I wasn’t the only member of the panel to be hungry. The others complained that they needed food to continue with this arduous task. Bread and cheese arrived; it was quarter past eight. Clearly there would be no prize-giving at nine o’clock. More discussion, more bread and cheese, more time lost. Our chairman suggested a solution. We would now make a selection of the twenty best reds, and at ten o’clock we would taste them once more on the stage in the piazza for their final placings.
And so it was that for the next hour and a half about thirty of the most unpleasant wines I have ever tasted hit my palate like liquid trip-hammers. After three of these in succession, the Frenchman announced that since his palate was accustomed to only the finest clarets, he would retire from the panel and left. Unfortunately, because of where I was sitting, the first glass of each wine now came to me, instead of to the Frenchman, ensuring that I tasted all thirty of the poisonous bottles, while my fellow panellists, having watched my reactions, were able to avoid them. Out of the forty or so wines that were drinkable, finding twenty finalists was not too hard.
Ten o’clock found us at the rear of the stage under the glare of the spotlights, tasting the final twenty once more while local poets read dialect poems and stories, emceed by a personable young man from Radio Sora. At eleven o’clock the MC announced that the results of the wine-tasting and the prize-giving would take place on Thursday, 8 August.
As the next few days passed in a flurry of music, fireworks, dancing and indigenous sports, the full weight of the responsibility I had accepted became increasingly apparent. There was no escape from talk of wine, juries and honesty. Every wine-maker in the village buttonholed me at some stage, since I was the only juror who was permanently in the village.
‘Did you taste my wine? Good, wasn’t it?’
All attempts to explain the intricacies that had been observed to ensure anonymity were greeted with a knowing wink. Everyone was sure that the jury was voting by any criterion other than honesty.
On Thursday afternoon I went to photograph gl’palluot, a game of obscure origins that once involved rolling hard cheeses down a hill. Nowadays it is played with a thick wooden disk, 20 centimetres in diameter; a string is whipped round it, and the player holds one end while hurling the palluot along the road. The rules are simple enough: teams of four players take it in turn to throw the disk from where the last throw ended. The team with the fewest throws to complete the course wins. Less than fifty throws for the 5-kilometre course is championship class.
The course for the event starts below the main church where the road begins to slope down towards San Donato; at the foot of the hill there is a pause, at my grandfather’s house, where refreshments such as wine and beer are served. When the last team finishes the downhill, the game continues back up to the church. Along the route there are drinking stops, where wine is served from a tractor and trailer to contestants and spectators alike. Most of the people whose houses line this stretch are also on the roadside, offering wine to passers-by. In the past I have been foolish enough to accept hospitality wherever it was offered on the way down, making the way back difficult. The skill in this game is twofold: throwing the palluot at the correct angle to negotiate bends in the road, thus gaining distance; and staying sober. Some players could barely stand when they arrived at the finish, while Michele, who was driving the tractor, was having difficulty staying on the road.
I walked along part of the route with Nino, the mayor’s brother, an old friend. The idea for the wine-tasting was originally his, he told me. Nino is an avid wine-maker, and he had assembled a jury with himself as president, but had been overruled by my good friend Graziano, currently a town councillor and in charge of the festival. Nino was thoroughly disgruntled at what he perceived to be a hijacking of his idea and his chance to head a tasting panel. However, he was prepared to accept that the new panel would stand a better chance of being seen to be impartial and expressed the hope that it had been just that. I assured him that we had behaved impeccably.
On Thursday night the piazza was full. An orchestra from Emilia-Romagna were playing liscio, smoochy 1960s’ dance music. During the break the mayor was called to the stage by the MC, the panel were invited to take their places at the rear of the stage, and the prize-giving began. Every participant received a certificate inscribed by a hired calligrapher, who now took his place on the stage, as each of the sealed bottles was opened in turn, and the names of the producers were matched to the numbered bottles. A cry of ‘fix’ went up as Nicola collected his certificate and trophy for the best rosé, not before it had been suitably eulogized by the panel’s chairman. All the bottles were opened and distributed among the crowd, so that everyone could taste the wines and compare their own impressions with those of the jury.
We came to the last three reds, the cabernets, the ones that mattered. Third place was won by a man who sells wine commercially in large quantity. Not much argument there. Second place went to a man who has no vineyard. The hecklers were in full cry. ‘He buys all his grapes! How can he win a prize when the grapes aren’t from Gallinaro? He gets the grapes from Le Puglie.’
The mayor called for hush. ‘And the first prize goes to Loreto Lucarelli!’ Loreto is the father of Graziano, the councillor who organized the event. The implications of this decision took a while to sink in.
I made my way quickly to the back of the stage while the prizes were handed out, ready to do a runner. A hand tugged at my trousers. I looked down at one of the producers from the slopes to the west of the village.
‘Excuse me, but do you know how to make wine?’ The implications of this question were clearly insulting.
‘Yes,’ I replied, ‘it’s made with sugar, bull’s blood and industrial alcohol.’ Sometimes the best defence is offence.
The back of the stage was now cut off by a mass of people. Rafaele, a smallholder, handed me two magnums, one of red, one of white. ‘Taste those,’ he commanded. Both were excellent. All around me milled the orchestra, the tasting panel, the town councillors and irate producers, these last all clamouring for a taste of the winning wine and explanations as to why they hadn’t won.
Nino arrived on the stage to join the mêlée. I asked how had he done. ‘Not placed.’ He wandered off, sulkily. No prizes and his idea hijacked.
Beside me a man confronted our chairman with a bottle of his wine. ‘Taste this again. How can it not be placed?’
I watched with interest as the chief taster once again appraised the wine.
‘Well?’ demanded its maker.
‘You fermented this in an oak barrel, didn’t you?’
‘No.’
‘Then you used a fibreglass container.’
‘No.’
‘In a glass demijohn?’
‘Yes.’
‘Aha!’ he exclaimed triumphantly. ‘This is typical of wine fermented in glass. That’s why it wasn’t placed.’
This was delivered with such conviction that the producer left with his bottle, stupefied into submission by the erudition of the chairman.
Rafaele, the smallholder with the good wine, approached again. ‘Isn’t that the best wine you’ve tasted?’ He eyed the chairman and myself like a hawk.
It certainly was the best I’d tasted, but it had not won a prize. The chairman, clearly as puzzled as I was, spoke. ‘It’s very good, but…’
We were saved any further pain: ‘Damn right it’s good. That’s why I didn’t enter it. Too good for this lot.’ And off he went, beaming with pleasure at having made his point.
I slunk off home to eat, but the fall-out didn’t end there. Graziano arrived at my door.
‘I’m delighted that we won,’ he said, ‘but no one believes it wasn’t fixed.’
In Italy there is a general inability to see things as uncomplicated even if they really are. An explanation of events that includes conspiracies, double-dealing and machiavellian machinations will always be preferred to one without these ingredients. Although the organizers h
ad gone to great lengths to preserve the anonymity of each bottle, it was clear to all from the result that somehow the jury had been rigged and that the Lucarelli wine had been preferred over better wines. And what about Nicola? Hadn’t he also managed to win, surely by getting at the jury? The truth, I suppose, lies somewhere between honesty and rigging. Nicola’s wine would probably have won even without my votes and Loreto’s win was really fair and square, but the fact remains that some attempt at jury rigging had been possible.
Nino found me in the bar the next day. He bought me a drink and looked me piercingly in the eye.
‘You recognized Nicola’s wine, didn’t you?’
I didn’t lie. ‘Yes, I did.’
‘I knew it! The sly shit. He can’t let anything happen without trying to muddy the waters. So, not content with trying to fix the painting contest, he had a go at the wine jury too. I knew it!’
I explained that his wine was good and, anyway, since it was the only rosé, it couldn’t fail to win a prize.
He remained unconvinced. ‘If we want this to be the first of many wine competitions, this is the sort of thing that we have to avoid.’
And so it is. The plans are already laid for next year. Identical bottles will be issued to the contestants so that no one can describe the peculiarities of their bottle to the jury. The two-bottle system will remain, but the number on the numbered bottle will be covered, so the jury cannot see it. Only after it is tasted and voted upon will it be unmasked. But whatever refinements go into making sure justice is seen to be done, the inventiveness of the Italians will surely find a way around it.
3
Casa Nostra
Gallinaro is long and thin. It stretches along the crest of a hill for around 2 kilometres, for much of the way only one house deep on either side of the road. At the highest point, around the church, the town spreads out into a maze of narrow cobbled alleys, wide enough for a laden donkey to pass. Below the church, there is just room for a long, thin piazza, not much wider than the road.
My house opens off the road. From the front it is a two-storey house with only four windows facing the street, all on the first floor. The street is narrow and the houses on the other side are tall, so the front of the house is mostly in shade. With the lack of windows at street level, this makes the entrance gloomy. Just inside the door there is a dark, black staircase to the first floor. At the top there is a small, formal sitting-room, with a balcony on the street side and double doors leading to the roof terrace on the other. After the gloom of the stairs, the first floor seems ablaze with light.
The terrazza is a big one, 8 by 5 metres, from which two thirds of the Comino Valley is visible. It is hard to describe the scale of the view. The terrazza looks nearly due west and on a clear day, such as after a thunderstorm, you can see Veroli, a town 37 kilometres away as the crow flies. As you look westwards, the Apennines rise on the right; on hazy days only those that encircle the valley are visible, but sometimes you can see the higher mountains behind them, and sometimes the even higher ones beyond. The Silara range is on the left, cleft in the middle where a deep, steep-sided gorge has been cut through by the river Melfa. Before you stretches the valley, past the old Norman keep at Vicalvi and the lake at Posta Fibreno, almost as far as Sora. The valley is wide below Gallinaro, but tapers to the west, towards Vicalvi.
The light is extraordinary and ever-changing. My wife, an artist, sits for hours trying to capture the ephemeral plays of light in water-colours. The view is never the same; distant hills come in and out of sight, sometimes Alvito seeming absurdly close and at other times just visible through the haze. The pattern made on the land by terraces, olive groves and vineyards seen from a distance is like marquetry of great complexity and beauty.
Whenever I am at home in Ireland and think of the house in Gallinaro I invariably find myself mentally on the terrazza. When we arrive it’s the first place I go to. As you lean on the railings that surround it, below is a drop of two storeys to the garden, since the house has three storeys at the back. Beyond the garden wall there is another drop to the new road; beyond that the land falls sharply away to the valley floor, nearly 215 metres below. The feeling of height on the terrazza is strong.
The right-hand side of the terrazza looks out on to the old part of the town. We probably have the most uninterrupted view of the church in the village; nowhere else can so much of it be seen at once. It is a massive, thick-walled building that was once a Norman castle. Behind it you can see the road to Forca d’Acero snaking up into the mountains, making its last turn out of the valley as it enters the pass. Since the house once belonged to my great-uncle, the archpriest, the view of the church seems curiously apt. The houses in the old part of the town cascade from the church down to the road, their roofs almost blending into a waterfall of tiles. We can just see the entrance to Bar Sinella; people take their drinks and ice-creams and sit on the wall that edges the road to look, to be seen and to chat. No one can pass through Gallinaro without passing this spot. This is where you go to find people or to be found. To the left of the terrazza we look down to a small public garden and not much else; the view is blocked by a huge walnut tree that drops its nuts into our garden.
At night the panorama from the terrazza is magnificent. The lights of the towns and the floodlights on their churches and civic buildings sparkle in the night air. In summer this visual delight is accompanied by the continuous singing of the grilli – crickets by night and cicadas by day. The first thing a visitor notices is the noise – not loud, but incessant. Birds and grilli sing their songs, agricultural machinery drones in the terraced hillsides, the people chat and shout in the streets. Cars and motorcycles seem to have exhausts specially tuned all the better to be heard.
In August the season starts in earnest. Every town, every hamlet has a festa and every festa has music, dancing and fireworks. In August 1991 there were eighty-five civic events and feste in the valley. The fireworks are the single most expensive item. They are the visible and audible manifestation of the event, the best-attended part of the festa and the most eagerly awaited.
On a summer’s night, sitting in the warm air on the terrazza, we can see the firework displays not just in the valley but even from Arpino and Sora. I can remember a night when we came home after a dinner, replete and full of wine. A thunderstorm was raging in the Apennines, sheet and forked lightning lit the skies and the mountains behind Alvito, creating an almost theatrical backdrop. It can’t have been raining in Alvito, as the firework display was in full swing. Being one of the largest towns in the valley, it has money to spend on its fireworks and for nearly half an hour I watched as the foreground filled with bursts of blue, green and red, cascades of white fire, rockets and fire fountains, while in the background nature’s own display raged. I tried, without success, to photograph it, using thirty-second exposures, but either nothing happened for thirty seconds or a lot did, so the resulting pictures were either black or over-exposed by sheet lightning.
In September thunderstorms tend to arrive in the afternoon, bang and flash for an hour or so and then go away again, leaving the air clear of dust when the sun returns. These short, sharp storms are fun to observe from the terrazza. The half-roof keeps you dry while you watch its arrival, normally from the south-west, then its mighty display and finally its disappearance. Being able to see so far means that you can spot a front coming from tens of miles away and watch its development as it heads for the valley. Sometimes the weather can be dramatic. On a warm evening, 16 August 1991, the sky became a violent shade of yellow, and huge hail-stones started to fall. Most were larger than golf balls; the largest one I saw – preserved in Sinella’s deep-freeze – was the size of a tennis ball. They fell with terrifying speed and caused immense damage to the ripening grapes on Gallinaro’s slopes. Bruised grapes do not ripen, they rot. For half an hour the hail-stones broke roof tiles, windows and three car windscreens. My car still carries the dents on the bonnet, roof and boot of this savage hail. No
one was injured, but two cows died, either from a direct hit or from shock. Again, we watched this ferocity from the terrazza, huge lumps of ice shattering on the tiled floor, sending fragments in all directions. An hour later the streets, white for a little while, were steaming in the evening sun. It was as if the savagery of the storm had never happened; only the dented car is there to remind me that it did.
The terrazza is where we eat lunch al fresco every day – normally a cold collation, such as fresh bread, mozzarella, prosciutto and cold beer. Until about two o’clock there is enough shade to be comfortable, but as the sun comes round and shines straight in it is time to go. Because the terrazza faces west, we return to watch the sun go down. In June the sun sets perfectly in the pass at Vicalvi, low, impossibly big and very red. Any clouds in the sky are lit from below with a flame-orange glow. The dust in the air creates strange and unlikely colours – green, violet and dark reds. These sunsets are so improbable that, were they painted, they would be seen as a flight of artistic fancy. The back wall of the terrazza and its now rather faded fresco turn from white to pink for those few magical moments before the sun finally disappears.
Recently I was looking through old photographs, going back to the turn of the century. People that I recognize and some that I don’t are posing on the terrazza. There is something strange about seeing people you know are no longer alive in a place that is so familiar and unchanged. It makes me feel less of an owner and more of a caretaker of the house, tending it in my lifetime to pass it on to the next generation. In the photographs the fresco looks brighter, but little else has changed. Only the vines, which had been trained up the walls from the garden to roof the terrazza with greenery, are gone now. There was a pleasure in standing on the terrazza in September and picking the luscious bunches of table grapes straight from the vine. Unfortunately vines, like everything else, have their allotted span and these venerable plants were eventually killed by a savage winter frost in 1976.
North of Naples, South of Rome Page 4