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 — because what happens to the grape after this, the long alchemy in the cellar, is another subject entirely and one I'll leave to people better qualified. What interests me here is the picking itself, and the eating that surrounds it, and the small family of foods that exist only in these few weeks, made from the grape before it disappears into the barrel.

The work is harder than it looks and looks harder than almost anything else in the farming year. A vine is built at exactly the wrong height for a human being: too low to reach standing, too high to reach sitting, so you spend the day in a permanent half-crouch, bent from the waist, moving crabwise down the row. The bunches hide under the leaves and behind the wood, and each one has to be found, lifted, and cut at the stem without slicing your own fingers, which in the low light and the growing speed you eventually do anyway. The crates fill and are hauled to the end of the row and emptied and brought back. Wasps, drunk on split fruit, take a close and personal interest in the work. Your back, by mid-morning, has opinions it did not have at dawn.

And yet nearly everyone who has done a vendemmia speaks of it with a peculiar warmth, because the hardship is the point, or at least the setting for the point. This is work done shoulder to shoulder, down parallel rows, within talking distance — and so it comes with a running commentary of conversation, argument, gossip, and song that the rhythm of the picking seems to draw out of people. Historically, whole networks of seasonal labour were built around it: students and city cousins coming out for the vendange to earn a little and eat a lot, families calling in every relative and neighbour, itinerant crews moving up through a region as the ripening rolled north and uphill. It was, and in places still is, one of the great annual gatherings — the moment the extended human network of a wine region physically assembles in the same fields to bring the year's most important crop in fast, before the weather can turn.

There is, I should say, a growing strangeness in the timing of all this, and it would be dishonest to write about the vendemmia in the old romantic key without acknowledging it. The harvest I have just described — the September harvest, the one that gives the whole thing its name in our imaginations, the settembrino rhythm of it — is quietly slipping away from September. The heat has been pulling it forward for years now, and this year it has pulled it hard: across Italy the picking began while July was still running, with the first grapes for the sparkling bases cut in the last days of the month, and some growers calling it the earliest start anyone can remember. The cause is no mystery. The long heatwaves and the drought behind them have sped up the vine's whole cycle, advancing the harvest by something like ten days on the average of recent years, and in the hottest regions the reds that once belonged firmly to September are now being talked about for the middle of August.

There is even a cruel twist inside the heat, which the growers know well and which I find grimly fascinating: past a certain point the sun stops helping. When the temperature climbs above about thirty-five degrees the vine's photosynthesis stalls and the sugars stop accumulating, so an extreme heatwave can actually slow the ripening it appears to be driving — a reminder that the relationship between weather and fruit was never as simple as "hotter is faster." The dawn starts I described are, increasingly, not a matter of tradition or comfort but of necessity: when the afternoons are dangerous for the people doing the picking, the work retreats into the cool few hours after first light because there is no longer any real choice.

I don't want to turn a piece about grape bread and must pudding into a lament. But the vendemmia has always been, at bottom, a negotiation between people and a climate — a race to catch the fruit at its one right moment before the weather turns — and the terms of that negotiation are visibly changing. The harvest is creeping out of the month that named it. Somewhere in the sweetness of the schiacciata, this year, there is a faint new note of unease.

Which brings me to the food, because a vendemmia runs on its stomach, and the harvest meal is an institution in its own right.

There is the mid-morning break in the rows themselves — bread, hard cheese, cold sausage or ham, eaten sitting on an upturned crate with purple hands, and very often the first wine of the day passed around in a way that would alarm an occupational-health inspector but that has fuelled harvests since antiquity. And then there is the proper meal, the harvest lunch or dinner, which across every wine culture is a matter of pride and near-obligation: the landowner or the family feeds the pickers, generously, as both payment-in-kind and thanks. In France the repas des vendanges is legendary — long trestle tables, vast platters, the sense of a feast owed to people who have earned it. In Italy the harvest table groans in the same way. These are not delicate meals. They are built for people who have been bent double since dawn and will be again tomorrow: substantial, abundant, restorative, and lubricated by exactly the thing everyone has spent the day picking the raw material for.

But the food I actually want to arrive at is stranger and more specific — the small clutch of dishes that exist only now, made from the grape and the fresh must at the fleeting moment when both are available, and that vanish again for another year the moment the harvest ends.

The most widespread of these is mosto cotto — cooked must. When the grapes are pressed, the sweet unfermented juice that runs off is the mosto, the must, and if you take a quantity of it and boil it down, slowly, for hours, it reduces to a dark, thick, intensely sweet syrup that keeps for a very long time and tastes of raisins and caramel and something almost balsamic. It exists all over the Mediterranean under a dozen names — mosto cotto or vincotto in southern Italy, arrope in Spain, pekmez in Turkey (though that is often made from other fruit too), petimezi in Greece, dibs in the Arab world. For much of history, in places where honey was dear and cane sugar unknown or expensive, this cooked-down grape syrup was a primary sweetener — the sweetness of the whole year captured from the harvest and doled out through the winter, drizzled over ricotta, stirred into dough, spooned onto snow as a treat for children, used to sweeten and colour a hundred regional cakes and biscuits.

From that same cooked must comes a whole set of harvest sweets. In Greece, moustalevria — must pudding — is made by thickening the fresh grape must with a little flour or semolina into a soft, dark, fragrant pudding, poured into bowls, dusted with cinnamon and chopped walnuts, and eaten cool; it appears in the markets and kitchens for a few weeks around the trygos and then is simply gone. The Greeks also make moustokouloura, dark spiced biscuits made with the must, and dry petimezi into a leathery sweet. In Cyprus and across the eastern Mediterranean the must is turned into soutzoukos — the extraordinary sausage-shaped sweet in which strings of threaded almonds or walnuts are dipped over and over into thickened grape must until they build up a firm, chewy, candle-like coating, then hung up to dry like strange purple salami. The Georgians, at the far end of the wine world and arguably its oldest corner, make the near-identical churchkhela, walnuts on a string coated in thickened grape must, a food so portable and energy-dense it was reputedly carried by Georgian soldiers as a field ration. Two cultures a thousand miles apart, the same grape, the same string of nuts, the same clever capturing of the harvest's sweetness into something that keeps.

And then, freshest and most fleeting of all, there are the breads and cakes made with the whole ripe grapes themselves, folded in raw. The Tuscan schiacciata con l'uva is the great example — a flattish, not-too-sweet bread dough studded thickly with small dark wine grapes, seeds and all, sugared and baked until the grapes burst and go jammy and the whole thing is stained purple and sticky. It is made, by tradition, only at vendemmia time, with the very grapes coming off the vines, and it is one of those foods whose seasonality is absolute: you cannot buy it in spring, because the thing it is made of does not exist in spring. It belongs to now and only now.

That absoluteness is, in the end, what draws me to the whole business of the harvest. So much of what I've written about this summer has circled the same quiet theme — the apricot that won't travel, the fig that rots if it leaves the tree, the passata that captures August against the winter. The vendemmia is the grandest version of the same idea, the largest and most communal act of the agricultural year, in which an entire region turns out at dawn to catch the grape at its single perfect moment, before it changes into something else. Most of that grape is on its way to becoming wine, which is its own long story for another time and another writer. But a little of it is pulled aside, every year, and cooked and thickened and threaded onto strings and folded into bread — turned into the small sweet foods of the harvest, which exist for a handful of weeks and then wait a whole year to exist again.

By the time the sun clears the ridge, the crates at the end of my row are full and heavy and beaded with cold, and my back has escalated its complaints considerably, and there is grape sugar drying tacky on my hands and forearms. Somewhere down the valley a tractor is already carrying the first load in. In a few hours there will be a long table and too much food and the particular tiredness that feels like having done something real. And tonight, if the household keeps the old way, there will be a slice of grape bread, purple and jammy and gone by next week — the sweetest and briefest dividend of the hardest and oldest work in the farming year.

The alarm will go again at half past five. There are more rows tomorrow.