Winemaker for a Day

I can scratch off another item off my Italy "to do" list. Early Thursday morning we started the Villa Verde grape harvest. We were both really excited to do it but luckily for me all of my lessons cancelled. Not because I'm a bad teacher or anything, it just worked out that way. I hope anyway. Allie had to commute to Rome to be the bread winner of the family while I got to stay at home and be the wine winner (not sure if that's really a phrase).

Once we (four of us) were set up with buckets and scissors we went to work. Let me just say, it's a lot easier to pick up a bottle of ten dollar wine at the grocery store than to make it from scratch! Unfortunately, due to Dante's touring schedule we couldn't pick the grapes until about two weeks after they should have been picked. That means that the grapes were starting to get very sweet. Sweet grapes have an upside and a downside. First the upside, the more sugar present in the grapes equals a higher alcohol percentage. What could be bad about that, right? Well, the downside is that bees of all sorts also really love sweet grapes. So we had to contend with wasps, bumblebees and some type of gigantic bee the likes of which I'd never seen. The bees get inside fo the grape so you have to be careful when reaching to snip off a bunch that you don't grab a bee otherwise you could be in trouble. As history has proved, bees haven't been enough of a threat to stop people from getting wine made so I decided not to be such a wuss and get right in there.

Initially, I was thinking how great it was to be toiling in the dirt, how many thousands of years wine has been making life easier for people and how awesome the wine that I helped make with my own hands was going to taste. Those thoughts were quickly wiped away as I looked at the rows and rows of vines and realized the task that was really at hand. One must pick quite a few grapes in order to make wine. About thirty minutes into the process I'd basically zoned out and was just picking away mindlessly then a sharp pain brought me back to reality. I realized my back was starting to hurt. Damn, so many rows left! But after an hour and a half we took our first load to the "crusher/squeezer" contraption (sorry, nobody really stomps 'em anymore) that removes the stems and squishes the grapes. What oozes down into the giant tank is a mess of the best smelling grape juice, skins, seeds, and the stems that get by. We took a well-deserved but quick coffee break and chatted about the process. Then we went back to the fields and did it all over again; pick the grapes, dump the buckets, fill the garbage cans with grapes, take them to the squisher and press the juice. Break for lunch. Repeat the process a few more times and you're finished. Sort of. Now I know what critics and wine experts mean when they say that the wine is really about the soil the grapes are grown in. What I think they're really talking about is the dirt, the bugs, the bees, and the sweat that all go into that crusher and miraculously come out wine on the other side. Don't worry, the fermentation process kills off all of the bad stuff, I promise.

After you've finished squishing all of the grapes you have to clean up your sticky mess otherwise wasps from all over the county will take up residence over night.

Once you've reached this point your almost done with the laborious part of making wine. Add some sulfites, then some activated yeast to get the fermentation process going more quickly, place a lid on the tank and put your wine, er grape juice to bed. For the next week you have to stir the pot twice a day to bring the bottom to the top to make sure everything ferments evenly, I think.

In the evening we celebrated the grape harvest with a small celebration, we drank some of the house wine from the previous year and enjoyed some good food. It felt great to us that we were able to sit and have dinner with everyone, although we didn't understand most of what was being said. Dante translated the important stuff and in between we tried our best to pick up all the words we could.

What a day, it was very rewarding and it's definitely something I would want to do in the future on a small scale as well. The one bad thing is that I'm so sore today that I can hardly move! Oh well, it's a small price to pay for a years worth of free wine!