Seasons in Basilicata (39 page)

“Oh, yes, the only one like this in town,” Giuliano said.

“How do the other winemakers do their crushing then?” I asked. “With their feet?”

“No, no. Not anymore. They have something like this, but they have to work it by hand. Not so good that way. This much better.”

He was obviously very proud of his
macchina
and kept stroking its cream, green, and red enamel-coated flanks and emphasizing once again that it was the “only one like this in Accettura.”

Close by stood forty yellow
cassette
stacked five high and full of those gleaming purple Sangiovese grapes.

“Okay! So,
va bene.
Let's go!” Giuliano said and flicked the On switch, immediately filling the narrow street where he lived, right across from his large garage
cantina,
with a cacophonous racket.

The
macchina
was linked by a long, transparent hose to a Jacuzzi-size plastic vat in the center of Giuliano's
cantina
—large enough to hold the six hundred and fifty to seven hundred liters of
wine he hoped to extract from the thousand kilos of grapes waiting in the
cassette
outside.

Donato carried the first
cassetta
to the
macchina
and slowly poured in the bunches of grapes. With a roar, some crackling and spitting, and a very slushy-mushy sound, the screw-mincer churned the grapes into pulp in seconds, sending the juice, skins, pits, and pulp through the hose and into the vat at a remarkable speed. The larger stalks flew out the back end of the
macchina.
A second
cassetta
followed quickly, and then a third. The time-honored process of wine making was finally under way. The great vintage of 2002 was about to emerge. Giuliano looked very happy, scurrying about up and down a stepladder among his dangling strings of air-dried red
peperoncini
to check on the rapidly filling vat and then outside again to advise the others on the pace of grape-pouring from the
cassette.

Already the rich aroma of grape juice and pulp was emerging from the
cantina
and mingling with the din in the street and the ever-growing piles of stalks, which Vito kept whisking away in emptied
cassette.

When we were about halfway through the pile of forty boxes, Giuliano beckoned me inside. “This is best bit,” he said, chuckling. “Now we find out what kinda wine we gonna get this year.” He placed what looked like a large thermometer into a narrow glass cylinder of just-pressed grape juice that stood on an old upturned wine cask. “This measures grape sugar. Tells you strength of your wine.”

We both watched as the little measuring device bobbed in the juice, then slowly steadied itself, and finally remained still. Giuliano peered intently at the numerical etchings on its glass surface and then let out a great, “Yesss! Look, David! Look! Twenty-three sugar content. That's about fifteen-percent-strength wine. Very good. When it's finished we'll lose maybe one percent. So we have thirteen point five to fourteen percent wine. A good year. Very good year!”

This was rather surprising, as most vintners had been bemoaning the lousy summer and forecasting mediocre vintages at best for
the year. In fact, throughout Italy, 2002 was generally considered to be a poor year for wine, but in this little part of Basilicata, things looked far more promising.

The
macchina
continued its roaring and squirting and pulping. I climbed the ladder to watch the juice and fruit pouring in and the thick, red, aromatic scum moving slowly across the rising surface of the juice.

“So, what happens after this?” I asked Giuliano.

“Is very simple. I leave this juice here for eight or ten days, depending, to ferment and then I drain off the wine—our
vino buono
—the “free run” wine. And then to get more wine we use the
torchio
[press].” He pointed to a sinister-looking, circular, vertically slatted device bound by steel hoops in the corner with a huge double-handled screw for tightening the press. Vivid images of the Spanish Inquisition came to mind. This machine was used to squeeze all the juices from the skins and fruit. “That's big, messy job. Takes me whole day sometime just for three hundred liters or so. Anyhow, and then it goes into my
barili
[barrels, often oak, but in his case metal] and these
damigiane
[demijohn] bottles over there in the back room, to age and ferment just a little bit more. And then, in three or four months, we come in each day and pour some from one of the big
damigiane
into liter bottles and we start to drink and enjoy it!”

“And what happens to all that sludge, the skins and whatever in the
torchio
?” I asked.

“We call that the
mosto,
” Giuliano told me. “Well, some people add water and make a kind of weak wine—maybe five to six percent—with a little fermentation and an extra squeeze. It's called
strizzo.
You have to drink that right now. It doesn't last.”

“And then?”

“Well, in the old days you could take the
mosto
—like giant fruit-cake—and distill it to make grappa. Some peoples still do. It's not hard, but it's not legal. It's very
controindicato.
I use for pig feed or
vigneto
[fertilizer].”

“Fantastic. At last I think I'm beginning to understand the
homestyle wine-making process. But are there any little additional tricks you use? Your wine's got such a deep rich body?”

“Well…” he hesitated a little and then gave one of those “oh what the heck” kind of shrugs. “Well, there is one little thing. Rosa and I usually take about thirty liters of the wine before we bottle it—about five percent of total, no more—and put it in big pan and boil it down on the stove in the 'ouse to about fifteen liters. Then we let it
cool and pour it back into the big container of wine, the six hundred liters, stir it up and…well, that's all. It helps give a little extra body. A bit more flavor.”

G
IULIANO'S
VENDEMMIA
EQUIPMENT

“Interesting idea,” I said, wondering how this little innovation would be regarded by the great vintners of Bordeaux and Burgundy.

“'S'my own idea,” Giuliano said, grinning his irascible grin.

 

I
COULD HEAR THE
same grin over the phone when I called him ten days later.

“So, it's today, Giuliano, day ten? The
torchio
begins?”

He responded with one of his chortling chuckles and reminded me that he'd said “about” ten days.

“So, when should I come over then?”

“Say three days? We let everything sit and ferment bit more for another three days, and then you come. Saturday. Good day for
torchio.
Vito is 'ere and maybe Donato too.”

“And Rosa?”

“Ah, Rosa, she always 'ere.”

“And me? What's my job?”

“And you. Yes. You wanna help too? Good. Then just sit and watch and drink my wine, eh?”

“We'll all sit and drink your wine. As usual.”

“
Va bene.
See you Saturday. 'Bout ten o'clock.”

 

I
WAS THERE
promptly this time (unlike the
vendemmia
at Salvatore's vineyard which I almost missed), ready to join in the fun and the pressing of the
mosto.

“Usual,” Giuliano had told me, “we get 'bout another two hundred liters out of that stuff. Sometimes more. 'Pends on the pressure you give it when y' do the squeezin'. Y' gotta be careful though. Do it slow. An' the wine's not so good like the first run.” He gave me a nudge and tippled an invisible glass of wine into his mouth “But nobody notices, eh?”

I agreed. I'd sampled his previous years' vintages—first run and
torchio
pressing—and I couldn't tell the difference. Both were bold,
full of body and fruit, and while not “long in the taste,” certainly of enduring impact and strength.

The
cantina
looked much the same as it had two weeks before, with its dangling ceiling strings of brilliant red
peperoncini,
salami,
pancetta, coppa, soppressata,
pecorino, and cascades of wizened, sun-dried tomatoes, which bore an unsettling resemblance to some deep-fried witchety grubs I'd eaten (or at least tried to eat) in the Australian outback a few years back. I seem to remember they tasted a little like peanut-flavored popcorn. Not bad, if you didn't dwell too long on the gooey source of the flavor.

There were two changes this time though. The huge red maturing vat had been drained of its first-run wine (now almost fully fermented, even after such a relatively short period). What lay at the bottom was an intoxicating, redolent three-foot-thick porridge of leftover “stuff.” The second change was the four-foot-high
torchio
(press), with its vertically slatted sides (similar to a barrel with gaps between the staves) bound by steel hoops, was now standing in the center of the
cantina
like a round altar awaiting sacrifices.

Giuliano had already scooped in a first load of
mosto
from the tank with his six-foot-long, three-pronged wooden fork—actually a thin tree trunk—filling the
torchio
almost to two thirds, and had pressed the
mosto
down as tightly as possible with his hands. He was now proceeding to place a circular lid on the press and then a series of thick, square blocks of wood on top of one another to spread the compression force evenly. And quite a lethal-looking device it was: a great steel contraption that fitted over the top of the round
torchio
and the wood blocks. Giuliano was now beginning to pump the
torchio
's lever to initiate the squeezing process.

“You do it all by hand?” I asked. It already looked like hard work, and he'd pumped the four-foot lever only half a dozen times.

I should have known the answer. “Nay, David. This thing's hydraulic—my
macchina enologica,
made in Perugia, like the chocolates. S'best machine in town is this.”

“Just like your
macchina da macinare,
I suppose,” I said, maybe a touch facetiously.

“S'right. Just like that. Good machines make good wine. It's worth it.”

I nodded. From what I'd seen of Giuliano's work, he took great pride in everything he and Rosa produced, from his handmade bricks and pantiles to his salamis, olive oil, and wine, to their hundreds of bottles of
passata
tomato sauce, and their fiery-hot pepper pickle, a true Basilicatan speciality that he and Rosa created together.

 

M
OST
TORCHI
IN
the town were still hand pumped, and it was a laborious, back-wrenching process. And such
torchi
were usually far less productive than the hydraulic kind.

“You end up with a lot of soggy
mosto,
with wine still in it. But this way—well, you'll see in half an hour or so. Mine comes out dry and hard as stale bread.”

By now he'd set the hydraulic press and we watched the little pressure-gauge creep around a numbered face measuring kilograms per square centimeters.

“Three hundred's maximum—the red zone on that dial. You don't go over that or…who knows? You just don't. There's a lot of pressure in this thing and if 'owt went wrong…” His hands expressed something along the lines of a nuclear explosion.

He increased the pressure, listened to the juicy squealing sound of the compacting, then waited, allowing the wine to pour out down between the wooden slats into a wide metal container around the base of the
torchio
and then through a funnel into a one-hundred-twenty-liter plastic vat on the floor. Then he increased the pressure again. And then again.

After half an hour or so, the vat was almost full, and the pressure dial was hovering around the two-hundred-seventy-kilo-per-square-centimeter level.

“S'bout it now,” Giuliano said with a satisfied grin.

At that moment Rosa and Vito came into the
cantina
from the family house, across the street.

“Well look at this!” Giuliano scoffed. “Right on time. Just when we're ready for a bit of sampling.”

They laughed. Rosa pulled out some glasses from a cupboard, and I shook hands with Vito, who told me he'd just come back from a job interview. He thought that maybe he hadn't got the job because he hadn't had enough
raccomandazioni.

“Them things are bloody essential. It's that old-boy
gens
network thing. If you don't 'ave 'em someone else'll get picked who's got more. S'nothing to do with what you know and what qualifications you've got. It's all that ‘who you know' crap.” He looked frustrated, like a stranger in a foreign land. Yet, despite his birth in England, he was Italian and he knew the rules. Unfair though they invariably were…particularly as described by Matthew Spender in his intriguing behind-the-scenes look at life in Italy in his book
Within Tuscany.
He suggests that Italy functions by the interaction of various tightly circumscribed “personal power”
clientelari
groups, so that the individual has significance and influence, not in himself, but only as a representative or member of a specific, well-defined and well-protected circle of mutual interests, reinforcement, and perpetuation. One friend told me that “some of these
gens
could teach the Freemasons and the Mafia a thing or two about
omertà
and unquestioning loyalty to the group.”