wine
A
C
The s of a Vintage B
Already, with the sun just over the hills, the inside of the truck was
like a steam room. Spent shotgun shells, assorted bolts and screws
and a surprising number of corks jumped around in the bright red
dirt covering the floor as we bounced down a road probably in
use since Julius Caesar’s day. The man driving had been talking
to me passionately for almost half an hour in Italian—which I
don’t understand. He could have been explaining the offside rule
in soccer, or the secrets of his grandmother’s manicotti. My guess
was that he was talking about wine.
That year, 1997, everybody in Tuscany was talking about wine.
Summer had been hot and mostly dry. Early mornings were
mostly a light sweater kind of cool. Spring had come early, but
not so early to threaten the vine flowers with frost. At a garden
restaurant outside of Panzano the old men scratched the earth
with the toes of their boots, squeezed grapes until the juice ran
through their fingers and tried to remember when they last felt
this good about a vintage. 1985? ’ 71? Maybe this would be the
one to wipe clean the memory of 1955. All this talk about the
wine of the century, and still the grapes hung at their vines.
So what makes this year one to remember and the next year
one that turns us all into beer drinkers? Nature. Rain at harvest
time makes for thin and often tart wine. Too much heat and
the grapes cook in the vineyard, making for wine with a
bad rubbery flavor. Don’t even think about hail. Frost
at flowering can wipe out whole vineyards, but it can
also affect some of the flowers leaving the others
to pull more flavors out of the ground by way
of root systems reaching deep down. That’s
what the vine is doing. It is reaching down into the earth at one
end, and stretching into the sky at the other. A well-cared-for vine
lives about as long as a person. Each year it produces a few clusters
of fruit, which give hints about how its life has been. The vintner’s
job is to hear those hints and bottle them up. In any case, what’s in
the bottle came out of the earth and down from the sky. Wine is
a kind of language made with letters and words of stone and dirt
and a grammar of sun and rain.
