A friend travels to Tuscany this week. This story is for her.
MONTALCINO, Italy—He says it is best to see the castello in the morning, early, just as the sun raises its brow in the east. He says
to go down the road from the castello, down from the Tuscan hills that push it up into the sky, down into the valleys where the fog is
poured like milk and to wait there until the mists lift and then to see it.
The castello is plain, unadorned. He thinks it is handsome when the morning's gold has been splashed on it.
On Sundays in spring, he goes as far as Poggibonsi and turns around on the road to see the castello through the crooked frame
of the pear tree. He sits along the way and eats his breakfast of meat and cheese and bread. He sees plainly then, for the vines have
not yet put out their leaves.
In the spring, he gathers the yellow flowers of the mustard grass—his word is colza —and brings the bouquet home to his wife.
The gay yellow colza is everywhere in the spring, running between the rows of vines, nestled up to the olive trees.
Before he kisses her awake, he sees his bees. He loves his bees, these little buzzing bits of business. The bees live near where he
makes his vin santo, a wine edged with sugar but rich with the flavor of the dry and dusty Tuscan air. It is not a wine to be taken
seriously, he says, but it is seriously made. He makes it of white grapes that he dries for four months on long lathed wooden shelves.
The wine is dark and long and he dips hard biscuits in it after his meals.
The other wine he makes is Brunello di Montalcino. Brunello, he says, comes from the grapes of the sangiovese and
'sangiovese' comes from the Latin, sanguis jovis, the blood of Jove. He says that good Brunello smells of all the perfumes of nature.
In the middle of September, he and his wife pick the ripe grapes from the vineyard of the castello. He crushes them in the press and
ferments the juice with the grapeskins for a fortnight. He settles the new wine until Christmas and then, just into the new year, pours
this blood of Jove into large oak casks where it lives through its infancy for two years.
His casks are very large and old and, like many creatures large and old, they prefer to suffer the wine to mature itself, not to
discipline it. In the end, he says, you must taste wine, not wood. Parla il vino. The wine must speak.
He racks the wine two or three times each year, pulling it from one cask to another, fluffing it up with fresh air, coddling it into a
softer self. He racks when the peach trees flower in the spring and again when fruit is ripe in September, but always only when the
moon is full. You must respect the moon, he says. It is the mother of all waters.
He says the cellar is his nursery. He goes there each morning to wake his wines. He cossets each cask with the full of his hand,
and atop the cask, in the—colmatore—the big green glass valve half-filled with wine against the air—the wine beats with his pulse. I
am in accord with my wine, he says.
For their living, he and his wife help at a farm near Cinciano. He butchers. She makes cheese. On Mondays, the air squeals when
the pigs are torn open. On a long zinc table, he halves the pigs, quarters them, cleaves them into eighths, chops, hashes, minces
them.
Into the aging rooms he puts salted and peppered hams, hung to dry. Into the coolers go savory sausages, some fresh, some
cured. Into the drying rooms go the salami, all, he says, sold before they leave the slaughterhouse.
In the farm's dairy, his wife and others' wives toil and trouble the teat-fresh, bosom-warm milk of Tuscan sheep in large, shiny
steel cauldrons. The women midwife the milk into cheese, into ricotta and pecorino, the piquant, almost sour cheese of Tuscany.
People eat it many ways: soft, moist and fresh, crumbly and aged a bit, or very old and strong, sharp like a lick of a razor.
They go to market when work is done. She trades for bright yellow squashes, vermillion tomatoes, deep green lettuces, bishop's
purple eggplants. He buys fish that are shiny silver slivers of light and veal that he holds in his enormous, coarse hands like a baby.
In the evening, they eat a simple meal. Slices of prosciutto so thin he sees the edge of the knife behind them. Some bread soup,
thick with green, leafy chard in a garlic-scented broth. Veal braised in his Brunello. A salad of lettuce leaves dressed in a film of olive
oil and lemon. They finish with some pecorino and crunchy raw fava beans, plucked from pillow-filled pods.
And when the day yawns to an end and the evening light melts into shadows, he walks in the black green of the Tuscan woods or
sits in the midst of his dogs and flowers and sips from a little glass tumbler his liquid labor.
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