La Vendemmia: What Harvest Season Means in Italian Wine Country

What are we actually waiting for, in the weeks before the picking begins? From my garden in Perugia the question arrives every September, when the light goes long and gold across the Umbrian hills and the vines on the slopes toward Cannara stop their growing and begin, instead, to concentrate. There is a word for this season that English does not quite carry. Vendemmia is usually translated as harvest, but harvest is a noun, a thing done to a field, and vendemmia is closer to a verb that has not finished happening, a gathering that is also a reckoning, the moment when a whole year of weather and labor and guesswork is asked to resolve into fruit. It is the least glamorous and most decisive passage in the making of a wine, and it is almost never the part anyone photographs.

I have come to think of the harvest less as an event than as a long act of attention. A grower does not simply arrive one morning and pick. For weeks beforehand he walks the rows at dawn, tasting berries, crushing skins between thumb and forefinger, chewing the seeds to feel whether the tannin has turned from green and bitter to brown and ripe. The sugar can be measured with a refractometer; the ripeness that matters cannot. It lives in the pips and the skins and the slackening of the stem, and reading it is a skill that takes decades and is never fully trusted even then. The vineyard is ready when the grower says it is ready, and the grower is never entirely sure.

What Does a Grower Wait For?

The temptation, for anyone who has not farmed, is to imagine ripeness as a single moment that simply arrives, a bell that rings when the grapes are done. The truth is messier and more interesting. There are at least two ripenesses, and they do not keep the same clock. Sugar ripeness, the accumulation that will become alcohol, climbs steadily through the warm weeks of late summer and can be read off an instrument by anyone. Phenolic ripeness, the slow softening of tannin in the skins and seeds and the development of aromatic complexity, moves to its own rhythm and can lag the sugar by days or weeks. Pick too early and the wine is green, hard, underdeveloped; pick too late and the acidity collapses and the alcohol runs high and the wine loses its nerve. The window between the two is where everything a grower knows comes to bear, and in a cool year it can be a matter of a single afternoon.

This is the quiet drama that the glossy accounts of wine always skip. Weather does not wait for the grower to feel ready. A ripening vineyard in early October is a standing bet against the sky, and the forecast of three days of rain can force a decision that the grower would have given a week to make. Rain swells the berries and dilutes the juice; a warm spell can race the sugars ahead of everything else; hail, the oldest fear, can end a vintage in twenty minutes. To stand at the edge of a parcel in the second week of October, tasting a berry and watching a grey front build over the hills, is to understand that farming is not a profession so much as a long negotiation with chance. The grower is waiting for ripeness, yes, but he is also waiting to see what the year will permit him to take.

Why the Picking Has an Order

The Italian harvest follows a sequence, and the sequence is a map of the country drawn in grapes. It opens, almost everywhere, with the whites. They are picked first because they are wanted fresh, with their acidity intact and their sugars moderate, before the autumn sun can push them toward flab. In Umbria the vendemmia begins in the last days of August and the first of September with the white varieties, Grechetto and Trebbiano and the base grapes for anything meant to sparkle, gathered while the mornings are still cool. Then come the earlier reds through the middle of September, Sangiovese and the softer local varieties, each parcel taken as it comes good.

The hills save their hardest fruit for last. In Umbria the final red to come in is almost always Sagrantino, a grape so dense with tannin that it needs every available day on the vine to resolve, hanging deep into October while the growers watch and wait and pray the weather holds. The late hang is not an accident of climate but a requirement of the grape: a Sagrantino picked in September would be a wine of punishing hardness, all grip and no grace. Among the estates that farm it with the most patience is Di Filippo, in Cannara, whose biodynamic parcels I have walked in that long Umbrian October more than once, and whose Di Filippo Montefalco Sagrantino 2018 carries, in its depth and its slow unfolding, the whole argument for waiting. Northward, on the Piemonte hills, the pattern repeats in a cooler key, and the very last fruit of all is Nebbiolo, picked under fog in the second half of October when much of Italy has already pressed its wine.

What the Season Asks of Those Who Farm by Hand

An industrial vineyard meets the harvest with a machine that straddles the rows at night and strips the fruit in a single pass, and for a great deal of the world's wine this is an entirely reasonable answer to the problem of labor. The estates we work with have made a different choice, and the harvest is where that choice costs the most and shows the most. Hand picking is slow, expensive, and dependent on a crew of people who must be housed and fed and organized for weeks, and it exists for one reason: it allows the vineyard to be taken in successive passes, parcel by parcel and sometimes vine by vine, each bunch cut only when it is ready and the unripe or the rotten left behind. A machine cannot make that judgment. A person can, and the wine remembers the difference.

Nowhere is the labor of the season more fully lived than on an estate that farms biodynamically, where the harvest is only the visible end of a year spent refusing the shortcuts. At Di Filippo the work between the rows is done in part by draught horses and a flock of geese rather than by tractor and herbicide, a set of decisions I have written about at length in the essay on biodynamic winemaking at Di Filippo, and that same philosophy governs the picking. The fruit comes in by hand, in small cases, timed to a ripeness read in the vineyard rather than dictated by a contractor's calendar. The cost of this is one no spreadsheet fully captures, a tax paid in patience and in the willingness to accept that the farmer, not the machine and not the market, sets the hour. To harvest this way is to insist that the wine begins in the vineyard and that the most important decisions have already been made before a single grape reaches the cellar.

The Last Fruit on the Hill

By the time the rest of Italy has finished, the Nebbiolo is still hanging. The grape is named for fog, nebbia, and it earns the name: it ripens so late that it comes in under the grey autumn light that settles over the Langhe and the Alto Piemonte in October, picked when the mornings have gone cold and the leaves have begun to turn and the first truffles are surfacing in the oak woods below the vines. The truffle and Nebbiolo share a season for a reason, and it is not sentiment; it is that both belong to the same short passage of damp, cool, shortening days. To pick Nebbiolo is to accept the longest wait and the greatest exposure to autumn weather, and to do it for the sake of a ripeness that no earlier grape demands.

In the village of Barolo, Giacomo Brezza e Figli has farmed since 1885, and the family's patience in the cellar, the long aging in large Slavonian botti that I traced in the profile of Giacomo Brezza and the Serralunga argument, begins with a patience in the vineyard that most drinkers never see. The fruit for a wine like the Brezza Barolo 2018 is taken late and by hand, parcel by parcel, each cru on its own schedule, the pickers moving through the rows in the cold while the fog burns off toward midday. Higher still, on the vertiginous terraces of alpine Carema, the growers of the Produttori di Carema bring in their Nebbiolo later and more dangerously than almost anyone, hauling fruit down slopes too steep for any machine, in a late harvest that is as much an act of mountaineering as of farming. When their last cases come in, usually in the back half of October, the Italian vendemmia is effectively over, and the hills go quiet, and the waiting that began in the spring finally has nothing left to wait for.

Walk a vineyard the morning after the final pick and you will find a stillness that is almost physical. The rows are stripped and tired, the cases are stacked in the cellar yard, the air smells of crushed fruit and diesel and wet earth, and somewhere a dog is asleep in the first weak sun. The grower stands at the edge of it with a cup of coffee going cold in his hand, not triumphant, not relieved exactly, but emptied, the way you are emptied after you have given something everything you had and the outcome has passed out of your hands and into the tanks. Whatever the year was, it is in the cellar now. The hills will keep their counsel until spring, and the long attention begins again.