Pesaro Archipelago
It was not altogether unlike an I Love Lucy episode in that the way things turned out was a bit more frenetic than what we initially anticipated. They did have a conveyer belt you bent over but instead of wrapping chocolates you picked through the passing grapes for any remaining stems the de-stemming apparatus had missed. And it did go faster than you could handle but you were never tempted to shove the passing stems into your mouth. For every small piece of stem you grabbed, and tossed behind you onto the floor, the more refined this 2009 batch of Cabernet Francs would be, despite all the literal blood, sweat and tears that would eventually over a very long process also end up with the grapes. There was not however a large wooden barrel of grapes we all climbed into, smashing them with our bare feet, nor did tempers flare and lead to a grape throwing fight with the locals. No, these grapes went from red plastic totes into the de-stemmer and up the conveyer into flexible suction tubing that led up to twenty foot tall 7 foot wide stainless steel containers, where mixed with a little yeast or other secret ingredients they would sit for a week or so and then be hand raked from a small door at the bottom into another suction device that leads them to the ATI Softpress 12, which very effectively removes every bit of juice and sends it I'm not actually sure where (but eventually into wooden barrels) after which the nearly dry clumps of grape husk are fed down that earlier (now repurposed) conveyer, into blue 50 gallon plastic barrels, which along with all those stems, will be used at some point to make grappa.
The night before, at dusk, after a day of sightseeing in and around Pesaro and a swim in the Adriatic, the four of us--our host, Antonio Ramone, Bernadette, and I--followed behind a specifically sized John Deere tractor driven by the brother of our host, that fit without room to spare between the rows of grape vine, and from the tractor our host off loaded to us an impressive quantity of red plastic totes that we then space out every third vine or so down each row. It took no time at all to do this and when we were finished we had the totes spread out down about 5 or 6 long rows and I went to bed that night thinking this would be no big deal and how it was sort of quaint that we were helping out with the 2009 harvest. In fact that is how I had been thinking of it since first learning we were going to Italy and that we would be for a brief period of our trip "helping" with this year's harvest. Quaint it was not.
What I did not understand, until it became painfully obvious, was that after the totes were filled with the clipped clumps of purple blue grapes and then picked up and stacked ( don't fill the totes so full we were admonished early on, they have to be stacked) on that same tractor and off loaded near the de-stemming apparatus, they were then brought back to the field empty and it was after nearly ten hours of this, with a short break now and then (one break was in the de-stemming line where eyeing carefully the passing conveyer of loose grapes for minute bits of stem I did have brief but unremarkable hallucinations), that I could feel it coming on, although in the end I did fight it off, a fit of uncontrollable full out weeping. I was determined though not to let the young Moldavian pickers see me cry nor any of the 65 year old men, especially that one with the bad leg, nor any of the Italian women, least of all that bossy one, good God would she ever shut up. Bernadette and I picked together, facing each other and attacking a vine from adjacent rows, and we were not the only pickers who purposefully searched for places to pick grapes out of earshot from that bossy, relentlessly chatty woman. Our friend Antonio Ramone, who is one of the original partners, along with Bernadette and a few others, of this NYC five floor walk up, and who lives just across the hall up here on five, has been traveling to Pesaro for the last three or four years and was no stranger to any of this process spent almost all of his day in the extremely arduous stem removal line. Antonio, who at times is a most expressive and gregarious fellow, was however from first mention that we would join him on this trip, mute to us about the rigors of what we were getting ourselves into. Which on his part I thinks shows a good judgment.
Early in the day, after we had picked barely a crate or two, the first line of women showed up with fresh cold mineral water and fresh breads, some of which, while without cheese or any other ingredient beyond a smear of marinara could almost be little pizzas. And they did this throughout the day but whereas early on it seemed like a wonderful and classy way to run a work project, by the end of the day, with knowledge of a promised grand feast of wine and pork, lasagna, chicken, rabbit and even pigeon, this bread and water break became to seem more like a picture from some slave labor story, or a prison road gang movie, and from one such famous movie the line "what we got here is a failure to communicate" began to ring into my consciousness with a tone so much clearer than ever before.
All of this I say with an attempt at humor because far from slave like treatment our accommodations were splendid and our host was most gracious and heaped onto us so much exquisite food (much of it prepared by his mother) and wine and tour guiding over three days that I would have to work another three harvests just to make up my share.
Next year we are traveling to a dude ranch in the Gulag Archipelago.
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