The Vendemmia, or What the Grapes Do Before Becoming Wine
The alarm goes at half past five, which feels barbaric until you step outside and understand why. By seven the sun will be over the ridge and the heat will settle into the rows like something poured, and the picking has to be well advanced before then — both for the pickers, who will wilt, and for the grapes, which are wanted cool, before the day's warmth starts anything fermenting prematurely inside the skins. So you go out in the grey half-light with a curved knife or a pair of secateurs and a plastic crate, and you bend into the first vine while the valley is still cold and silver and completely silent, and you begin. This is the vendemmia — the grape harvest, the vendange in France, the vendimia in Spain, the trygos in Greece — and it is one of the last great communal agricultural labours still performed, in many places, more or less by hand. I want to write about it, but I want to write about it as food and as work , and to stay firmly on that side of the line — be...
