by Annie Hawes
We have startled ourselves almost as much as our poor innocent friends with this passionate limelovers’ outburst. Unusual to find yourself in such total agreement with Frank the Knife.
With the Boots Home Wine Making Kit the actual wine-making procedure takes all of three minutes. You mix a tin of concentrated grape juice with a lot of water and a bag of sugar: easy. But first you will have spent an age obsessively scrubbing out anything that’s going to come into contact with your wine, steeping it in swimming-pool-flavoured Bottle Sterilizing Fluid. Twenty minutes per object, or else.
This truly British experience is all I have to draw upon; and although I am used enough to Liguria by now not to be expecting much Bottle Sterilizing Fluid, I had imagined that up here in Domenico and Antonietta’s wine-making zone, which turns out to be in their other olive grove overlooking Diano Castello, we’d at least be doing quite a bit of cleaning work. Not so. As I sat on one of those handy rocks washing my feet under the outdoor tap, preparing for my first-ever chance to stamp luxuriously about in a great pile of grapes, I found the bar of soap rudely snatched from my grasp by Domenico. No, no! No soap allowed; just wash with water. The principle being that whatever’s naturally and organically on your feet is less likely to be inimical to the well-being of your wine than soapy perfumy roba chimica.
No doubt true, but disturbing to the Boots-trained novice. The trampling job was done, sad to say, in a rather unromantic large galvanized bathtub. Domenico is not keen on people stamping around inside his great-grandad’s wooden vats the way you used to in the good old days; they might get ruined, and these days decent wooden vats are hard to come by. No one makes them any more. So you stamp in the bath, then lift each bathful, heaving and groaning, shoulder-high and tip it into the vat. Our personal contribution, four carrier bags of Besta de Zago’s silly Americano grapes, strawberry flavoured, got squashed in quarantine in a separate bucket for fear of it contaminating other people’s serious supplies.
Today, too, we have simply rinsed out our equipment, several old plastic buckets, two big tin funnels, and ten glass demijohns, under the outdoor tap and thrown ourselves and everything else about on dusty tarpaulins and muddy grape-juicy ground. No sterilizing, scrubbing or any such pernicketyness so far, not even so much as a drop of washing-up liquid. The tap is set into an upright rock in the terrace wall below a long, low rustico with a lichen-covered terracotta roof; in here stands the row of fat towering vats in which the squashed grapes have been sitting for the regulation four days. Now it is time to decant the wine from the fermenting vats, wringing it out of the grapeskins which have finished doing their job and must be removed. Then the fizzling purple mosto will go into the demijohns for a forty days’ rest.
This place is higher than our house and over the other side of the valley the view downhill is all sea and sky. Besta de Zago ought to be visible somewhere over to our right; needless to say it isn’t. Nothing but wave upon wave of olive trees. On the wide terrace to the seaward side of the building Domenico is hard at work at the grape-wringer, aided by a man even smaller and sinewier than himself, a man whose unusual name, I have gathered, is Compare Gianni: Gianni Appears. Like a stage instruction. And he does just this: appears like magic to help out whenever there is a big wine or oil job on hand. At the moment Compare Gianni and Domenico, vests rolled up to their armpits, are busy heaving, sweating and straining round and round the barrel-like wine-press which is bolted to a purple-stained concrete slab set in the dusty ground so it won’t tip over under the strain.
At every grunt and heave on the six foot windlass, a dollop of wine-to-be squirts from the spout at the bottom of the press into a lightly rinsed old plastic bucket: the handle edges its way half a turn down the great wooden screw at the centre. Forza! Every now and then they stop their winding and straining while one of them goes indoors to empty the full buckets down the funnel into the damigiani – demijohns – sitting ready on a raised dais in their plaited straw paddings, and then to refill them with more wine and grape broth from the hissing gurgling vats. The other unwinds a few turns of the torchio to release the pressure, adds some more wooden blocks to take the crushing-plate down to the new level. The mosto goes in, and they start their winding again. The men are in full sun, covered in sweat and sweet grape juice. Flies are attacking them from every side, and there are still another two full vats to go. How pleasant to be female and be able to do your job under a shady broad-leafed nespolo tree.
Antonietta and I (Lucy is off earning money in the Land of Beer) have got the fire lit in the outdoor oven round the other side of the building, another of those beehive-shaped things like the one in her orto down in the village. We have a sackful of beetroot to go in it to roast in their skins once the wood burns down. Later we’ll get the fire going under the iron grill that is cemented in to some rocks beside it, so the brace will be ready for lunch. But the main women’s business is over here on the big tarpaulin in the shade, sorting grape twigs.
Every dozen or so bucketsful, when the wine-press gets too full up with solid remnants to take any more mosto, the men undo its four big wing-nuts, heave out a two-foot thick round damp mat of heavily crushed grape twigs and skins from the bottom of the device, and chuck it over to us. We shake out and unravel the tangly matted things, pulling out as much of the damp twiggy innards of the grape bunches as we can and throwing them away on to the olive tree fascia below us, where they will quietly biodegrade over the winter. The rest, mostly grape skins, we keep in a big wine-reeking pile to one side. They will go back through the press again when the first pressing’s over. Not only is there lots of wine left in there, say the experts, but it’s the skins that give the wine its colour and perfume.
Considering what shy and elusive creatures they usually are in this hot and sunny land, I am surprised, as I shake out my grape mats, at the rather large number of crunchy crushed snails in among the crushed grapes. I wonder whether I’m supposed to pick them out as well. Obviously not: Antonietta’s ignoring hers. Snails are just part of the recipe. And since they’ve already been sitting fermenting away in the wine vats all week, I don’t suppose there’s much point in not squeezing every last drop out of them now. Still, I can’t resist mentioning it. Vino d’uva e lumaccha, I say, wine of grapes and snails. Antonietta, predictably, cackles happily and says it all adds to the flavour. If you eat snails anyway, I suppose there’s no reason why their presence should bother you. And if your word for what wine does when it’s fermenting happens to be ‘bollire’, which also means ‘boil’, then I daresay you do feel that in four days they’ve been thoroughly cooked. I am not so sure.
Antonietta keeps calling this place a taverna. I am confused. Did someone once sell wine in this unlikely looking spot? No: of course they didn’t! Whatever gave me such a silly idea? A taverna is just a cantina that also contains a table and seating space in it, a few cooking facilities; a place not just used for storing but also for producing (and, of course, consuming as you go) the family’s food and drink supplies. This one does indeed contain not one but two tables: a gigantic square oak one with irregular turned legs standing in the middle of the room, big enough to seat four a side easily, and a long thin marble-topped one up against the wall being used as a work surface with one of those little gas hobs sitting on it. I tell Antonietta how lovely they are, hoping she may be dying to get rid of them. Not lovely, she says, old and ugly, but they have sentimental value – they belonged to Domenico’s granny. Anyway, they’re extremely useful. Sigh.
We have taken a break from our labours to come in and look for an important missing item: a special device for sucking the oil off the top of the demijohn before you start to siphon the wine into the bottles, a kind of mini-suction pump, I gather. We don’t need it just yet, but we will do in forty days’ time, and its disappearance has been bothering Antonietta. I am actually only pretending to look for it, since I haven’t got the faintest idea what it looks like. She eventually roots it out of a dusty pile in a corner
: it is a proper official factory-made Demijohn Olive Oil Removal Pump, neatly packed away in its box. They really haven’t just invented this olive oil corking business themselves, then.
Of course not! Some people use food-grade liquid vaseline, which you can buy in the Consorzio Agrario, says Antonietta, but its very name smacks suspiciously of roba chimica, and she and Domenico steer well clear of it.
Now we have to go and check out the old litre and a half bottles which are lying in a dusty heap in the other room of the taverna, make sure there are enough of them. These are what we’ll be decanting the wine into in forty days’ time. Antonietta explains that you only bother with small bottles and real corks if it’s such a good vintage that you’re going to keep it for years. Which this apparently isn’t.
How can you tell? I ask. By the grapes, says she, giving me one of those ‘how brainless can you get’ looks. I probe no further. In any case, this being a mysteriously undeserving brew, we will be reusing the old screw tops, double-sealing, just in case, with a drop of the olive oil we will have recycled from the demijohn pump, wasting not and wanting not.
Does everyone just rinse their stuff in water, I ask, or do some people sterilize their equipment? In our country, I say tentatively, we think the wine will go off if you don’t. Antonietta’s never heard of such a thing. Anyway, as she points out, it’s no wonder people have funny ideas about wine making in a land without grapes. She probably wouldn’t be able to make beer if she tried, either, she adds, generously. So, Mr Boot, we won’t be bothering to sterilize the bottles either. Just a good rinse under the tap. Or, if they’ve got a bit of residue in the bottom, chuck in a few pebbles with the water, rattle them around; that soon gets them nice and clean.
I decide to say no more about my experience of British wine making: best not to mention the tins of concentrated grape juice and bags of sugar hidden in my murky past. I haven’t got enough energy left to really enjoy the outbreak of horror it would be bound to provoke.
On this side of the rustico/taverna is an extraordinarily ramshackle and haphazard-looking chicken run in which half a dozen fowl scrabble and cluck; also a great open-topped cement-rendered tank, which Domenico built a few years ago to make the grape squashing easier, but which they no longer use – still, at least it comes in handy as a rainwater butt. The idea was that you could get right inside it and trample around with no fear either of spillages or of breaking the planking on the vats: it has a tap built in at the bottom to let the juice out, like the vats, but would hold six times as much. It would have saved all the effort of heaving bathful after bathful of squashed grapes shoulder high to decant the contents into the vats. A brilliant plan, say we.
Yes, says Domenico wistfully, gazing at his defective brainchild, you wouldn’t have needed to bother with the vats at all, just cover the tank for four days. But the cement, he says, somehow sucked all the flavour out of the grapes. After two years’ unsatisfactory vintages, he went back to using the vat and old galvanized bath. That’s why, these days, he’s so protective of his vats.
Twenty demijohns at fifty-something litres each. We will have made, amazingly, nearly a thousand litres of the stuff. But, of course, they calculate a couple of litres a day easily for a household of two. Not that they necessarily drink that much, but you use a lot of it in your cooking round here, and then there’s family and friends popping round for dinner, not to mention having to keep your voracious Mother of Vinegar fed. Five demijohns for us, and our Americano brew, which has been mixed half-and-half with the proper mosto and put in its own mini-demijohn, to the accompaniment of horrible faces from Domenico. Fifteen for him and Antonietta.
What about you, Compare Gianni? I ask. Don’t you drink wine? I am answered by an outburst of uproarious laughter from all concerned. ‘Compare’ they keep repeating, and collapsing with mirth again. I am used to this sort of thing, and wait in a quiet and dignified manner for them to get over it and explain. I discover that not only have I spoken in the dialect of Calabria, a thing highly laughable in itself, but I have just, in effect, claimed to be a native of the place: ‘Compare’ is what, if you’re a Southerner, you call someone from the same village as you. Or more literally, the godfather of your child.
Gianni is from Antonietta’s birthplace; he is also Maurizio’s godfather. So, of course, she calls him compare. (Nothing to do with appearing, then. Pity.) And Domenico’s connection by marriage with the place allows him courtesy compareship. I, on the other hand, should just say Gianni.
The answer to my question, though, is that Gianni Appears will be doing his own wine next week: we will be going up to his campagna to help him in return. Ah. Until now I have been toying, as I rattled my mats, with the idea of working out how much I have saved, or not, by making this wine instead of buying it. This new information ruins all my calculations. There are a horribly large number of imponderables to deal with anyway – would I for instance base my sums on the price of wine in England, or in Italy? Work out my hourly rate as if it was an office job? Or lower because it’s agricultural labour? Or higher because it’s more tiring? Or at nothing at all because I would much rather be doing this anyway and it’s a kind of holiday entertainment, which some people might even pay to do? Then, is the wine more valuable because it is made of grapes to my own personal knowledge? Or less valuable because it is crude peasant stuff, maybe? I am already in deep waters when this new variable, another day’s work up at Compare Gianni’s as part of the bargain, is introduced. It is more than my overloaded brain can bear. I give up the attempt. Shepherd’s Bush and Diano San Pietro are just incommensurable, that’s all. And a year’s worth of wine is a year’s worth of wine.
The last bucket of the morning goes into its demijohn in the cool of the taverna and we stop for lunch. Our pile of steaming roast beetroot already awaits us, cooling on the ground in the shade. Today the orto dictates that for the primo piatto we fry up a big pile of those tasty green pointy peppers with just a bit of onion, no tomato, because Domenico says that ruins their flavour; for our primo we boil a potful of just-lifted new potatoes which we cut up and dress with the pepper stuff, as if they were pasta. A pile of bistecche and lamb-chops sizzles on the grill, cooking into delicious stripiness as we baste them from a cup of salted olive oil with thyme crumbled into it, using a rosemary stick as a busting-brush. We peel the ashy skins off the warm beetroot, slice them up and dress them with olive oil, lemon and a big handful of parsley from the patch. Domenico and Gianni bring out a jug of the mosto to wash it all down with. Lovely, halfway between wine and fizzy grape juice: but no more than one glass, says everyone, or you’ll get a terrific headache.
Now, at last, relaxing over the coffee, there is time for the experts to deal in depth with the question of spoilt wine and how to avoid it. Sterilizing does not come into it. Everyone agrees that the only absolutely essential thing with wine, apart of course from rinsing everything thoroughly with plain water, is never to perform the vats-to-demijohns operation, the one we are doing now, at the full moon. This is always fatal. The moon can be waxing, the moon can be waning, it doesn’t matter; but a full moon will surely turn your wine to vinegar.
Seeking information from the Diano company about exactly what conditions we’ll be facing once winter sets in, we hear that it pours with rain and is bone-achingly cold the whole time. Enquiring among the denizens of Luigi’s bar, we discover that the younger generation have been absurdly optimistic: it rains even more than that, and is twice as cold. We know that, comparatively speaking, these tales of Siberian weather conditions can’t be true: otherwise why would anyone ever have bothered with Wintering on the Riviera? Only Ciccio, with a Wintering in Denmark experience under his belt, agrees tentatively that from some standpoints it could possibly be considered rather mild here.
Everyone is busy wrapping themselves up anyway in this pleasantly warm weather to fend off the colpo d’aria, that Hit of Air which may strike an Italian down at any moment once August is over; something, we im
agine, like the draughts that used so to preoccupy our grandparents when we were young. Not draughts though, which Mimmo tells us are called spifferi, lovely word. The colpo d’aria is something much more menacing and all-embracing than a spiffero. A chill, perhaps? In deference to local custom, we too have started to take a jacket or a pullover with us when we go out of an evening. Sometimes we even go so far as actually to put it on. By day, we remain fearless as far as air-hitting is concerned, going around in our mad foreign short sleeves even though October is heading this way.
The worst thing about the house, we decide when we try to imagine, say, a whole week of rain and cold, or possibly even snow, will be our steep little path with stepping stones, the only way of getting between our two storeys. It already turns, like the road, into a mud-slide whenever a temporale strikes. We can face the idea of having to keep umbrellas strategically placed at all times; but underfoot, it seems to us, a solid stairway, even if it still has to be an outside one, will be essential. We are soon consumed with the idea that, like everyone else in this valley, we can Do It Ourselves.
You look, for example, out of Luigi’s window at one of those old outdoor drystone staircases, built over an arch with a useful winter woodstore below, and you can just imagine some Sanpeotto waking up inspired one morning a century or three ago, or maybe it was only thirty years, and saying to himself, ah, I know, if I just built a bit on at the side here between my house and Bacì’s, and a wee archway there to support it, I’d get an extra balcony and wood-store at the same time, and he could use the other side of the arch for a stair down to his chicken-run… Or was it Bacì who wanted the stair, and thought the wood-store would come in handy for his neighbour? Who can say? Anyway, none of it seems to fall down; all of it looks beautiful. And as I’ve mentioned they’re still at it, all over the place, to this very day, even if in a more rectangular and concretey way. We have become more and more convinced that professional builders are not, as we once assumed, essential to building works. Architects even less.
