Friday, October 31, 2008

october poppies



Red poppies bloom in the spring in Italy. Fields of poppies blanket the rolling hills of Umbria and Tuscany in April. The bright red fluttering blossoms line road sides in Lazio and Puglia. In the very south of Italy, at the bottom of the heel of the boot, there is an old recipe for a fieldworker’s soup using the paper thin petals, olive oil, and pan-fried bread. I have the recipe written down somewhere in a notebook, transcribed from an old cookbook I found in an old farmhouse outside of the seaport town of Otranto, known as the Gateway to the Orient.

I bring home a packet of Italian poppy seeds bought at a plant nursery not to far from Rome. I smuggle in the thin sealed envelope with the picture of a poppy field that goes on forever packed carefully between my dirty socks and underwear in my suitcase. The little beagle with the big brown eyes is none the wiser. I’m not sure he needs to be.

Our season starts much later than springtime in Italy, so we don’t plant the seeds until late May. We wait all summer for them to grow. Their frilly leaves make a thick carpet at the edge of a messy holding bed filled with plants that haven’t found a proper home yet. Several boxwood recuperate from winter kill, as does a Munstead lavender that looked so poorly that I cut it all the way back, its woody stems down to the quick. That was when I didn’t know that lavender does not thrive under such severe measures. Planted nearby are the two old fashioned tea roses with incredible crimson blooms that wait for their spot in the perennial beds. They smell of cinnamon and bergamot.

By August, the poppies begin to bloom showing their red faces, one here, one there. And now, in October, they are strangely at their most plentiful. I cut a clutch for a vase inside the house. I’m sure the temperate autumn has had a hand in this poppy abundance, these warm days and slightly cool nights that have felt like perennial September. But the bounty can’t last, even though the season has lulled us into feeling like winter will never really come.

--Deirdre

Sunday, October 19, 2008

la garagista




On the evening of the Harvest Moon, we held a wine tasting. This was the first of what we hope will be many soirees in our meadow on Mt. Hunger. The few days before the weather had proved difficult, showering us with cold rain, and rather violent winds. That morning, the sky cleared, but the wind still howled and pressed. The bean trellis had been blown down, its old wood covered in a tangle of green leaves and vine. We expected this. We went about our chores as if the evening would come off without a snag. We collected and arranged flowers, set up tables, procured the food, set out wine glasses. Would it rain? Would it be too windy?

The outlook for the day improved. We ate a take-out lunch on the porch, the wind nearly spent. We felt almost confident, and at ease. I looked at the sign on the barn that we had hung yesterday. We had christened this project of growing grapes, making wine, and sharing our gardens and fledgling vineyard la garagista after the rebellious French garage wine makers of the '80's. Yes, I thought, our celebration would happen. People would come. We would open bottles of wine. We would share the harvest together.

I set up the sign-in table in the barn. We had spent months cleaning and organizing this space. One wall was lined with stacked firewood for the winter, next to a wine rack filled with bottles. The floor was dirt, but in the center stood one of our wine tasting tables set with glasses and an old French-style candelabra that is very elegant. Light poured in through the narrow, long windows. Our friend Gina had loaned me a copper wine trough that we filled with ice and water and bottles of a sparkling rosé that would usher in the evening. Iacopo, Rafael, and Winthrop, our friends who would show the ten wines we would be featuring tonight, opened and tasted the bottles, then lined them on the table in the stone garden.

Iacopo, our friend from Italy, would be representing the importer of these wines. Rafael owns the small company that brings them to us here in Vermont. Winthrop had recently started to work with Rafael. Michael, another friend volunteering for the evening, joined Caleb to set up the bruschetteria, and began to tend to the big open fire on which to toast the bread for the myriad toppings they have prepared. Caleb’s mother Carol lit a small fire in a galvanized metal tub, our version of a fire pit, so people could warm themselves in the stone garden as the evening cooled. Claire, and our friends Anthony and Christy, lit all the torches and candles. Conversation and laughter bubbled around the house and barn, and we feel as if we had dodged the wicked weather until 5:25. Five minutes before guests were to arrive, clouds crested the hill above, and it began to rain. Oh, well, I thought, what a shame. We’ll just have to stuff everyone in the barn. No one spoke.

But then, like a tease, the rain stopped, and the clouds thinned out into mare’s tails. There was a collective sigh, and a couple of people laughed away the tension. Guests began to arrive. The energy was high.

It turned out to be a beautiful evening. The wines were sublime and showed themselves off. The tastes that Caleb and Michael offered were lively and married the wines well. Guests walked through the gardens, sitting and contemplating or conversing. We all watched the moon rise, a fantastic harvest moon. No one really noticed the downed bean trellis that never got rebuilt during the course of the day, there not being enough time.

Then, after all the guests left, fifteen of us, a combination of family and friends who helped coordinate the evening, stayed for dinner. We lined four of the tasting tables down the center of the barn. Someone accidently knocked over a bottle of open wine. The wine spilled and puddled on the wood, and I thought how perfectly it christened this table for our first of what I hoped woulde be many dinners in this barn. We set the long table with fine china and silver and the two baroque candelabra. We pulled chairs from around the property and inside the house. We set up a buffet to serve a purea of zucchini and onion soup made from ingredients in the garden, and plates of a silky, sliced pork belly seasoned with wine and sage, served with small, pearl white beans. On the table were plates of oysters to begin, and the last of the bruschetta. Countless bottles of wine had been opened, and everyone tasted and retasted the stars of the evening. Iacopo brought the last of a wine made from a cru selection of grapes that he helped make in Tuscany; and I opened local wine maker Chris Granstrom’s Cove Road made from Marquette, St. Croix and Frontenac. We toasted and congratulated each other for an evening well-done.

It was time to open the first bottle of my own first vintage made from grapes all the way from Italy. A true “garage wine.” The glass was plain, recycled from a bottle of my favorite Aglianico made in Campania. I was hopeful that the bottle, once being the home of a great wine, would elevate my own effort. Iacopo teased me because on the handwritten label I had hung around the neck, I had written La Garagista, Vintage No. 1, 2008. “What do you mean 2008?” he asked. Flustered, I took my pen and crossed out the 8, and wrote in a 7. I wasjumping ahead of myself. I hadn’t even received my juice for this year’s vintage yet. (Patience has never been one of my virtues. Is impatience the vice of any new wine maker?)

I uncorked, and poured. I was nervous that my wine may have turned to vinegar. We tasted. While my first endeavor was simple with a soft finish, it was smooth with the flavors of red currant and warm, sweet spices.

Aloud, I deemed it drinkable.

--Deirdre

Sunday, October 5, 2008

bottle neck



We are back from our hiatus. Too many things to do, and not enough time to do them is the cliched mantra of these last thirty days. The weather here in Vermont shifts back and forth between hot and humid, and rainy and wet. The hurricanes traveling across the ocean, whirling dervishes of wind and disturbance from South Africa take aim at the Carribean islands and the Gulf coast, always threatening coastal Texas and New Orleans. We get the run-off of extravagant winds and rain bringing tempestuous unpredictability to our northern reaches.

These wild days remind me that I need to bottle my wine. The end of the season is fast approaching and I think my fledgling wine has had plenty of time to sit and stew. It’s probably a good idea to get the wine transferred to glass bottles so it can settle and relax in the wine rack next to the wood rack in our barn-garage before the cold frost blankets the ground. Frost, that net of shimmering white crystals, so pretty in Harvest moonlight, in the brightness of the next day is revealed as a cruel trickery. It leaves a trail of blackened stalks and vegetation.

I have collected used wine bottles from the restaurant and they sit in boxes waiting to be washed, their old labels scrubbed off. Here are the remains of good wines—bottles emptied of Aglianico from Campania, Ciro from Calabria, Primitivo from Puglia, and Nebbiolo Langhe from the Piemonte. Here’s sturdy dark glass from an old-style Chianti producer. The remains of good wines. I want my wine to be cloaked in respectable, heavy glass. Even though my wine is a small wine, I hope it will rise to the challenge of a good vessel.
On a sunny day, I set up the galvanized metal washtub with water warmed from sitting in the hose. The cases of used bottles get filled with water themselves then packed into the tub, the water inside keeping them from bobbing up. I’m looking for the minimum of work here, imagining the old labels gently sloughed off the glass on their own.

There is no such luck. Some labels are adhered with an industrial substance that is tighter than two coats of paint as they say in these parts. When I think the bottles have had enough time to soak, I see that my job will not be so easy. I must scrub and pick and scrape to get some of these labels off, and still the glue sticks and makes the bottles look pocked and dirty. I start over. I soak the bottles in really hot water in the sink in the kitchen. This works a bit better.
Since I have lost all our Barbera wine to my naïveté, there is only the Nebbiolo to bottle, and that is cleverly contained in the bucket with the spigot in a sterilized solution in the kitchen sink. I soak the bottles once again along with the clear plastic tube that came with my winemaking kit. The bottles and tube get rinsed in cool, clean water, then are set out to air dry. We lift the wine container onto the top of the tall trash can in the kitchen. Previously, the wine has been sitting undisturbed all summer in the pantry with an occasional “barrel” tasting to make sure it would really be worth all this trouble.

I attach one end of the tubing to the spigot, the other goes into the neck of a bottle. I hold on tight and open the spigot. I’ve not chosen the best of places to conduct this procedure as I can’t see how quickly the wine rises in the bottle. Too dark down there on the floor with a dark brown-green glass bottle even thought the lights are turned on. It is after sundown afterall.

Unexpectedly (yet expected all the same) the bottle overflows. There is cursing, more spillage, and hands and fingers that are not fast enough. This happens over and over again as the bottles get filled, a puddle of ruby liquid at my feet. My fingers are saturated with wine, and I lap at my hands (I contemplate licking the floor) because I don’t want to lose one bit. The wine tastes good. Not perfect, but good. I am completely surprised, unbelieving, so I want to keep tasting to be sure. The wine is light and clean. Given the problems I had earlier with the pretty bacteria, I figure this is one of those small tragedies converted into a miracle. The wine bottles, varied in shape, stand tall and look like they are marching across the floor toward to the door and the wine racks in the barn where they will fine and settle for as long as they last.
--Deirdre