Four moods. One year.
A vineyard does not have a busy season and a quiet one. It has four different jobs, four different tables, and four different kinds of light. This is the year as it is actually lived here.
Spring — Growth
Bud break. Two weeks where the whole plain turns the colour of a green apple and nobody sleeps well. Everything that happens for the rest of the year is decided by what the vine does now, and there is almost nothing you can do to hurry it.
It is also artichoke season. The Carciofo di Paestum comes out of the ground twenty minutes south of here, and for a few weeks it is on every table in the province, raw and dressed with nothing much.
Summer — Labour & Sun
Work before seven, work after six, and nothing much in between except heat. The vines are managed rather than watched now — canopy, exposure, the daily judgement about how much sun a bunch should be allowed to take.
This is when the estate is loudest. It is also when the long table goes down the middle of the rows at dusk, because the light lasts until nine and the ground finally cools.
Autumn — Harvest
Picking starts at dawn and lunch starts when it stops. Everything the year has been about arrives inside a window of a few days, and the decision of exactly when to pick is the single most consequential judgement anyone here makes.
It is the most honest day in the wine calendar, and the one we open to guests — not as spectators but as pickers, because the work is the point.
Winter — Rest
Pruning, mending, waiting. Every cut made now is a decision about next year’s crop, taken months before there is anything to look at. The vine gives up everything it does not need. So does the estate.
The olives are pressed the week they are picked, and the new oil is on the table while it is still cloudy and tastes of grass.
