The Last Promise (22 page)

The young workers, mostly students, straggled in right at eight o’clock or five minutes past, harried and tired, having woken only minutes before. The old men would grumble about the young people and their tardiness, but it was with forgiveness and done more to call attention to their own work ethic than out of actual annoyance.

There is a palpable excitement on the first day of the
vendemmia
, like that of men standing around the waiting room of a maternity ward. Every generation felt it, was charged by its electricity. They slapped each other on the back, laughed and kissed each other. Everyone was happy.

The harvest baskets waited next to the trellises, and the tractors were fired up and brought in line to the end of the rows, pulling large metal trailers that would be filled and refilled, bringing in a kilo of fruit with each haul—more than a ton of grapes—four times a day. Each tractor drove down a wide row lined with trellises while two teams of four workers, two teams to each side of the tractor, moved down the row with it, cutting the thick, woody stems, separating the grapes from the vines with metal shears, dropping the fruit into plastic baskets.

When Ross arrived, Eliana was already there with Alessio. She was wearing denim jeans, rolled up at her ankles, sneakers and a formfitting white T-shirt. It was the most American he had ever seen her. She couldn’t have looked more beautiful. Alessio saw him first.

“Mr. Story! Over here!”

Eliana quickly looked over. She smiled at him sweetly.

“
Ciao,
Ross,” she said. When he was near her, she kissed his cheeks. “I’m so glad you came.”

“I’m glad to be here.”

She handed Ross a pair of shears. “These are for you. Do you want gloves? It’s pretty sticky business; the nectar gets everywhere.”

Ross looked at the old men and their calloused bare hands. “No. I’ll be fine.” To Alessio he said, “Are you ready?”

“Yeah. I hope there’s not a lot of bees this time.”

“No one said anything about bees.”

“Lots of bees,” Eliana said. “We’re not the only ones attracted to the ripe grapes. No one told you about the birds and the bees?”

“Not recently.”

“We plant hedges of blackberry bushes around the perimeter of the vineyard because the blackberries ripen before the grapes and attract the birds and bees to them instead of the vines. Of course that doesn’t stop the boars.”

“Boars?”

“A pack of wild boars can decimate a vineyard.”

“Have you ever seen a wild boar?”

“No. Just their tracks. They’re nocturnal. One night, I think it was my second year here, I was lying in bed when I suddenly heard this terrible snorting and grunting. You wouldn’t believe how loud it was. It sounded like they were right outside my door. I was terrified. Maurizio was gone and I had no idea what to do. The next day there were hoofprints all over the vineyard. Big ones and baby ones, a whole pack. They ate almost a full acre of grapes.”

“So how do you stop them?”

“We put electric wires on the trellises. The boars touch that wire with their wet snouts and they lose their taste for grapes. Some of the large vineyards use sound cannons, but Luca says that they don’t work that well. At first the poor beasts are terrified out of their wits, but pigs are smart. They figure out pretty quickly that the sound doesn’t hurt them, so they just go on eating.”

Ross just looked at her as she spoke, listening less to what she was saying than to how she was saying it. She was showing off her knowledge of winemaking and he liked that she wanted to impress him.

“So where’s Anna?”

“Anna never comes to the harvest. She says she sweats too much.”

“And Maurizio?”

“He’s the
capo
. It’s beneath him.”

“And not the
capo
’s wife?”

She shrugged. “I’m American. I don’t know better.”

Just then a call went out from the foreman, and the pickers all moved toward the first section of vines to be harvested.

Ross, Eliana and Alessio took their place on a row that was about a hundred meters long, sloping gently down into a valley. The vines were full, drooping with the weight of the grapes, blushed, dark and plump against the green vines.

“So how does this work?”

“It’s easy.” Eliana took a bunch of grapes in her hand. “Hold the bunch out like this, snip the vine with your shears”—she cut the stem—“ and drop them in the basket. When the basket’s full, we shout
pieno
and the tractor driver brings us a new basket and dumps this one in his trailer.”

“Simple enough. Even for a city boy.”

“Oh, if you come across a bad bunch of grapes, just leave them on the vine.”

Ross looked down at the vine. “How do I know if they’re bad?”

“Call their wives.”

He looked up.

“Sorry. Just watch for mold. You can ask me. Or if you’re not sure, just leave it; someone will come along behind us to check and they’ll take it if it’s still good. You won’t have to worry much about mold; we haven’t had much rain lately.”

Just then an old man, barely five feet tall, with thinning silver hair and dark eyebrows, walked up on the other side of the trellis. He was wearing boots and denim pants with a long-sleeved shirt. He was missing three of his front teeth, which was apparent because he was smiling widely, happy to be working alongside the
capo
’s beautiful wife and son.

He greeted Eliana.
“Buon giorno, bella signora.”

“
Buon giorno,
Massimo.”

Ross liked the old Italian men. They had no pretense, no inhibition. He envied their freedom.

Eliana introduced Massimo to Ross, though the old man had little interest in him and stooped instead to run his sausagelike fingers through Alessio’s hair. A child was a novelty among the workers, and they were all happy to see Alessio in the fields.

“Massimo is great,” Eliana said. “He’s been here forever. Long before I came. We don’t even know where he lives; he just shows up here the first day of harvest, ready to go. All the old guys who work black are that way.”

“Work black?”

“Working
a nero
. It means we pay them under the table. They have to work that way, otherwise they’d lose their pensions. These old men are our most valuable workers. They know the land here better than their own bodies.

“I don’t think the grapes would grow without them. I know they’d never get picked without them. They keep the younger workers moving. If you get just young people together, they talk too much and pick too slowly. The old guys don’t let them. They keep the pace. So we put one of them with every two or three of the young ones.”

“How long does the whole harvest take?”

“About two weeks. Ten days to two weeks. We have seventeen hectares. Just a little over forty acres.”

“Aren’t there machines that pick the grapes?”

“There are, but for a premium wine, grapes should be handpicked. The machines tend to suck up things you don’t really want in wine.”

“Such as?”

“Mildewed grapes, green grapes, bees, spiders, lizards.”

“You mean my table wine has lizard in it?”

“It could. It’s not a big deal.” She pulled her hair back behind her ears. “It adds to the aroma.”

“Cominciamo,”
Massimo said, lifting his shears to the vine.

“All right, let’s go, gentlemen,” Eliana said.

The group began cutting the grapes. Eliana was quicker than Ross, her slender fingers more experienced and nimble. For a while Ross tried just pulling the bunches from the vine, but he found that the stems were stronger than he’d expected and it actually slowed the work. He felt foolish for having challenged the wisdom of the ages. Before the end of the first two trellises, his hands were stained dark purple with juice. It was clear to Ross that Eliana was there only for Alessio’s sake, laughing and playing with him, shooing away bees and eating the grapes. They stayed close together, working steadily throughout the morning as the laughter and talk of the workers slowed with the heat and fatigue of the day. Around noon some of the workers began gathering empty baskets and walking back toward the cantina.

Eliana glanced down at her watch. “It’s lunchtime.”

Ross took their basket over to the trailer, dumped it, then brought it back, setting it down next to the unfinished trellis.

Eliana wiped the sweat from her face with her forearm. “I think I’m done for the day. We usually just work for an hour, but Alessio was having such a good time we just kept on going.”

“You’re a good little worker, Alessio,” Ross said. “You held your own against these college kids.”

“Thanks.”

Eliana bumped up against Ross as they walked. “You seem to be enjoying yourself.”

“It feels great being out here. There’s something cathartic about working the land. It’s something we white-collar guys miss.” He looked over at her. “I was thinking, you could probably get tourists to pay to come over here and pick grapes. ‘For a limited time and your entire bank account, you too can experience the real Chianti.’ ”

Eliana laughed. “You sound like Tom Sawyer. Does the ad man in you ever die?”

“Never.”

“Well, I’d never sign up. We had raspberry bushes back in Vernal. Raspberries and peas. I hated it when we had to pick.”

They stopped near the cantina. “Manuela’s making lunch for us back at the villa. We still have a little time; would you like a quick tour of the winery?”

“Yes.”

“How about you, Alessio? Do you want to go through the winery or back home?”

“Back home.”

“Okay. Tell Manuela we’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”

“Okay. Bye, Mr. Story.”

“See ya, pal.”

Alessio darted off across the field.

“Don’t forget to wash your hands!” Eliana shouted after him. She groaned. “If he gets those hands on the furniture . . .” She watched him until he disappeared near the villa. Then she turned her attention back to Ross.

“Is there a place we can wash?”

“Sorry, right over there.” She led him to where a brass spigot emerged from the stucco wall of the cantina, running into a stone basin, chipped and worn around its brim. Around the base of the basin wild capers grew. They washed their hands; then Ross washed his face in the cool water.

The small strips of grass around the cantina were crowded with workers who had retrieved their lunches and staked their territories. Again the line between generations was clear. There were the old men with their tablecloths and little bottles of wine and meat and cheese and bread, packed by their old wives. And then there were the young workers who lay down wherever they could find shade, with their sandwiches and chips and bottles of soda or beer. A cloud of smoke rose from the cantina as the workers all lit their cigarettes.

Eliana led Ross around the building to the back. There were men there, the tractor drivers and Luca, who wore a baseball cap and carried a clipboard. Luca looked up at them as they approached.

“Buon giorno, signorina,”
Luca said.

“Buon giorno, signori,”
she replied.

Then Luca glanced at Ross. Ross nodded, but Luca only turned away, continuing his conversation with the tractor drivers.

“This is where wine starts,” Eliana said to Ross, as they approached a large metal bin brimming with grapes. “This is the collector. This is where the tractors dump the grapes we harvest; then the grapes are pushed by a giant corkscrew into the stemmer-crusher . . . that thing,” she said, pointing to a machine next to the bin, “which takes off the stems and crushes the grapes.”

“So the days of stomping grapes by feet are history.”

“Actually we stomped some wine by feet last year. Alessio and I have pictures of our purple feet to prove it. It was a marketing gimmick Maurizio wanted to try. You were in advertising, you understand that. People like the idea of drinking something someone actually stepped on.”

Ross grinned. “Especially when you make it sound so appealing.”

Eliana stepped away from the vat. “Okay, then after the stemmer, the grapes, with their skin and seeds, are sucked up these tubes into the fermentation vats. This way.”

Eliana led him into the cantina. The air was sweet and rich with the smell of new grapes. There were eight large stainless steel tanks, standing vertically in a row.

“Why do they take the skin?”

“Because the skin is part of the wine. Actually it’s the skin that gives red wine its color. The grapes stay in these vats from six days to two weeks. During that time the color leeches into the wine.”

“Do you have to do anything to the wine while it’s in here?”

“A few things. We add yeast cultures to aid the fermentation. The skin of the grapes has its own yeast and it will ferment without ours, but this way we have more control and get a better ferment. And we can monitor the heat. The fermentation causes the heat to rise. If it rises too much, it will kill the fermentation. The wine also needs to be rotated because the grapes naturally separate. The seeds sink to the bottom and the skin rises to the top and forms a cap. If the cap gets too hard, it can trap carbon dioxide in the vat that can suffocate the yeast and also stop the fermentation process. It’s happened to us a few times. It’s not good.”

“Like I said before, you know your wine.”

“I should. I’m the
capo
’s wife.”

Just then Luca walked into the cantina. “
Signorina
Ferrini, may I help you with something?”

“No, thank you, Luca. I’m just showing Ross how we make wine.”

He glanced around the room then went back outside.

Eliana stepped closer to Ross. “Okay, after the vats we pump the wine down to the cellar, where we store it in barrels. Want to see?”

She led him down a concrete stairway into the large, brick-ceilinged cellar. The air was cool and musty. Large oak barrels lined the walls and were stacked in the middle of the floor as well. Each barrel was stenciled with a number.