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.
At dinner that night, we drink wine from last year’s harvest and then a bottle from 2004, that has a deeper flavor than the first, confirming what I already knew about the “wine like women getting better with age” fact, which Elf and I happily repeat. Tipsy, I step outside for some cool night air and look up at the star filled sky. In the distance I hear deer barking.
By the time I leave a few days later, the grapes we picked have begun to ferment, filling the cantina with a nose-tingling aroma – it’s alive… changing! I drive toward Rome with the vineyards slowly receding from view.
In the car I think about how I’d expected to get some burst of a revelation about turning fifty when I harvested. But the truth is, being side-by-side with peers as well as Rizzi and Marcella of an older generation and Owain from a younger one, just felt natural and peaceful as we all blended with La Vendemmia, a tradition that’s been going on for centuries. It put all the fuss about the Big Five-O in the right place. It’s just another season, different from seasons before, different from seasons to come––with elements like rain and heat thrown in to surprise and remind us that we’re not totally in control. Humbling.
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