Brigolante holiday rentals in Assisi, Umbria

Self-catering apartments in Assisi's town center and nearby countryside.
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Us vs. The Big Boys: Wine Making in Umbria

There is how the Big Boys do it, and there is how we do it.  Wine, that is.

The Big Boys carefully plan their vineyard and select grape varieties appropriate for the soil, sun exposure, and altitude.  They take great care in cultivating the delicate vines:  pruning the shoots, selecting the stronger plants, replanting old or weak vines.  They consult with botanists, agronomists, viticulturists, and agricultural historians. They monitor and treat for mold and insect damage.

Our grapes, of the select "uh, who knows?" variety.

We just go with whatever my husband’s grandfather planted together with his brother 40 years ago on a piece of land near the house that they chose because they eyeballed it figured it looked sunny enough, given that we are on the north side of Mount Subasio.  We occasionally fill in the gaps left where vines have died, but only when it gets to be a couple in a row.  If you ask my father-in-law what grape varieties he has, he will respond: Red and White.  When pressed, he will concede with a nonchalant shrug that there are probably Sangiovese, Merlot, and Sagrantino vines planted, and white Malvasia grapes and “Boh, something else but I can’t remember” grapes.  Mold and insect damage get noticed and commented on at the dinner table.

Filled bins, waiting in a line like soldiers about to be shipped to the Western Front.

The Big Boys organize their grape harvest using white lab-jacketed professionals who begin to pick after monitoring the level of sugar, acid, and pH of the grapes.  Clusters of grapes are selected according to their stage of ripeness over a period of days, and overripe or damaged fruit is attentively weeded out.  The grapes get carefully placed in small crates which are sorted by variety and loaded on flatbed trailers to be transported to the winery with minimum damage and bruising.

Zio Gino, our oldest picker.

Nicolò, our youngest picker.

Our grape harvest includes Zio Gino, Zia Viola, our neighbors, my inlaws, my nine and six year old sons, and occasionally sporting guests at Brigolante and is begun after tasting a couple of grapes to see if they are sweet and monitoring the weather report on Rai Uno.  The vineyard is stripped of every cluster of grape over an afternoon regardless of ripeness, lest it begin to rain or run into dinner time.  The grapes are chucked indiscriminately into big 50 gallon plastic garbage pails (which we use only for this purpose), and then loaded onto the back of the tractor where they make the bouncing and bumping trip back to the garage.

My father-in-law Ugo's hi-tech harvesting tools.

The Big Boys then proceed to destem, crush, ferment, and press the grapes, sorted by variety, in gleaming modern cantine with stainless steel mechanical equipment and small chemistry laboratories used to monitor and adjust sugar, yeast, and alcohol.  The rooms are temperature controlled to calibrate the speed of fermentation, and after the must is pressed the wine is stored in massive stainless steel vessels or new oak barrels for the remainer of the secondary fermentation and aging…under careful watch by the vitner’s enologist who runs periodic tests checking the status of the wine:  pH, titratable acidity, residual sugar, free or available sulfur, total sulfur, volatile acidity and percent alcohol.

Our grapes ready to give their life for a bigger cause. Notice the odd white cluster. Eh, just toss it in!

After much swearing and searching for an adapter for the German plug, we fire up our little mechanical crusher/destemmer in the garage and set it on two wooden planks above a big plastic vat the size of a Jacuzzi.  (We don’t have a Jacuzzi, of course, but I’ve seen them.)  First the white grapes all get tossed in, and the must immediately passed to our old wooden basket press, which is cranked by hand either by my father-in-law or my older son, depending upon if it’s a school day.  The white wine is immediately trasferred to the fiberglass vat to ferment and age, because none of us like white that much so if it doesn’t come out that great no one cares.  Then the red grapes all get tossed in to be destemmed and crushed, and stay there fermenting in the vat with an old wool plaid blanket thrown over the top to try and keep the temperature warm enough in the cold garage.  Every day or two my father-in-law tosses a saccharometer (which looks kind of like a floating candy thermometer and measures the sugar content) in there to see how things are going, but since his eyes aren’t that good and both my husband and I have grave doubts as to whether he actually knows how to read the calibration even if he could see the tiny markings, it’s pretty much a crap shoot.  When we notice all the neighbors pressing, we figure we may as well.  Then the wine gets stored in big old wooden barrels next to the washing machine and the tool bench for a couple of months.

Tossing the grapes into the crusher/destemmer.

The Big Boys polish their wines with blending and fining, and stabilize them with preservatives and filtration.  Often, the results are—unsurprisingly–fabulous.  Their wines are bottled in new glass wine bottles, labeled beautifully and informatively, and shipped all over the world.

This is much more fun than going to school.

We open up the taps at the bottom of our barrels and vat in the spring, and drink whatever comes out.  Sometimes it’s suitable for nothing more than dressing a salad, together with olive oil and salt.  Sometimes the results are—surprisingly–fabulous.  We fill pitchers with our rough farmer’s red that we set on the table for mealtimes directly from the vats, or bottle some in bottles we’ve washed and put aside from store bought wines, which we then manually cork and stick a label on that I print off a Word document on my computer.  Our wine is incredibly instable; just the altitude difference between our house and the valley under Assisi is enough to make it turn.  Which means we drink it all here, just friends, family, guests, and the odd passer-by.

And I’d rather have that than be a Big Boy any day.

This is what's in our wine.

3 Comments

  1. Gail Brown |

    Rebecca, What a great entry! I smiled all through breakfast this morning reading your blog. So glad I subscribed. Complimenti!

  2. valentina panci |

    Hi Rebecca,
    I’m the girl who published a University Thesys about you and your Slow Travel Blog, do you remember?
    I moved from Rome to Milan for work with my boyfriend.
    I hope we will have occasion to meet us.
    Anyway I want to tell you that this new blog is very interesting as well. Compliments!

    Valentina.

  3. Sarah Weiner |

    What a fabulous description. I love knowing the story behind the bottle you left for us to enjoy during our stay at Brigolante.