I celebrated my big Five-O birthday in May, where at a dinner, traditional toasts were made about how women, like wine, grow better with age. Since the wines we drank were from Italy, it got me thinking that heading off to Tuscany for a grape harvest, or as the Italians call it, La Vendemmia, would be a good choice for a birthday present to myself. Actually, any excuse to go to Italy is a good one, but harvest and 50 seemed to go especially well together and I thought it would spark some revelations about what this whole landmark age is all about.
A gentle warm breeze flows through the vineyards where I stand with clippers in hand, snipping off heavy clusters of purple-black Sangiovese grapes. The sun feels good on my bare shoulders. I’m in Montefollonico, a village south of Siena, at Reniella, an agriturismo owned by Elfride (Elf) and Bob Vaughan, British transplants, in their fifties. This year, the hot dry weather ripened the grapes by mid-September, a month earlier than usual, and I got here just in time.
The Vaughn’s neighbors, Rizzi and Marcella, two seventy-something year-old natives, are joining in with us. They remember me from a couple of years ago when I came here to help with olive harvesting and welcome me back with double-cheek kisses.
Rizzi is a wiry, leather-skinned man with a thick brush cut of salt and pepper hair. Around his waist is a belt of twine, strung through a half old brown leather shoe which holds his clippers. He is the quintessential Practical Tuscan farmer. He motions to faraway clouds warning that we better get picking, as it will probably rain this afternoon.
His wife Marcella, sturdy and muscular, dressed in two layers of colorful smocks, is raring to get to work. She hoists a stack of empty garbage cans over her shoulders and sets off for the vines. I want to be her when I grow up.
The two of them make me feel like I’m their daughter for the afternoon. Marcella grills me about why I’m traveling without my husband, shrugging her shoulders as if I gave her a lousy answer when I explain how we Americans don’t get that much vacation time. She turns her attention to her husband and they keep up a steady flow of gentle bickering over I’m not sure what, because I only understand every other word. It seems to be a typical marriage argument: Do it my way, no, put the bucket here … It would annoy me if it was my real parents, but since it’s in Italian, I’m totally charmed.
The harvest work is simple. We each take a row and clip off bunches of grapes at an unhurried steady pace. The Vaughan’s ten-year old son, Owain, runs up and down collecting our full buckets and carrying them to Bob’s tractor bed, where they’re emptied into big pails. After a couple of hours, the vineyard acre has been picked.
“Not many grapes this year,” Elf says. “It’s not just that it’s been so dry and hot, but the vines are old, almost fifty. Like older women there’s not much fruit.”
Just as I start to cringe she adds, “But the fruit that does come is especially sweet and flavorful. In fact, older vines are prized around here.” Elf turned fifty this year too, so we share a triumphant moment over that fact.
Instead of stomping the grapes like Lucy did in the classic TV episode, Bob empties them from the tractor into a metal masher that spits the twigs out one end and pumps the crushed fruit through a wide plastic hose that Elf holds over a stainless steel tank. A thick, frothy deep purple stream gushes out, and when the tank is full the rich smell knocks me out.
