A Small Place in Italy (12 page)

‘The farmers were lovely. Some of them said it was the first time they had a foreign waitress serving them food. I said I wasn’t as foreign as they thought and that I had been brought up at Fontanellato near Parma and I gave them a bit of
dialetto parmigiano
to be getting on with. They all left me tips but I left them for the regulars.

‘You know you made a joke about marrying a farmer?’ she went on. ‘Well, one of them asked me to marry him. He was very nice, very correct, a widower, about fifty, with a whitish moustache.’

‘What did you say?’ I asked. ‘I can always grow a moustache, probably even a whitish one. I didn’t think you liked them.’

‘I said I can’t marry you just now,’ she said. ‘So he said he would ask me again next year.’

‘And what did you say to that?’ I asked.

‘I said, all right, you can ask me.’

‘Will you do it again next year?’ I asked, genuinely impressed at the thought of having a rival for her hand in his fifties and with a whitish moustache.

‘I will,’ she said, almost pertly, ‘if they ask me.’

‘If things go on like this,’ I said, ‘I can see myself growing a whitish moustache and going to an agricultural college to learn farm management, trying to catch up with this man.’ But she wasn’t listening.

‘Then, when it was all over and all the guests had gone away we all sat down, the staff that is, and had an enormous lunch.

‘Just before I was leaving to come here,’ Wanda said, ‘the Signora took me to one side and asked me if I was still interested in getting some beds for our house. Apparently, she and her husband have been told that their hotel is too old-fashioned and that if they don’t do something about it pretty quickly they will be downgraded. So they have decided to modernize it and the first thing they’re going to do is to get rid of some of the beds and a lot of other furniture.’

‘But the furniture’s marvellous, not grand but very nice, and so are the beds, at least the ones I’ve seen are. They must be mad,’ I said.

‘It’s not they who are mad, it’s the Tourist people,’ said Wanda. ‘And marvellous or not, according to the Signora they’re going to have difficulty in even giving it away. She had a man up from Sarzana to look at it, and he wasn’t interested.

‘She took me up to an attic. Most of the beds she wants to get rid of are up there in the dark but she had a torch. There’s a beautiful mahogany one, like a
chaise-longue
, made in Lucca; but she doesn’t want to get rid of that. Anyway it’s too good for I Castagni. There are some wonderful iron ones and there are some
of those decorated with mother-of-pearl designs and some have little oval paintings of country scenes. And they all have mattresses, all very clean. They looked as if they’d just been renewed. One of the beds I really like hasn’t any springs but the Signora said that she knows someone in Sarzana who can make some up for us.

‘Altogether I chose five, two singles for the front bedroom upstairs, a double for us at the back and two singles for the loft upstairs.’

‘Do you think we can afford all these beds?’ I asked. ‘Won’t they be too expensive?’

‘She’s only asking 40,000 lire,’ said Wanda, ‘and she’s letting us have a kitchen table as well.’

We carried out our first
vendemmia
at I Castagni a couple of days after the Festa di San Remigio, with the help of Signor Giuseppe and Signora Fernanda, who proved surprisingly agile, and with Signora Angiolina giving us encouragement from the sidelines. We were lucky to have Signor Giuseppe to show us how it should be done. Although I knew how to drink it, I only had a rudimentary idea of how wine was made.

Signor Giuseppe had already done Signora Angiolina’s
vendemmia
, having taken over the responsibility for it, much to her relief.

We had been told that Signor Giuseppe always did his
vendemmia
long before anyone else but this year, with the weather apparently set fair, local people said he would have been well advised to have waited another week; but he was anxious to get it over and done with. It is possible that this determination to get the wine, as it were, stowed away, safely under the hatches, was because at one time he had had some unfortunate experience with the dreaded hail or some other natural disaster, when he was working for the proprietors of the big vineyard down in the plain.

When he came to our
vendemmia
he was equally impatient for us to get it done; but although we realized that it was too early
we did our best to carry it out as efficiently as possible, setting up a table on which we sifted out the good grapes from the not-so-good and those that were just awful.

Those that were the most difficult to get rid of and were particularly hostile to the making of good wine were pale green, about half the size of a pea and as hard as rock. No sun, however hot, would ever ripen them.

Some of our vines, especially those bearing red grapes, were very old with very thick stems like miniature stunted trees; but although everyone prophesied their immediate demise they, like everything else at I Castagni, continued to flourish for another quarter of a century and were still doing so when we left.

Signor Giuseppe was not interested in sorting tables or anything effeminate like that. He liked to put everything, apart from stalks, into the squashing machine, believing, as he said, that the preponderance of good grapes would nullify the effects of those that were not so good.

‘Via!’
(‘Away with them!’) he would say, making a gesture of dismissal with one hand as he allowed some discussable grapes to be engulfed by the machine, a bit like a monarch ordering the decapitation of some recalcitrant subjects, while at the same time, on a whim, allowing others to go free.

In fact, from now on, it became an unacknowledged struggle between Signor Giuseppe and ourselves, on his part not to omit a single grape, if possible sweeping them off the sifting table before Wanda and Signora Fernanda had a chance to go through any kind of selection, on our part to thwart him; but we always needed his help.

The machine which Signor Giuseppe lent us for our
vendemmia
, and continued to lend us for all the years we lived at I Castagni, was really the property of Signora Angiolina. It looked like a wheelbarrow but with a pair of carrying handles in lieu of wheels.
It was made of galvanized iron and it had a rectangular hole in the bottom of it in which a horizontal screw similar to those that mince the meat in a sausage machine was turned by a handle. Larger, more sophisticated versions were operated by electricity.

When it was to be used – it took two people to operate it effectively – it was lowered on to one of the
bigonci.
Then while one person kept it topped up with grapes, the other turned the handle and crushed them and they were precipitated into the
bigoncio
, juice, skins, pips, stalks and all, although serious efforts were made to cut off as many of the heaviest stalks as possible while the bunches were being gathered.

Then, when the
bigoncio
was almost full, the two operators lifted the machine off the
bigoncio
, using the carrying handles, and set it down on another, empty
bigoncio
, and the whole process was repeated.

Then the strongest of the two operators, which virtually meant one who had not yet suffered a hernia, and most males of middle age in this community had suffered one, with the help of his colleague hoisted the filled
bigoncio
on to one of his shoulders and he then poured the contents into one of the oak barrels which were raised off the ground on wooden platforms.

All we had to do now was to wait for the fermentation to begin. When it did, it was heralded by the appearance of innumerable minute insects which hovered above what were now the seething contents of the barrels, which had either given birth to them or inspired them to appear; and eventually they disappeared as suddenly as they had come. From time to time during this period, exhorted by Signor Giuseppe to do so, I pushed a wooden pole up and down in what is called the
mosto
to accelerate the process of fermentation.

Then one morning after about ten days had passed, Signor Giuseppe loosened the wooden bung on the barrel that contained
the red grapes and what looked like a great gush of blood poured out of it and began to fill the
bigonci
we had ready for this moment at a tremendous rate. From them we transferred the wine into demijohns, topping them up with
olio enologico
when the wine reached the neck to stop the air getting to the wine. We then capped them with wired-on metal caps to foil the dreaded mice.

This was the moment, when the wine came gushing out of the barrel, when we each took a glass of the new wine and drank it, still foaming, and this was the moment when Signor Giuseppe always said,
‘Questo vino è una cannonata! Un vino genuino!
’ And both Signora Angiolina and Signora Fernanda, and Wanda and myself would all concur.

‘What do you really think of it?’ I asked Wanda the first time.

‘I think it’s pretty awful; but then I don’t like new wine. I think it will be all right,’ she said, ‘providing it doesn’t go on tasting like this.’

‘Well, what do you think it tastes of?’ I said.

‘I think,’ she said, ‘that it tastes of old rusty nuts and bolts, like Teran [the local red wine in her particular part of Slovenia]; but then Teran is very good with food.’

Whatever the taste, for us it was an historic moment. We had made our first wine!

Of the two, the white seemed slightly better than the red, but eventually, when we began to drink them the following year, the red turned out to be really quite good, with only a few hints of nuts and bolts. The white was not so good and we didn’t improve it by adding too much bisulphite, which we were told would prevent it assuming a brownish colour when we took it to England. It stopped it changing colour but produced a rather sickly drink that gave us a nasty pain between the eyes.

Now Signor Giuseppe put a couple of wedges under the back of the barrel so that the last of the wine could be drained into a
bigoncio
. This was the last of the free-run wine, what we then hoped would be the
vino buono
. What now remained in the barrels were the skins, the pips, those stalks that had not been cut off when the grapes were picked, and those tiny, green, iron-hard grapes that had either escaped detection at the sorting table or else had been too numerous to deal with, about which nothing could be done any more, and a lot of wine still in the skins, to be extracted by pressing.

Now the first of the two barrels was turned on its side and with our bare hands we dug out of it what looked like a red sludge and put it in the press, which had been got ready for the purpose. It, too, was the property of Signora Angiolina and was about the smallest of its kind available.

Signora Angiolina’s press was really a barrel with loose-fitting staves and a loose-fitting lid raised on a wooden platform. It was constructed in such a way that when it was filled with what was left of the grapes after the crushing process and a screw was operated by turning a capstan bar on the top of the instrument, the lid was forced down on the contents squeezing out the wine so that it flowed through the gaps between the staves, and down through channels carved in the wooden platform on which it stood and into a receptacle below it. To squeeze all the wine out required several pressings. After each one wooden blocks had to be inserted between the capstan bar and the lid so that the pressure could be maintained on what was a constantly diminishing amount of liquid. What came out from these repeated pressings was what was known as
strizzo
, literally squeezed or wrung out, which made a wine full of tannin but of inferior quality. Sometimes, if there was enough free-run wine to absorb it, some of the first of the
strizzo
was added to it. When we finished with the red we did the same thing to the white. It was then put into demijohns.

In a few weeks’ time, while the wine was still fermenting, it would have to be racked off into other demijohns and the sediment removed; and during the winter months this would have to be done again.

What remained in the press after the
strizzo
had been extracted was a circular compressed mass of stalks and skin and pips that looked like a big fruit cake which Signor Giuseppe then extracted from the press by cutting it in half with an axe. These remains he used to make
grappa
, what the French call
marc
, in a still which he, as did many others, kept somewhere on his property, or else he spread it on our
vigneto
as a fertilizer.

In November, the long vine shoots would have to be cut off and collected for fuel and the vineyard manured and ploughed and the soil moved over the bases of the vines to protect them from the frost, and then the whole business began again. And when Signor Giuseppe took over the working of our
vigneto
, which he eventually did, the responsibility for finding the manure, which was already becoming as expensive as gold dust, that is if you could find it, devolved on me.

The result of all this often frenetic activity was that we had altogether succeeded in producing about 300 litres of wine, what was, with the threatened demise of some of the older vines, a totally inadequate quantity to meet our needs, and those of any future visitors. It was obvious that if we were going to increase our production we would have to buy more grapes and plant more vines. The sooner the better as it would be at least three years before any newly planted vines produced any grapes.

A week after our
mini-vendemmia
took place the Dadà asked us if we would like to help them with their
vendemmia.
The invitation was conveyed by Rina to Wanda when she went up the hill to collect the milk. At that time neither of us realized that being asked to help was a compliment because it meant that we
were regarded as being potentially hard workers and would therefore earn the prodigious amounts of wine and food that would be served up to us in the course of the
vendemmia
.

Meanwhile, in order to stave off what looked like being a vine-less/wineless future if nothing was done about it, I started work on enlarging the vineyard.

Under the auspices of Signor Giuseppe and with the help of Attilio, I began to excavate three trenches, each about seventy feet long, four feet deep and four feet wide, on one of the terraces below the house that had not been planted with vines for many years. It had to be a minimum of four or five years before the land was used again for this purpose.

The sub-soil was heavy clay with large stones embedded in it. The same sort of awful terrain that I had encountered when I had been digging out the septic tank.

When it came to digging, Attilio was a worker of what could only be described as frenetic energy. Wielding a pick, with a handle that was almost as tall as he was, and a spade, with a handle nearly twice his height, he hurled up great clods from the depths of the trench, like an actor in an old Keystone Cops film in which everything is accelerated, all the while talking away to himself nineteen to the dozen. Seeing him thus, going full blast, it was obvious why he was so much in demand when it came to doing
giornate
.

To keep us going, Wanda took time off from the seemingly endless task of priming and undercoating and painting the window frames and shutters and doing the laundry without a
vasca
, to bring us food and drink.

The weather was beautiful, too beautiful, one golden glaring day following another, but the evenings were already autumnal and we burned olive logs to keep ourselves warm. Signor Giuseppe had been wrong to start his
vendemmia
so early.

It was a gargantuan task we were involved in, possibly one of
the last vineyards to be dug in the area using only picks and spades. The next time we wanted to enlarge it still more in a year or two’s time the whole thing was done in a few hours with a bulldozer, and this included levelling the hillside behind the house as well as trenching it. Altogether it took us about five days and it was the hardest digging I had engaged in since 1940 when the Infantry Division of which I was a member was given the task of digging a trench system across Kent when the invasion of Britain appeared to be imminent.

‘Heh!’ Attilio said, when we had finally finished, as a sort of warning shot across my bows to announce that he was going to say something further. By this time I was a clay-stained wreck, sodden with perspiration, he immaculate in his cotton jacket and trousers, white shirt and cap – admittedly he had some clay on the toe caps of his boots.
‘Heh! Adesso dobbiamo buttare un po’ di concime nel buco
’, he said. ‘Now we must throw some manure in the hole.’