't told us. Now when I'm alone, I'm sure I'll be listening.
When she walks on, Primo says, “All old houses are haunted.” He shrugs, turns out both hands. “Spooks do nothing. Water is what to worry about.”
In the night I wake up but all's quiet except for the little Niagaras plummeting into the ditch.
Sfuso: Loose Wine
GITA, ONE OF MY FAVORITE WORDS, A LITTLE trip. This morning, I expected Ed to head to the olive terraces with his hoe but instead, he looked up from Burton Anderson's The Wine Atlas of Italy, which he often reads at breakfast, and said, “Let's go to Montepulciano. Our wine supply is getting low.”
“Great. I want to go to the garden center there to buy plumbago to plant under the hazelnut tree. And we can pick up fresh ricotta at a farm.”
Isn't this what we came to Italy for? Sometimes, in the long restoration, I've thought that I came to Italy only to rip ivy from walls and refinish floors. But now that the main projects are over, the house is—well, not finished, but at least looking more like home.
We will restock our sfuso, loose wine. Many vineyards produce a house wine for themselves, their friends, and local customers. Most Tuscans don't drink bottled wine on an everyday basis; either they make their own, they know someone who does, or they buy sfuso. In preparation, Ed washes out our enormous green glass demijohn and also our shiny, stainless steel container with a red spigot, an innovation that threatens to replace the traditional demijohns.
To protect wine from air after the demijohn is filled, we learned to pour a splash of olive oil on top, forming a seal, then jam in a fist-sized cork. The new canister has a flat lid which floats on top of the wine. A drizzle of neutral oil is poured around the tiny space between the lid and the side of the canister. A second tight lid then goes on top. As you open the spigot at the bottom and pour your wine into a pitcher, the lid and sealing oil lower too, keeping the seal intact.
When families have seven or eight demijohns, they usually store them in a special cool room, a cantina, then uncork each demijohn as they need wine. We've done that, hoisted the demijohn to a table and tipped it, filling old wine bottles through a funnel, then sealed our twenty or so bottles with olive oil. We became adept at tossing off the oil with a jerk when we opened a bottle. But always a few drops floated on the surface. Already, I've consigned two demijohns to decorative functions in corners of rooms. We found our three abandoned by the recycle bin; someone else had given up. But how could they throw the bottles away? I love the curvaceous, globular, pregnant shape and the green glass with bubbles trapped inside. We scrubbed them with bottle brushes made for the job and bought new corks. “Do we really want to use the demijohn again?” I venture.
“You're right. But don't tell the men.” He means, of course, Anselmo, Beppe, and Francesco, who scorn any change regarding olives or wine. We load two twenty-liter plastic jugs into the trunk—handy for transporting, but we must transfer the wine into the canister as soon as we come home. A plastic taste can seep quickly into wine.
It's great being a tourist. Guidebook and camera in my bag, a bottle of water in the car, the map spread out on my knees—what could be finer?
The road from Cortona to Montepulciano, one of my favorites, levels from terraced olive groves to luxive, undulating hills, brilliant with golden wheels of wheat in summer, and now in spring, bright green with cover crops and long grasses. I can almost see the July fields in bloom with girasoli, giant sunflowers, the hallelujah chorus of crops. Today, lambs are out. The new ones look whiffey on their faltering legs, while those just older cavort about the mothers' udders. This is the sweetest countryside I know. Only occasional blasts of pig barn odors remind me that this is not paradise. In shadowed dips of the hills, shaggy flocks sleep in big white clumps. Wheat fields, fruit orchards, and olives, perfectly cared for inch by inch—all gradually give way to the vineyards of Vino Nobile of Montepulciano.
Chianti, Brunello, and Vino Nobile, the three greatest wines of Tuscany, share a characteristic full-bodied, essential grape taste. Beyond that, Tuscans can discuss endless shades of difference far into the night. Since production of Vino Nobile began in the 1300s, they've had a long time to get it just right. The name of the Tuscan grape, Sangiovese, suggests much older wine production; the etymology is from sanguis, Latin for “blood,” and from Jove—blood of Jove. The local strain of Sangiovese is called “Prugnolo Gentile,” nice little plums.
We turn into a long alley of lofty cypresses lining a strada bianca, a white road tunneling under the trees. We drive through bolts of pale green light angling down through gaps between trees. Ed only nods when I remember a line from Octavio Paz, “Light is time thinking about itself.” It seems true to me on one level and not on another. The Avignonesi vineyards surround one of those sublime properties that set me to dreaming of living another life in an earlier time. The villa, the family chapel, the noble outbuildings—I'm in a heavy linen dress in 1780, sweeping across the courtyard, a white pitcher and a ring of iron keys in my hands. Whether I'm the contessa of this fattoria or the maid, I don't know but I have a flash of my steps years ago, the outline of my shadow on the stones.
Avignonesi's winemaker, Paolo Trappolini, a startlingly good-looking man who looks like a Raphael portrait of himself, tells us about the experiments at the vineyard. “I've been searching out almost-extinct rootstock around Tuscany and saving old strains.” We walk out in the vineyard and he shows us new bushy vines planted in the “settonce” pattern, a Latin way of placing one vine in the center of a hexagon of other plants. He points uphill at a spiraling planting pattern, la vigna tonda, the round vineyard. “This also is an experiment in using different densities to see the effect on wine quantity and quality.” He shows us the aging rooms, some of which are covered in thick, gray mold, and the vin santo room, deliriously perfumed with smoky, woody scents.
Avignonesi makes many fine wines, which can be tasted here or in their Palazzo Avignonesi in the center of Montepulciano. Ed is especially interested in their vin santo, the smooth, nutty wine sipped with biscotti after dinner. In homes, at all hours, we've been offered vin santo, have had vin santo forced on us. It's ready, in every cupboard, and you must try it because it's homemade. Avignonesi's is special, one of Italy's finest. We are able to buy only one bottle; their limited quantity has been sold. Someone has given us two venerable bottles of vin santo, a 1953 and a 1962 Ricasoli, bought in New York and now transported back to their place of origin. Anselmo also has given us a bottle of his own. With the precious Avignonesi, we'll invite friends for a tasting after a big feast one summer night.
Next is Tenuta Trerose. Most of their vineyards are planted the usual way, in staked rows, but a large field is planted as a low arbor, the Etruscan style of planting. The offices are in a moder
n building behind a villa in a cypress grove. A young man, surprised to see visitors, gives us a price list and shows us their wines in a conference room. Ed, having consulted the most recent Vini d'Italia, his trusty yearly guide, selects a case of Salterio Chardonnay and a mixed case of reds. We follow the man out onto a catwalk overlooking a warehouse of stainless steel tanks, some oak barrels, and cases and cases of wine. He shouts, and a woman appears from behind boxes. She starts to put together our cases, leaping, as gracefully as a lynx, over and on stacks of boxes.
Inconspicuous yellow signs point the way to vineyards—Fassato, Massimo Romeo, Villa S. Anna (produced by women), Fattoria del Cerro, Terre di Bindella, Podere Il Macchione, Valdipiatta. We know the names, having popped many a cork from their heroic wines. We're headed to Poliziano for our sfuso. Ed waves to someone in a field, who meets us in their warehouse. “The best sfuso in a decade,” he tells us, as he sets out two glasses on a stack of wine boxes. Even at 11 A.M., we're pleased by the hearty red color and the light hint of strawberries in the taste and, what, oh, almost a fragrance of mimosa. We've found our house wine. He fills our jugs from a hose attached to an enormous vat. By law he must seal the jugs and dutifully record our names in his computer. As he pulls up Ed's name, he sees we've been here before. “Americans like our wine, no?” he asks, so we answer yes, for all Americans. Ed wedges the tanks behind the seat, hoping they won't leak as we negotiate the unpaved roads.
The anguine town of Montepulciano stretches and winds as though it were following a river but it climbs a long ridge instead. Henry James's impression, a view caught between arcades, was of “some big battered, blistered, overladen, over-masted ship, swimming in a violet sea.” Tuscan hilltowns often give one the sense of an immense ship sailing above a plain.
Bella Tuscany Page 3