Found in Tuscany

Living Kitchens

2012-01-23T10:57:00.018-05:00

These jars are not what you think. They are not home-canned and inert. Every one of them is alive and undergoing an ancient form of preservation. This is how Sally and I pickle, sprout, and ferment our way through winter. We call it our kitchen garden. It's what we do while the rest of our farm lies fallow in the winter.

Now that people are returning to naturally levened breads (using sourdough starter), naturally fermented wines (using native yeasts already at home on the grapes), and naturally cured meat products like prociutto, why not natural pickle? It's one of the original slow foods.

Somewhere along the way the modern idea that pickling means dousing things you want to preserve with vinegar replaced the original tried-and-true food technology. And the taste. And the texture. And the health benefits that went with it. Anyone who's tasted real brine fermented pickles, sauerkraut, and kimchee knows the difference. Vinegar (usually industrially distilled acetic acid) tastes like the astringent industrial product it is. The shelves of Whole Foods and other wholesome grocers are stocked with vinegary-but-homey-looking products with nice packaging that simply aren't the real dill. Yes, they sometimes use artisanal vinegars (malt, rice, wine). But if you want honest pickle, the kind grandma used to ferment with the help of naturally occurring, age-old, lacto-bacillus in a plain stoneware crock, if you want the softly tart lactic acids with their meaty umami elements and complexity, if you want the same probiotic microbes that make for healthy intestinal flora ... you have to make pickle yourself. Or rather, set it up and let nature do it. Or visit me!

Guided by Meta Givens' classic Encyclopedia of Cooking, I made my first batch of fermented dill pickles from cucumbers, dill and garlic I grew myself while a freshman chemist in college back in 1973. Sauerkraut soon followed. Before that I never cared for either. Since then I have lacto-fermented just about everything I could get my hands on, all self-started with a few spices and a little salt to balance things in favor of the "good" preserving microbes over the bad rotting ones. I am pleased to boast, not one batch has been a failure. A record I can't claim for my wines.

For those of you already on the road to pickle heaven, I do not add whey (from strained yogurt) as every website and blog post on the subject recommends as a failsafe. The reason is whey contains bacteria evolved to turn milk into yogurt.* And while we also ferment our own yogurt, I prefer to pickle with the helpfully evolved bacteria and yeasts already attracted to cabbage, cucumbers, jalepeno peppers, carrots, beets, lemons, onions, limes, garlic, radishes, turnips, daikon, ginger, Brussell sprouts ... you name it!

And what could be greener? They need no refrigeration and keep for months (though refrigeration does prolong the shelf life).

Along with our bubbling pickle (and though it's months before we'll sow a seed in our garden) I plant small crops of alfalfa, radish, arugula, cress, lentil, mung bean and other for tasty sprouts that are literally still growing when they land on our plates. Nothing from a store, no packaged sprout, is as fresh.

Don't get me wrong. Sometimes, I like to sprinkle a little rice wine vinegar on my bean sprouts, and make a pickled salad. I like our homemade wine vinegar -- fermented using the "mother" Giovanni's ancestors started over 500 years ago -- on fresh arugula and braised spinach from our garden. I like it, after steeping hot chilies, on Carolina pulled pork with coleslaw. I like vinegar for what it is -- a condiment and flavoring. And I happen to like a "ploughman's lunch" of cheese, beer, and English mustard pickle (uses malt vinegar). But when I want something crunchy, tart and complex I reach into my tiny briney seas teaming with lactobacillus and pull out a naturally fermented pickle.

*Lacto-pickle strains of: Leuconostoc, (also gives sourdough it's scent), Lactobacillus (other strains in wine, yogurt, most fermented food, a probiotic) and Pediococcus (probiotic also in yogurt, gives buttery character to chardonnay)

** Yogurt: Lactobacillus delbrueckii bulgaricus, Streptococcus salivariusthermophilus, Lactobacillus acidophilus and bifidobacteria.

Green Flame

2011-12-26T10:43:00.002-05:00

I never cease to be fascinated with the way the silver-green boughs and leaves catch fire in the light and flicker in the wind. Olives trees are evergreens, and perhaps the original Christmas tree. And an ancient symbol of peace. That's why our favorite gift to friends and loved ones during the holiday season is oil from our own olives handpicked with care. Peace to all.

Labor of Love

2011-12-07T07:28:00.004-05:00

Sometimes I don't have the time or energy to post because I am so busy pruning the olive trees, managing the grapevines, tending the garden and in general holding back chaos. So here is a short You Tube video that gives a sense of the kind of energy it takes one man to restore and run a 5-acre farm.

A Sense of Legacy

2011-12-01T15:21:00.004-05:00

This shot is taken in the tiny piazza of our tiny village of Montisi. Sally, who took it, has pointed out the similarity in our hands.

The guy with the dangerously slung sickle blade looks a lot like our builder, Claudio Brandini (left), in the eyes. But you be the judge.

The Fruits of My Labor

2011-11-23T16:19:00.005-05:00

Besides the regular bounty harvested mid-November ...

There were these delicious heirloom tomatoes!

Happy Thanksgiving

Joy of Pruning!

2011-11-03T02:13:00.011-04:00

10 minutes after the posting "Joy of Wire," the muffler fell off our ancient Fiat on the way to Sunday lunch with friends. I walked 10 feet away from the car to search in a freshly plowed field for something to tie it back up with temporarily, and found, I'm not kidding, bailing wire. 10 minutes later, we were on our way to lunch.

But pruning. I've just finished all the fruit trees on the property, about 40 of them, not counting our 92 olive trees. This the last round. After this, I will not longer be restoring the suffering abandoned trees that had once been covered in blackberry vines and were being winched to the ground by the dreaded vitalba (summer clematis) vine. I will be maintaining them. No more cycles of trees exhausting themselves with pears, plums, peaches, walnuts, cherries and figs, then being fruitless for 2 or 3 years. No more broken branches overladen with too much tiny fruit. No more fear of falling as I harvest from trees that grew too tall and lanky as they struggled to break through the smothering canopy of vines. Now, I can go out with a small saw and a pair of Falco's in my belt holster and climb into the tree and reach the limbs and fruit without fear of overreaching and blowing a rotator cuff. I do not have to carry a ladder around. The trees look right, now, like grown-up bonsai. All things considered, they will be happier next year than they have been in 20 years. Mission accomplished; the farm has been restored.

Speaking of pruning. These are the last prunes Sally preserved by the age-old and greenest of methods, air drying. Real prunes, from real reclaimed prune trees. Real tasty. In fact, the exclamation point at the end of this sentence doesn't do my reaction to tasting them justice!

Joy of Wire

2011-10-16T03:26:00.005-04:00

It's called the contadino's friend. Baling wire. Trellising wire. There are a thousand uses and re-uses for it.

As I clear the farm I still have to be careful I don't stoop to reach into brambles or weeds and get an eye poked out. In kinky strands, curlicues, and abstract cattle brand-like shapes it lurks everywhere, holding split trees together, anchoring things to the ground, waiting to spring up like a booby trap and zap. I keep finding it. And saving it. And using it. I have re-trellised the vineyard almost entirely with the old wire I have found, splicing rusty lengths together because it looks better among the gnarly trunks of our 40-year-old vines than shiny new galvanized wire would.

To my eye it looks like the raw material for art. Perhaps this is what Calder saw in it too.

Hot Times,Part IV

2011-09-21T02:48:00.009-04:00

The plaster coat! Actually ours is stucco, the same breathable yellow stuff coating part of the house.

The dome's rosy glow is from a dusting of terra cotta dust I saved from cutting our sconces and outdoor pavements from the old roof tiles [pictures].

Have I said I am trying to use EVERYTHING on the property? The sill under the oven door is broken bits of hand made brick, the walls of leftover porotone (extruded terracotta brick) will be faced with broken brick and stone left over from construction and demolition of the old shack.

Did I say that the fuel will be grape vine and olive and fruit wood from all the clean up of the property? Did I say how much the sugars in these woods flavor the cooking? Stay tuned for the first "fire up."

Hot Times, Part III

2011-09-03T22:45:00.002-04:00

The insulation coat. It will hold in the heat. It's 4 inches thick. Clay, sawdust, planer shavings, wild oat straw, and the rest of the Thermite left over from the construction of the base. It's looking more and more like a mud igloo. Just the way it should.

Handmade Things

2011-09-02T01:34:00.005-04:00

Fatto a mano. Italian for handmade.

Speaking of handcrafted things, we harvested the malvasia grapes, the first to ripen in our vineyard, and began to make our first hand-crafted white wine.

Wine, as I do it, is a handmade thing.

Hot Times, Part II

2011-09-01T01:36:00.007-04:00

One thing is certain, a forno is a handmade object.

On Saturday, Sally and I drove Nathan to Rome to catch his flight home just in time to make his connection in Philadelphia, just before Hurricane Irene hit. Unfortunately, that meant he and I didn't have time to pack the clay over the sand dome, or to get the oven to the point where he could bake the pizza he'd hope to make. That will have to wait until his next visit.

Since the oven wasn't going to build itself, I went to work. By foot, in big rubber boots, I mixed clay with sharp builders sand, then I packed it by hand over the wet sand dome Nathan and I had sculpted, to create the 4-inch-thick cupola that forms the oven body. This is the oven's thermal mass. Along with the fire brick floor, it will collects and hold the heat from the fire and radiate it back into the cooking food.

After it had dried for two days, I scooped all the sand out from under the hardening dome. To speed things up a bit, I lit a drying fire. If I'd wanted, I could have cooked pizza, but since the oven will work better with another coat of insulating clay, and will look better and last longer with a final coat of finishing plaster, I'll get things a little more finished before I throw that dinner party.

Hot Times, Part I

2011-08-23T01:03:00.013-04:00

It's been as hot as an oven here, so Sally's nephew, Nathan Silva, and I have been inspired to build a forno, Italian for pizza oven. They are also good for baking bread, roasting meats, cooking casseroles, and a host of other things including curdling yogurt and drying fruit, because they hold heat a long time and cool gradually after firing.

We started the process by clearing the area inside the old farmshack walls of leftovers from the housebuilding process, saving everything that could be reused in the oven, including this old poroton (extruded terracotta block), which we stacked into the walls of the base and reinforced with rebar.

On that we poured a 2-inch thick cement slab, creating the base for the oven floor and the ceiling of the wood storage area.

From a neighbor we obtained some good Tuscan clay, the kind all that terra cotta (cooked earth) tile, brick, and pottery is made from. It starts out gray but ends up red. After Nathan kneaded it with water to the right consistency by foot.

We added wine bottles and Thermolite (heat puffed clay nodules) to create the insulation base on which the oven floor will go.

When that dried, we used a layer of clay and sand to set the fire brick that is the actual pizza cooking surface.

Stuff Wine Lover's Dreams Are Made Of

2011-08-07T23:57:00.003-04:00

I'm talking about grapes, of course. Vitus vinifera, the noble wine grape. Those of you who tuned in to the unfolding saga during our first growing season and vintage last year, are wondering how the vineyard is doing at this stage. You will remember my disastrous battle with the dreaded powdery mildew known to Italian winemakers as oidio. You will remember how we threw 80 to 90 percent of our grapes to the ground, rotten with blight, yet still managed to make some wine. Wine that is turning out to be better than I expected.

This year, there is oidio again. Turns out it is to be expected here in the micro-climate nooks and crannies where grapes grow best, places like our vineyard which has a perfect southern hillside exposure but is pinched between woods that cause the sun to hit it a bit late in the morning. The weather was strange in July, cooler than usual, but humid, which doesn't help. There is good news, however, we have only dropped about 20-30 percent of the crop so far, just about what I'd want to cull to increase the quality of the bunches on the heavy bearing vines anyway. Even better news is, veraison has begun and the grapes are turning red. This is good because the change in grape chemistry at this stage tends to keep the oidio away. I have sprayed the vineyard with copper sulfate (approved organic) for the last time this season. Unfortunately, about 30 minutes after I finished spraying, a thunderstorm drenched the vines. Apparently, enough of that spray stuck and is doing it's job. The grapes are looking good. The weather has improved. Sunny and dry. Cool nights. We have about a month to go. And for now, as the ancient Romans used to say, it's in the laps of the gods.

Feral Cats

2011-08-02T12:06:00.007-04:00

When I first met Giovanni, our neighbor farmer, four years ago, he told me there was a feral cat living in the old farm shack on our property. He advised me to feed it occasionally because it kept the vermin away. I've left it food for the last four years and caught glimpses of it now and then -- a beautiful tiger-striped silver-gray female with an almost oriental face.

This year when I returned to Tana Lepre, she did not show up, but this cat did. I am sure it is one of that older cat's kittens, Three years ago, I was walking down from the olive grove when I heard a strange sound from the bole of a hollow tree where the feral cat had given birth. She was presumably off hunting, when a tiny kitten had climbed out of the bole and fallen down the 4-foot earthen bank from which the tree juts. I picked the tiny thing up and put it back in the bole. There were two other kittens in there mewing away. Two were silver like their mother. One was a "quilty cat," which is what Sally and I call the ubiquitous patchwork feral cats of Tuscany.

Like mother like daughter ... except this cat is much less aloof, probably because she showed up as an adolescent. She has two ways of speaking, meowing and hissing. Mostly she meows, but she sometimes hisses at me when she's hungry. She especially seems to like the sound of Sally and me talking. It's taken 3 months for her to inch closer and not run away every time we move. She joins us for meals and gets all kinds of tasty snacks, including cat kibble. Lately, she's begun to eat right under us at the table, inside or out. And when she's still hungry after emptying her bowl, she tells me by running under me and rubbing my legs with her back and tail. I reach down and try to pet her sometimes as she eats, but she always starts and jumps. The first time I tried, she bolted into the woods, now she just pulls back and looks up at me like she's going to hiss.

This morning I woke up to find she had climbed up our roof, onto our balcony, come into our bedroom through our open french doors, and slept on the floor just below me. She still won't let us pet her but, like the fogs around here, she's creeping closer on little cat feet.

Her home is under our solar panels, which shelter her from sun and rain. The locals think it's funny when I call the panels a cat house in Italian. Here she is on "Cat-henge."

Lettuce in July

2011-07-24T04:28:00.001-04:00

Lettuce is a cool weather vegetable better suited to spring and fall than the blasting African heat of Tuscan summers. But I planted several varieties in the partial shade of the prune and fig trees lining our orto (kitchen garden) and we are still eating them. Like most things fresh from a garden, this lettuce is particularly sweet and "lettucy" tasting, not a hint of bitterness. Because enzymes start turning sugars and soft tissue to starch and cellulose the minute you pick ANYTHING, you can't get anything like this in ANY grocery store or market.

Coming soon: Corn, beets, tomatoes, melons...

A Farmer's Worst Nightmare

2011-07-11T00:42:00.007-04:00

It's the leading cause of farm fatalities and it makes farming one of the three most dangerous occupations in the United States. It usually happens when your load shifts, or you misjudge the angle of a hillside or the stability of ground after rain. Sometimes the tractor just gets out of control. Sometimes it hits something it shouldn't. Worst of all is when it rolls over on you.

I was tilling the steeper part of the vineyard, on the slope Sally dubbed Stairmaster because of the burn we get in our butts when we ascend it, when I hit a root and the Bertolini flipped over, throwing me over the handlebars and smashing me into a row of grapevines. While it's true the Bertolini walking tractor has only two iron wheels, it qualifies as moderately heavy machinery nonetheless, especially when it lands on you. This picture hardly does the bruise justice, but what looks like the scar left from an angel wing removal, is the imprint of the handlebar that slammed me down.

Stupid, stupid, stupid is how I feel about the accident. And stupid is how I felt as I called out for help, hoping the kid running the whining diciespulietore (weed whacker) in the distance would eventually turn it off and hear me hollering. When he finally did, he came running to find me snarled in a vine trellis and unable to get the beast off my back. It took all his strength to get it off me, and both of ours to turn it upright. The good news is I made a nice cushion for the tractor, so it was undamaged. I was lucky, I escaped with only a bruised torso. I shudder to think what would have happened if I'd caught a hand or foot in the tiller blades.

An honest admission: It was a very hot afternoon, and heat hampers Jack's ability to think clearly, making him rash and accident prone. Tuscan Resolution #3: Make no serious decisions of any kind in the heat, especially when it comes to heavy equipment.

This afternoon it is 100 degrees in Tuscany. I am driving nothing more than my laptop in front of a fan.

Frivolous Vintages

2011-07-04T14:14:00.005-04:00

Today Sally and I are celebrating more than independence with the first ready wine of our bottled 2010 vintage. The rosato (rose`) which I've named Frivolo (Frivolous), because it was an afterthought, was meant to be a carefree and easy drinking summer thirst-quencher, but turned out better than I expected by a lot. It is fruity, lots of cherry and raspberry on the tongue and roses and violets on the nose. And not one hint of the dreaded oidio (powdery mildew)!!!! It is more complex than most rose's I've tasted, yet is refreshing and best served chilled like others in the genre. I'm thinking Tavel.

After we harvested the perfectly ripe grapes for the main crush, there were slightly less ripe clusters I didn't want to waste, so we made a second harvest to ferment a less alcoholic wine that I was thinking of bottling as a sparkling wine. Left on the skins for only 1 day, this wine should have been pinker, less red, but a few bunches of colorato (used only to add deeper color) got into the batch, hence an almost burgundian density that is quite pretty in the glass.

The sad part of the story is that most of the wine escaped down the drain when I bumped the 14 gallon demijohn it was fermenting in. The happy part is that a hunch paid off.

I did lay down 3 bottles with champagne corks and a tiny addition of sugar that will restart the fermentation and carbonate the wine naturally. If it works, you can bet I'll be making more pink Tuscan "bubbly" next year.

Happy Birthday America! I'm looking at you through rose' colored glasses!

Fool Moon: Or Flock Amok

2011-06-20T12:23:00.005-04:00

It was my first relaxing day off the farm since arriving in April. Sally and I had spent the whole afternoon in sybaritic splendor with publicist Sally Fischer, her husband Eliot and son Jack, eating, drinking, swimming, chatting at Il Falconiere, just below the ancient Etruscan city of Cortona. Then it was off to Il Molino for dinner. We were dipping our biscotti in vin santo when the kitchen staff rushed through the restaurant saying “something is strange with the moon.” Outside, we stood together in front of the old mill invoking Galileo and gazing up at an unexpected treat -- a total eclipse of the moon. As the first sliver of smoky moon began to re-silver, we bid our buona notes and Sally and I drove back to Tana Lepre to view the end of the eclipse from our balcony.

We never made it to the balcony.

At the stroke of midnight the celestial event was just ending as we drove up to find a note from the caretakers at Romitorio -- the villa perched at the top of our dell and our only other visible neighbor -- taped to our front door. “Something is wrong,” it said. “Your sheep have escaped. Now they are in our garden. Please come get them as soon as you can!”

Romitorio has recently become the property of Virgine Saverys, who runs Avignonesi, one of the biggest wine labels in Italy and the world. We hadn’t met yet, but I could just imagine the damage the munching sheep might be doing to her shrubbery, and the scene when we finally do met: “Oh! So you’re the one with the sheep!”

It is one thing to keep sheep penned inside an electric fence that tickles their noses when they touch it. It’s quite another to herd them. Especially when you’ve never herded anything before. Especially at night. Especially when your darned flashlight won’t work. Especially when you have no idea how to get a flock of anything to turn right or left, or to stop.

When we moved them from the lower field to the olive grove in broad daylight, Ulisse’s Albanese sheep wrangler, Simi, used a bucket full of grain to entice them along. I had no grain. But I did have two boxes of Fitness, a multigrain breakfast flake, in the pantry. As I drove the kilometer up to Romitorio, Sally dumped the Fitness into a bucket.

We found the sheep milling around by the villa’s front gate. Natalie, the caretaker, said they’d been walking down the white road. She was very sweet about it all. I wanted to kiss her for not letting them run all the way to Siena. But I had miles to go before I slept, so we moved ‘em up and headed 'em out.

With Sally driving the car as “pusher” and illuminating the way with the headlights, I walked the sheep down the road trying to interest them in the Fitness, which they couldn’t have cared less about. They were nervous as hell in the moonlight and suddenly they took off running. Thankfully, they follow roads like, well, sheep, which made chasing them somewhat easier than it could have been if they’d just decided to cut across the fields. Eventually outrunning them, I threw out my arms and blocked them. They turned back, started running, and when they got to Sally’s blockade at the junction, turned down our little country lane.

There were several more junctions to turn in this manner – them taking off, me outrunning them, me throwing out my arms and shimmying ugga-booga, them turning like scared sheep, them running up to the headlights like scared sheep, Sally opening the car door and shimmying ugga-booga, and them turning in the direction we wanted. One more turn to go.

This time they simply overshot the turn and charged up the steep hill of alfalfa behind our farm. I charged off after them, Sally’s fading voice became a squeak in the moonlight: “Where are you? Where’d you go?” “Go home!” I yelled. There was nothing more she could do.

After stumbling through deeply furrowed ground pocked with a mine field of calf-deep wild boar rooting holes, I found the flock halfway up the massive slope. Thank goodness the moon was full, the sky cloudless, and some of the sheep white. Thank goodness I didn’t bust an ankle. And now, I began to learn a fundamental law to the art of herding of sheep. You do not herd a flock of individuals., you influence a blob, a big wooly amoeba that oozes this way and that. The trick is to anticipate the direction it is about to ooze in, then try to steer the portion showing directional intent with your firm presence.

By about 2:00 a.m., after munching crop circles through Giovanni’s alfalfa, I half expected the flock to lie down and start chewing cud, and I’d resolved that I’d just sit down and spend the night wherever they stopped, just like a real pastore. But I’d gotten the hang of keeping the blob moving and finally managed to get them into our olive grove at the top of the hill.

I called out to Sally and she heard me. Probably half of Tuscany heard me. When came up the hill carrying a hurricane lantern burning a candle, she looked like the French Lieutenant’s Woman, except that the lantern was from IKEA. The sheep and I were tired but we were closer than I’d actually hoped to be. But when I unhooked part of the fence to usher them through, they hugged the shade of an olive tree to stay out of the bright moonlight, and refused to budge. This is where thinking like a sheep came in handy.

The thing is: besides the plants they ceaselessly seek, sheep relate first and foremost to the butts of other sheep. If they see one a wooly haunch receding, they move almost automatically to close the distance. There is even a mathematical formula for this, I’m sure: The anxiety of a sheep increases in direct proportion to the distance between its nose and the rump of the next sheep. All I had to do to take advantage of this universal law, was grab the fleecy head of one of the biggest sheep, and walk it toward our destination. When the others saw it’s rump receding they followed, and with Sally flapping her arms at stragglers, I pulled the flock the last leg home.

After repairing the part of the fence mysteriously wide open (did someone do this as a joke?), and switching the electric fence back on, we went down to the house and drew a bath. Then, for the first time ever, I shuttered the bedroom windows against the bright light of the fool moon. Even then it was hard to sleep. Because I’d neglected to do a head count, I counted sheep over and over in my dreams, wondering if I’d gotten them all back, if little lambs really do eat ivy, and just what their lives would be like now that these lambs had tasted freedom.

Living Lawn Mowers

2011-06-10T08:49:00.002-04:00

The loaner lambs from Podere Il Casale arrived last week. Fourteen, 6-month-old walking fertilizer factories. In one week they cleared the small field, now more a meadow, just below the house. Now they are up in the olive grove munching away and removing the fire hazard. I won’t have to pay to have the ground mowed or tilled this year, and this pleases me.

Unlike the claims of Hollywood western cowboys, sheep don’t eat everything down to nubs. They are very selective. And they aren’t noisy. OK, yeah, they’re a little stinky when they get wet in the rain, but that’s OK way out in the field.

Wild Starts

2011-05-31T08:23:00.007-04:00

Two posts ago, I said I like yeast and I meant it. Three months ago, I visited my good friends Eric Fischl and April Gornik at their Long Island home. Eric, ordinarily a renowned painter and founding curator of the American Now & Here show (which opened in Kansas City last month and will now travel around the US), had gotten into baking bread using wild homemade sourdough starter. The kind that has been used forever, by Romans, Frenchmen, and western pioneers, but has been replace in the last century by industrial yeast powder (the way real soup stock got replaced by boullion cubes). It’s also the gooey basis for bread therapy.

I must say the olive loaf Eric shared was divine. It was based on the recipe from the Tartine Bread Book, written by Chad Robertson of the famous bay area bakery/cafe, where Eric and April had eaten a meal and become inspired. As a belated Christmas gift, they gave me a copy.

A few weeks later, Sally and I were visiting our friends Michael Pollan and Judith Belzer at their Berkley, California home. Michael was baking bread to research a chapter on fermented foods for his next book-n-progress. It happened to be sourdough. It happened to be reminiscent of the Tartine inspired loaves Eric pulled from his oven. When I mentioned the book I’d just been given, he pulled a flour-coated copy from the counter and said that’s what he’d been using (with a little mentoring from the author himself.) That night we tasted a loaf of actual Tartine bread beside a fresh loaf of Michael’s. Sorry Tartine, I liked Michael’s a tad better (more sour, like what I grew up with).

I made my first sourdough bread, from starter, when I was 14 and growing up in Folsom, California. But I gave up fermenting wheat when I began fermenting grapes into wine and concocting savory main courses to go with the result. There’s only so much time in the world. And I could get all the fresh San Francisco sourdough I wanted at the time.

But this is a blog about Tuscany, where there is nothing bland except one thing: its bread. It is, the blandest bread in the world, leavened or un-. No salt. Certainly no wild sourdough starter. Even the air holes have more flavor than the dough. It’s virtue, and its claim to fame, is that it is the perfect neutral base (think wallpaper paste) for respectfully and unintrusively soaking up sauces. One thing it decidedly is not is sandwich bread.

I like sandwiches. A lot.

So, pulling my Christmas gift Tartine book from my bag when I got back to Tana Lepre a month ago, I started a batch of starter [pictured above]. It is something like I made in my California youth, but with good wild Tuscan yeasts and bacteria doing their job on the fine, but bland, Italian flour. For 3 weeks I “trained” my starter, teaching it to rise and deflate on schedule with its daily feeding of new flour. Then I went to work.

There is nothing like a travertine dining table as a workbench for shaping loaves.

Here is the result. Thumpin’ good crust, yeasty perfume, chewy texture. Now I’m going to go make that sandwich!

[all loafs by Jack]

The Beast

2011-05-10T08:31:00.007-04:00

It kicks, bites, pulls, plows, balks, and handles like a mule. It takes all my upper body strength to start with a pull rope, but once that diesel is thumping, it can till all day without pause. It’s cantankerous on rough ground, a bear to turn corners, and can rip your arms off if you don’t pay attention. It’s the Italian invention that helped put Italian agriculture back on its feet after WWII. It’s the Bertolini walking tractor. I’ve always wanted one!

Actually, Ulisse loaned me his to prepare my garden soil, which I’m giving him half to use. This is our barter system. I give the land, water, attention to the crops, he plants what he wants on his half and harvests it when its ready. In return Sally and I get a melon and a tomato or two and the satisfaction of knowing our once defunct farm is producing even more in this world of dwindling resoursces and rampant population growth. It also just makes the place look tidier.

Before I tilled, I had to mow the tall grass with my trusty scythe. Here is what it looked like. before.

The Sweet (And Slightly Yeasty) Taste of Patience

2011-05-01T07:44:00.004-04:00

This glass of wine is murky because this is what was left after I spent the morning racking (siphoning) our wines from the 2010 vintage – our very first! I don’t mind tasting a little yeast when it tells me things about the wine (and tastes a little like bread/beer, which I also like). If the wine tastes good with the yeast, it should taste even better without it!

It took until noon to rack the 46 gallons of wine that have been sitting quietly in the dark underground garage since we left in late December. Of the four different cuvee, in increasing order of extraction and intensity, the rosato (rose’ juice left on skins only a few hours), salasso (juice strained without before being put in the press after 5 days), free run (what ran freely from the press when juice and skins were ladled in after 7 days fermenting), and press wine (what came out of the press when pressure was applied to that), all were siphoned off the lees (yeast sludge) in the bottoms of their demijohns and into new ones on the shelf. No mishaps this time! No broken demijohns! No lost wine!

When I started the process around 8:00 o’clock this morning, I was concerned about the rotten egg smells of sulfur from the salasso demijohn and alarmed to find that Alesio, the kid who looked after the wines during the winter, had poured paraffin oil, not sterile sulfite water, into the fermentation lock (which he also broke) and also on top of the wine. What a mess! I had to be extra diligent and sanitary.

On tasting samples from each of the four different wines – each an experiment to see just what our grapes, vinified using various ancient techniques, would give me – I found them interesting and delicious in their own ways. Most happily, there was no sign of the dreaded “horse blanket “or “wet dog” taint associated with the dreaded oidio plague or with the brett infecting my neighbor Giovanni’s wine (which he doesn’t seem to notice).

The rosato was fruity and fresh and will be refreshing during the summer heat! The others exhibited graduated intensities of red fruit from a palette of raspberry, cherry, strawberry plum, rose, violet and spice, with balancing hints of the slightly meaty-mushroomy savoriness I associate with umame (and find in my favorite Rhone wines). More Burgundy/Beaujolais styled, rather than Bourdeax-Rhone, these wines should age nicely in the short run. And though this year I don’t think I will age any of them on wood, they should drink nicely for the next 4 or 5 years when bottled, with food and without it.

Encouraged so far, I may go for a “big red” this year.

Saluti!

Returns!

2011-04-30T08:17:00.004-04:00

Finally, I am back at Tana Lepre after a long Friday afternoon drive out of Rome, which is swamped with pilgrims come for Pope’s John Paul’s beatification. It has just rained and the air is sweet and green and, as the sun is about to set beneath cantilevered silver clouds, there is an explosion of song by birds I’ve never heard before. And this!

Last year I threw a few California poppy seeds on the bank in the front of the house. These are the result! They are the color of Italian egg yolks.

Already the cuckoo is mocking me from its tree.

Returns

2011-04-26T08:54:00.002-04:00

Today I am packing to return to Tana Lepre (Hare's Den). Tomorrow, I will be at Cinecitta Studios in Rome, for the opening of their new film museum!

Wilkommen, Bienvenue, Welcome....

2011-04-10T11:59:00.004-04:00

Well, I'm finally packing to return to Tana Lepre (Hare's Den). One reason I'm late getting back this year is I wanted to stay in New York for the opening of a Broadway musical whose title most Italians would appreciate. In this revival of the depression era extravaganza, Anything Goes, our dear friend Joel Grey plays Moonface Martin. He's not just one of the world's most gifted stage and screen performers, he's a darn good photographer. Here he is doing his darndest to upstage Sutton Foster in the sparing number "Friendship."

This Monday, he'll be honored with an eponymous exhibition by The Museum of the City of New York. It also happens to be his birthday.

Happy Birthday Moonface!

Win-Win Sharecropping

2011-03-04T11:30:00.008-05:00

Being a writer married to a photographer and having wonderful friends in the arts and sciences means I get to do some pretty cool things. For instance, I remember sitting opposite renaissance funny man Steve Martin in his limo immediately following the Broadway opening of his play “Picasso At The Lapin Agile” as he cracked, a little nervous about reviews, “I’m still just the son of a poor sharecropper.”

What does this have to do with Tuscany, you're wondering?

Sharecropping is still alive here in Tuscany, but not in the way you would think. Besides the fact that the feudal mezzadria (half-sharing) system wasn’t outlawed until 1964 -- which makes almost anyone still farming in Italy literally the sons and daughters of poor sharecroppers -- there are those of us who think an updated version of crop sharing might hold promise, especially in these times when “think global, act local” is the viable path toward sustainability, stability and health.

I’m one of those people. So is Pienza-based cheese maker Ulisse of Podere il Casale. By virtue of being abandoned for over 10 years, our farm is certifiably "organic," so I call the new system we are setting up mezzadria biologica -- organic crop-sharing. It starts with the kind of barter I spoke of in my "Bragging Rights", post about giving away our plums in return for a case of the delicious plum preserves they were transformed into. The next step was when Sally contacted Ulisse, a Swiss cheesemaker over by Pienza and he brought his team of WWOOF volunteers to help harvest our olives. For this service he took half the oil, our best vintage yet. It was a great deal we plan to continue because till now we've only been able to harvest half our trees ourselves anyway. In the end we got a cheese credit as well!

What is WWOOF, but a form of sharecropping? Unlike today's internships, where college grads become unpaid slave-apprentices hoping to get offered a job, Wwoofers give labor in trade for education, room and board in beautiful locales like ours. Everyone is happy in the end.

Now, I am in talks with Ulisse to sharecrop our large orto (garden) in exchange for his products, and perhaps to graze his sheep on our fallow wheat field. The sheep will improve the soil with their manure and keep noxious weeds down, while enjoying free-range health. And I won't have to mow!

But just as good as its practical win-win economics, neuroscientists are now finding that the pleasure centers of our brains light up when we share, making sharecropping a feel-good thing to do.

Town & Country

2011-02-27T09:18:00.011-05:00

It is hard blogging about the farm when I am away from it for the winter. This is why my posts tend to thin a bit once I've returned to New York in January. I just don't have the callus-building hands-on daily experience to write from. So, I will continue to write about what I know and experience in contrast to my life on the farm. Which means a little bit more about the gentleman in the gentleman farmer. So here goes.

Sally and I do the New York-Tuscany shuffle. We do not disagree with anyone who says we have the best of both worlds. But right now the farm is asleep. The new wine is quiescent in the cool cantina. The new olive oil is thick as green lard in the cans. In two months the oil will thin and settle, the wine will fizz once again, and the buds on the prune and peach trees will pop. And I will be there for it. But right now who is Jack without all this?

Sometimes I feel like Forrest Gump, a super-lucky nobody among somebodies. Imagine me at my friend Jean Pagliuso's opening of her "Poultry & Raptor Suites" at the Marlborough Gallery a few nights ago. Jean renders exquisite black and white portraits of seemingly unlikely subjects until you see them and realize the personality in each once it's rendered on specially prepared mulberry paper.

The subject (above) and the work.

I took my friend, Italian movie producer Roberto Bessi (Ladyhawke, A Good Woman, Modigliani, etc.), to the opening. He has been here the last four days, drumming up interest in several projects we are developing together, including a romantic comedy based on my experience reclaiming the abandoned Tuscan farm.

Afterwards, Sally, Roberto, and I went to a cozy after party at the home of Jean and her husband Tommy Cohen, where Roberto pretty quickly struck up a conversation with an old acquaintance, Jeremy Irons. I was also able to reconnect with many of the people I missed over the 9 months I was working on the farm, including Managing Editor at Sports Illustrated, Terry McDonell, amazing figurative painter Eric Fischl and his wife, landscape painter April Gornik. Susan Minot, Bryan Hunt, surgeon-author Jerry Imber, and other friends were there, as well. Thanks Jean and Tommy for a bright night in a long cold winter.

Sometimes I can't believe my life. When I'm not doing what I love on the farm, I'm doing what I love in the city that never sleeps. Farmer Jack is one very lucky gentleman.

Thumbs Up

2011-02-24T08:38:00.006-05:00

I thought I knew my anatomy. It took a vineyard to teach me I don't have a single muscle in my fingers. That's right. Fingers are all bone and cartilage and sinew. A puppet master system of tendons sliding through sheaths of fixed tissue, so called "cables and pulleys," makes our hands work. Only when tugged by muscles in the palm and forearm do the strings that run to the tips of our fingers give us grip.

Most people know about a grip related repetitive stress problem called carpal tunnel syndrome. This involves pinching a nerve in the wrist. And of course there's arthritis of the joints. But there's another problem that arises when the connective tubes or tendons at the base of the fingers gets inflamed. It sounds like something cold war spies used to get. I got my "trigger finger" (of the thumb) from the mundane, repetitive, meditative activity of pruning thousands of grapevine stems.

Let's hope the shot of cortisone and the splint and some time off for winter do the trick. I have to get back and get the fruit trees pruned before bud break.

Hand Language

2011-01-19T09:11:00.009-05:00

Everyone knows Italians speak a lot with their hands. But what do they mean when they gesture? Some things are obvious. Grab the crotch to keep away the devil when you see something bad, flick your chin with your fingers at someone who is an insufferable bore in the north or to say "can't park here" in the south. There are some naughty ones that involve fists and fingers, and some very sweet ones like waving with a beckoning backwards clap of one hand (Italian zen for "Come back soon!").

Here is our dear friend Gianni Marriotti, captured by Sally. It may look like he's describing a really big truffle he found, but he and I were discussing the fine points of living well and the importance of remembering the past. He is talking about connecting to what is deep and fundamental and keeping story alive.

Here it looks like he's telling me how I could grow really big tomatoes if I traded a few to a farmer for some good manure, but he is really talking about the advantages of the non cash-based barter system that was in place in rural Tuscany until very recently, and how it kept dealings honest.

It may look like he's talking about what it takes to be president of the United States of America, but he's really talking about what it takes to enjoy life -- family and friends.

This is not what you think. He is talking about what makes Gianni Gianni.

And it is this, the talk, with hands or without hands, but definitely with friends, that makes living well, in Italy and anywhere else, living positively and optimistically, with one palm up in an attitude of grateful receiving, and one toward the heart in sincerity.

Giovanni's Hog

2010-12-31T09:35:00.004-05:00

I'm a little jet-lagged, having just returned to New York.

One of the reasons I stayed in Italy until the last day of the year was to participate in one of the most important and certainly the last of agricultural rituals in the annual cycle of rural Tuscan life -- the slaughtering of the family hog.

I'd waited for nearly a year and in November, when I asked Giovanni when it would happen, he answered in his raspy Tuscan dialect: "Around Natale (Christmas), maybe Capo d'Anno (New Year's Day). It has to be cold."

I said I wanted to help him do it, wanted to experience it alongside him and to document it. I asked him to promise he'd let me know when it would happen. He grinned at this. It wasn't his usual Errol Flynn "Welcome to Sherwood!" grin, but a limper, more introspective version. I now understand the enigma in that look.

Thinking the event was imminent because the weather had been unusually cold, Sally and I stopped by a few days before Christmas to ask when the slaughter would take place. Giovanni looked a little sheepish, then said it was already done. I asked when he'd done it and he said just that morning. The meat was hanging from the tractor boom in the barn. We could see it for ourselves if we wanted.

What we found suspended in the barn were two identical slabs of pork with the last bit of blood dripping from the cloven snout. Giovanni had introduced me to this same white hog one year earlier, just as I was starting this blog. He fed it corn and petted its snout and spoke sweetly to it. Milena fed it slops from her kitchen. It lived in a very nice pigsty, actually a small house with windows and a tile roof which it shared with another black hog. When I asked how much food was hanging there, Giovanni said half of the carcass would feed his family for half the year, the other half would feed his cousin's family for just as long. Then I asked why he hadn't alerted me so I could participate.

Giovanni dropped his voice apologetically. His eyes moistened slightly. "E brutto," he muttered. It's ugly. He meant the slaughter.

I understood. It is a very personal thing. He hadn't really wanted me to watch as he spoke softly to to the hog, saying his thankful good byes before he shot it in the head. I respect this very much. I hadn't helped raise this animal. I hadn't fed it scraps from my own table. Giovanni and Milena and Arnaldo really live with their animals. They treat them well while they are alive, then they kill them as humanely as possible to put food on their table. I'm sure there are struggles and messes and mistakes, just as there are when we raise our own children, but it's a natural permacultural cycle involving interdependently evolved domestic animals (us and them) both of whom -- at least in the case of close-to-the-land folk like the Mangiavacchis -- enjoy a far higher standard of living, and in many cases longer and healthier lives, than they would if disconnected from their hosts in the wild. Which brings me to my New Year's thought.

Without connection, there can be no respect. Yet most of us in the developed world live at a disconnect to the food we put in our bodies. We think meat is something that comes from a supermarket and most of us who eat it don't even know we are unplugged. Some of us stop eating it when we realize it was once a living animal -- a reactive and equal disconnect in many ways. The fact is, with the exception of rock-eating extremophile bacteria, every living creature must eat living things to live. Even plants depend on the nitrogen that comes from animal kingdom protein, some of it from us when we die and re-enter the planet-wide cycle of life (if we haven't stingily pickled ourselves and hermetically sealed our nutrients in aluminum coffins). I'm sure some people have already looked at the picture above and thought it repellant and stopped reading. For those who haven't, I want to say it is a portrait of the admirable and connected conscientiousness Giovanni and his family practice. And a reminder that, whether or not we chose to sustain ourselves by eating animal flesh, we could all stand to be more connected and to better respect the living things that die to keep us living in this amazing worldwide ecological niche we human beings occupy and share.

Happy New Year, Earthlings!

Snow!

2010-12-26T05:22:00.001-05:00

Merry Christmas Everyone!

A Big Fiasco Fiasco!

2010-12-18T11:48:00.009-05:00

I've always loved that winery aroma. Now our garage is full of it.

Last night we had un disastro, un catastrofo, un incidente internazionale stratosferico, It was a big fiasco, literally. That’s what these gigantic, fig-shaped, green glass flasks are. They are also thinner than I imagined in places. I learned this the sad way as we were racking (siphoning) the last of the wine that needed to come off its lees from the 54 liter (14.25 gallon) demijohns.

Because a full demijohn weighs 130 sloshing pounds, which is more than my back cares for me to lift from ground level, my procedure is to rack half the wine into its next home (another demijohn), then rack the rest into a smaller 25 liter demijohn, to be poured into the bigger one once it is lifted up back onto the shelf. All went well during the two back and hand cramping hours clutching the siphon tubes, and I’d lifted the last half-full 65 pound demijohn of rosato onto the shelf. Then I decided to adjust it an inch. Just and inch. Just a little nudge. It kissed the demijohn next to it, just touched, and suddenly fruity red rosato was gushing out and swirling like blood around our ankles. I was lucky I didn’t cut myself.

Sally had blinked and missed the glassy kiss. She started to cry. “What am I looking at?”

I was too numb to answer.

Luckily, I was able to pour what was left from the broken demijohn into the smaller demijohn and nearly fill it. We topped it off with two bottles of local rosato and a little bit of press wine from a smaller jug, then corked it with a fermentation lock and started mopping. Happily, we still have 150 or so liters of wine left (180 bottles). Even more happily, we tasted the racked wine, a red and the pink rosato, and found them both complex, fruity, and likeable, even for “green” wine.

I already have my New Year’s resolution: We’re fermenting the next vintage in stainless steel!

Scoundrels & Honest Men

2010-12-16T03:22:00.007-05:00

Apologies, again, for being slow to post, but this time it’s because we’ve been ripped-off. Not by an Italian, but an Englishman. In fact in all our dealings getting the house built and the farm restored, we can only point to one person who has taken money from us dishonestly. In this case, it’s the man we paid $2500 to provide us with internet service that was crappy and slow at best, and is now non-existent. And now he’s trying to extort another $1500 from us to get it running again. Because this was the worst service by the most unprofessional person we have ever experienced, and because he does business in Tuscany and Italy, I am worried there will be other victims. It would be irresponsible of me not to offer FAIR WARNING to anybody in Tuscany or Italy, or anywhere else in the world, to think thrice before doing business with this man and to offer more detail to anyone who asks.

What I'd rather talk about is the kind of simple everyday honesty Sally and I have found all around us here in Tuscany. This door is a symbol of it to me. It is the front door to the old sharecropper’s shack whose lower walls are still intact outside our kitchen. I saved it from demolition because it is beautiful and has wabi-sabi, the patina of life lived about it. I’ve tried to find a use for it, but when Gianni Marriotti -- the first Tuscan to befriend us when Sally taught her first photo workshop here 15 years ago -- said he liked it, I offered it to him.

Like me, Gianni is a pack rat of rustic things. He knows where to find valuable discards and can see the aesthetic appeal and usefulness of junk with no apparent life left in it. He reads the story in patinas, dings and scars -- past and future. He calls it a game, but he is an artist. For him it’s the story that counts.

For instance, we now have a door for our downstairs closet. It has a notch out of the bottom corner that made Sally want to reject when he first showed it to us. Then he pointed to the tooth marks, the tiny gratings of a hungry Italian country mouse during the winter famine of ’44 that everyone blamed on Mussolini. “We’ll take it! I said.

We’ve received many gifts from Gianni, and paid for a few. That’s because he has engaged us in his barter system. I now have a beautiful contadino’s knife for my belt. A friend of his, an artisanal saddle maker, created this beautiful robber’s bag for me out of a bit of wool army horse blanket from the first World War, a silk pillow case from a palazzo in Siena, bits of horse tack once used by butteri (the famous Maremma cowboys), and an old military grain sack. It was a steal. So was this table that a friend of his made years ago. And so were the set of handmade contadino farmhouse chairs that go much better with our kitchen table than the plastic IKEA things we were using last week.

So here we were, standing before the door I was going to trade Gianni for many of the wonderful things and stories he has brought into our lives. He looked at the door longingly, taking time to point out the details, the small repairs of tin patched over the years, the amazing red color, each item an unspoken anecdote attached. He asked if I was sure I wanted to give away so much storia. I said yes and started to lift the heavy chestnut slab to take it to his truck. That’s when he stopped me and said, all in Italian of course: “If you ask me, it’s a crime to remove this door from this property. You must find a way to use it here. The only way I could take it from here is if you have absolutely no doubt that there is not some way to use it as a table, a foot board for your bed, or even as a door or a decoration."

Suffice it to say he had cast the doubt and had cast it like a man of principal. He drove away with the bed of his pick-up truck empty that night and our house all the fuller of treasures he had brought, material and not. Gianni Marriotti is an honest man.

Burning Things

2010-11-24T03:59:00.005-05:00

I get a kick out of burning wood. I like the way it warms our house, cooks our food, and brightens our walls. I especially like burning the scraps and rubbish left from building our house and restoring the property, like the way it makes our 5 acres tidier and safer to walk around.

Sally has just reminded me that when I fish, I take pains to use every part of the fish I catch and kill. “Like an Indian,” she says. The same goes for wood. The wood from clearing the land of “weed trees.” The wood from pruning the fruit and nut and olive trees and grape vines back to health. The wood scraps left by the Brandinis in rubbish piles around the house. And the worm eaten scrap ends of the beams, runners, shutters and sills from the old capanna (sharecropper’s shack). I respect it all like an Indian does a deer.

From the end of one of the old cypress beams, I used a puny crosscut saw to hand-cut the 4 massive legs that now hold up our rustic-elegant travertine dinning table.

From the ceiling and floor runners (corrente) I fashioned the outside dining table that now sits under the cane and castagna (chestnut) I pegged and lashed together into our shade-giving pergola. Two shutters perched on ancient hand made bricks serve as our front and back porch benches. With what’s left after that, I plan to make end tables, bookshelves, and other useful things. But from the rotten saw ends and worm eaten bits left over from this constructive recycling I am staying warm and heating a kettle for a cup of delicious Pu-er tea.

Carbon footprint? One way or the other this wood already has one. Left to rot or buried in a dump, it would give up its stored carbon as methane, a much worse greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. So burning it efficiently is the lesser of evils, especially when it saves us from burning propane fossil fuel delivered by a gas powered delivery truck, or from heating with electricity generated by a coal-fired power plant.

Air Pollution? Except for a small puff when I light it, there is no smoke visible from our insulated copper chimney. All the big carbon molecules are broken down into simple water and CO2.

Efficiency? The wood I am burning right now has warmed me thrice: Once when I labored to gather it, once when I cut and stacked it, and now as it dances with flame. Its smoke is sweet from plant sugars, salty from my sweat, and complex from the alchemy of the hearth. Till now, besides the sun through our windows, our super efficient Morso 6140 exhaust gas recycling wood stove has been our only source of heat. Only today, after returning to our shuttered house after a week away at Paris Photo, have I turned on the riscaldamento sottopavimento (under floor heating system) to help bring things up to speed. Ours runs on solar heated water and a tiny bit of propane when that is not enough. Usually it is. The rest of the time we only use it to keep the house at a baseline temperature and top off what we need with wood. In this way, in our small house, which is no more than we need, we use no more space, electricity, gas, or water than necessary. And in this way, we are leaving the faintest outline of a footprint rimmed with carbon.

Another thing I like: kindling fires with drafts of what I write.

Mushrooms, Chestnuts & Truffles!

2010-11-12T01:30:00.006-05:00

From the chestnut forest of Monte Amiata, and from the woods around our house, come some of my favorite hunting, gathering, and eating experiences. And they happen at this time of year!

A few days ago we got Giacomo, one of Montisi's five registered truffle hunters, to take us out with his faithful poodle Kika.

Within five minutes, Kika was sniffing and pawing a small patch of ground like a real truffle hound . Then Giacomo took over.

After a few more minutes of digging with his harpoon shaped spade and sniffing fistfulls of earth, Giacomo had unearthed a respectable 40 gram truffle.

A perfect serving for two over scrambled eggs, baked potatoes, or our favorite, taggliatele with sage butter. Don't forget the Barolo!

Apologies & The Last Big Thing

2010-11-02T05:46:00.010-04:00

Sorry for not posting more frequently, everyone. I was kinda busy.

Last weekend was our village of Montisi's festival celebrating the first pressings of the new olive oil. For me this represents the peak of the harvest season around here and invokes 5 little words that really get me salivating: Chestnuts, Mushrooms, Oil, Wine and Truffles. Today, let's talk about oil. Extra virgin. Green gold as Homer called it.

Harvesting and milling the olives from our 90 oil producing trees was the last big thing I had on my list of projects for this year. It's a lot of work and usually Sally, I, and our friends Russell and Momo can only manage about half the trees in one long weekend. But this year, thanks to our newest friends, Swiss cheese makers Ulisse and Sandra of agrotorismo Podere Il Casale and their WWOOF (World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms) volunteers, we got every olive hand picked in 4 smart days.

But first, Sally and I harvested our 3 trees of meatier green curing olives which I like to treat in lye baths. In two weeks we and our lucky friends will be enjoying them as appetizers. The smaller salt-cured olives (black) will take about a month before I'm using them in savory lemon chicken in brodo and in tagines.

On Saturday, Sally and I scooted off to the village piazza for a lunch of polenta and faro soup while Swiss harvesters Christina, Louise, and Minh (who is part Vietnamese), Americans Jake and Ben of Wisconsin, and Italian Adriana of Castelmuzio, the next village over, carried on. By 4:30 they were finishing up and I was hauling the 40 pound crates of olives, six at a time down the hill in the motorized mule of my Ape, grateful to each of them for their diligent work because a big storm front was moving in.

I had gotten our nets folded and put away and was sipping a glass of wine on the front bench savoring what was supposed to be the last of the rays of sun we’d see for 4 or 5 days, when Sally hollered down from upstairs. “What is that in the field?” I hurried to the edge of the terrace to look and a 300 or 400 pound cinghiale (wild boar) sauntering across the field. It moved, with its black bristle razorback, like a wildebeast or gnu crossing the African savannah. It's unusual to see a boar so casual in broad daylight and in an open field. We tracked it a long while with the binoculars we shared. It felt like a some kind of omen. If of nothing else, that the weather was about to change.

One Good Year

2010-10-24T05:07:00.007-04:00

I realize, after going over my blog archive, that it has been one year since I started this blog and publicly engaged in the three promises of its subhead. And to be honest, I have succeeded and I have failed at each.

The house: It's built! Sally and I are living in it! But I still have a little work to do on the floors, and we need doors on the bedroom and bath. Otherwise, the rest is cosmetic (light sconces to install, a dab of paint here and there). I'd say I have succeeded handsomely, and the fact that 14 months after groundbreaking the house was habitable in a country where most things good and bad take twice as long as you think they should is a true triumph. Thanks Paulo & Claudio & Fruzico Brandini (our builders)! Thanks Daniele (our surveyor/architect)! Thanks Simone and Cesare (our plumbers)! Thanks Stefano and Cesare (our electricians)! Thanks Piannigianni, Alvaro and Oreste (our excavators)! Thanks Stefania (our translator and roustabout)! Thanks Pasquale (our blacksmith) Thanks Gianni, Arnaldo, and Milena (our neighbor farmers who've helped in many small ways)! Thanks Russell & Eileen (our friends, cheering squad, hosts, and transportation for the last 3 years)! Thanks Momo Brubeck (who showed us the property and helped me clear a good part of it). Thanks Gatto, Matteo, Gabriele, and the other guys who pitched in for the initial vineyard cleanup. And thanks Carlo Roberti of Toscana PhotoWorkshop for inviting us to Italy and introducing us to this place all those years ago.

The wine: Going back to my September posts, I see I succeeded in getting not one, but 3 kinds of wine fermenting by Sept 26. But because they’re still bubbling away on a nice, slow, low temperature, non-fruit-killing schedule in the pregnant bellies of the 54 liter glass demijohns. I can't really say that it's made. Still, given everything I was up against just to resurrect the dying vineyard and wrestle enough organic fruit from all the pests and disease of this year, the fact anything at all is fermenting is a real triumph. Thank you Elisabetta and Giancarlo for offering the grapevines that gave us the volume we needed to fill the vats.

Becoming Italian: Ah, well, in this I must admit defeat. I have learned only enough Italian to listen and nod politely at the dinner table and throw in a word or two here and there. I have succeeded in cooking pasta to the satisfaction of my Italian friends, but I have not grown a photo-worthy tomato in my garden (here they pass around pictures of vegetables like Americans do snapshots of their children). I now speak with my hands a lot more, but they have said some rather embarrassing things inadvertently. I’d give myself a D grade (with a B+ for effort). But isn't the point really the journey toward Italianita’? Like perfection or the horizon, it’s a goal I can never really reach. At least I've gotten a good start.

I suppose I should re-head the blog: One more year to finish a home, One more year to finish a wine, and One more year to become more Italian. But I think I’ll just attach a small addendum.

Stay tuned for Found In Tuscany -- Year 2!

Leaping Lizards!

2010-10-07T03:44:00.007-04:00

Known here as lacerta, this emerald lady was sunning on the woodpile. She's over a foot long.

Bragging Rights

2010-10-06T05:54:00.011-04:00

Besides enough grapes to make wine (200-plus vines), and the 93 olive trees from which we will draw the world's best oil, I have single-handedly, sometimes with one hand tied behind my back (or at least in a sling), cleared and pruned back to health a cornucopia of fruit and nut trees. Here's the list:

22 prune trees

12 peach trees (10 white, 2 yellow)

4 cherry trees (3 bing type, 1 pie type)

3 fig trees (green outside, red inside)

3 walnut trees

2 yellow plum trees

1 pear tree

1 gooseberry bush

All heirloom and all certifiably organic!

"It's paradise!" remarked a visitor from Croatia when he saw Tana Lepre early in the clean-up process. I'd agree without hesitation, except that Adam didn't have to do any work there. On the other hand, Adam never knew the bone-deep, in-your-sleep soddisfazione (satisfaction) of actually accomplishing anything in Eden. And that's a real pity.

Here are some of our prunes. They are an antique domesticated wild variety locals call Coscia di Monaca -- Monaca's Thigh -- because of their shape. They are beyond savory, nothing like store prunes or plums. In fact, everything here is an antique, renaissance heirloom variety.

Here are Monaca's thighs pruning in the sun.

And here is a jar of them transformed into prune marmalata by our friend, Nicola Sgarbi at Laboratorio Buon Gusto.

It can't get more local. This is the barter system at its best. Nicola comes and harvests all the prunes he wants and a few weeks later he hands me a case of prune preserve con chiodi di garofano (with nails of clove). He also makes an incredible apricot and saffron spread. Perfect with toast and coffee!

Sally!

2010-10-04T13:46:00.003-04:00

Actually, Sally is in Positano at the moment, shooting a villa and a swank hotel for the Italian equivalent of House and Garden. I'm left here alone to concoct pesto from what might be the season's last basil and the exceptional walnuts (toasted of course) from our trees.

A friend recently asked why there are so many pictures of me on my blog. The truth is Sally is the photographer and I'm doing most of the work when she takes my picture. And hey, it's my blog about me being me. But here she is for those who miss her, doing one of the many things she does best, photographing the landscape.

Actually, this is high in the Alps. After a long hike in the rain. And the snow. To a glacier. Way the hell up there.

It's not easy finding new ways to photograph a photographer.

Pressing Matters

2010-10-01T03:59:00.013-04:00

Adesso, sono un garagista! (Now I am a garagista!).

Yesterday (day 6 of the wine fermenting "on the skins"), I pressed the must, wringing every drop of savory juice I could from the skins and pulp with my trusty second hand torchio (wine press).

Now the fermenting wine is safely fizzing away in 54 liter (14 gallon) glass demigianne (demijohns). From right to left are: The "frivolous" rosato; the elegant day 5 salasso (drawn-off) rosso; the serious day 6 free run (unpressed) red, and the nearly black day 6 press wine red -- about 189 liters (50 gallons) of fermenting wine!

Going back over projections I jotted down last winter, I see that I originally planned on about 27 gallons of red and 7 gallons of white wine (about a bottle per vine) or a total of 128 liters. Despite the oidio, birds, deer, and hare damage, and thanks to the back-up grapes Elisabetta offered from ancient Pieve San Stefano, we overshot by 30%! Rather than the miserable 20% yield (37 liters) I was expecting, we threw a ton of grapes to the ground and selected only the best bunches and still have 236 bottles of wine (about 20 cases if every drop makes it) bubbling away! At least as far as quantity goes, I'd call that snatching victory from the jaws of defeat.

What remains to be seen, or rather tasted, is the ultimate quality of my product. For now, I am happy to report that the juice that oozed through the slats of the press basket yesterday was a delicious explosion of cherries, with chewy but not bitter tannins, and reasonably bright acids. And of course the taste of yeast one expects in fermenting wine.

What kind of wine do I most want to craft? I would love to create an elegant, fruit-forward, terroir-driven wine that tastes like you've just kissed a pirate who's eaten a fistful of blackberries, with dark notes of violet, wolf pelt, and female musk sprinkled in. But more importantly, I want it to be a pure expression of this place and the effort I've spent here. I want it to show just how much of myself I am willing to pour into the task at hand.

Punchdown!

2010-09-29T05:32:00.003-04:00

Known as pigeage in French and follatura in Italian, punching down the cap of floating skins, seeds and stems that rise to the top of the fermenting must, at least twice a day, is crucial for leaching every drop of vital flavors and polyphenols and keeping unwanted nasty molds from growing. I do it 4 times a day, very very gently to keep the whole grapes, which are undergoing a different kind of enzyme driven fermentation (carbonic maceration), from breaking apart.

The first shot was day 1. Here is what it looks like on day 5 of being "on the skins."

It's kind of fun, like playing with your food or making mud pies. My arm gets all purple. And the room fills with the headiest aroma of yeast and grapes and cherries!

Nice color extraction!

Broth from Bones

2010-09-27T02:33:00.009-04:00

One thing I do frequently in the kitchen is make savory stocks from leftover bones, fishheads, etc. My freezer in New York is filled with ziplock bags laid on their sides and frozen like shingles, all labeled and dated, the basis of many a good gumbo and sauce.

Like the bones and other tidbits left at the end of a meal, the remaining under-ripe grapes on the lower, less sunny, more oidio prone vines in the vineyard would not let me sleep. Was there something I could do with them besides make vinegar? Were there enough good grapes there to make a little, say, an easy going apperitivo? Something thirst-quenching that doesn't need to assert itself during summertime sunset conversation? Maybe a frivolous rosato (rose')? Or an unassuming Prosecco-like spumante? Waking up with a resounding "yes!" in my head, I began to scheme. That was yesterday, Sunday.

Fast-forward to lunch. Sally and I talk over our Salad Nicoise of mainly ingredients from the garden. "I would like to pick the rest of the grapes (etc.)," I say, "Maybe tomorrow with Alesio. Could you help for 2 or 3 hours? Don't worry; it's nothing like the work of the first batch."

"Sure."

"I'm thinking of making frivolous rose' out of them."

"OK."

"The only thing is wineries are starting to make rose' here now, so it wouldn't stand out as unique. Maybe it would just be easier to let the grapes go and keep buying inexpensive rose'? On the other hand, nobody makes a sparkling wine here. A sparkling rose' would truly be unique. It could be the champagne of Tuscany."

"Let's make that!"

"The only problem with sparkling wines is you have to start with lower sugar so there's room to add a little bit more yeast and grape juice to carbonate it in the bottle without the alcohol killing off the yeast before it can."

"OK?"

"And since the grapes were already at that level (19 Brix) when I checked last week, they are already in danger of getting out of that range. For a unique spumante rosato, I should really pick them NOW."

"OK!"

It took from 2:00 to 7:00 p.m. to bring them in (under threatening skies) and select only the best bunches into the 100 liter vat. By 8:00 o'clock they were stomped (again by my feet) and left to sit overnight.

Just now, at 10:00 a.m. Monday, I have inoculated the must with yeast. There they are, the leftovers, stewing in their own juices, extracting a little color and flavor from the skins as polyphenols, making a rich and savory broth from the bones.

Harvest!

2010-09-25T10:12:00.012-04:00

Four years and 4 months after my first machete swipe to disentangle and free the dying vineyard, Sally and I have harvested our first wine grapes. Now the proof is bubbling in the vat!

Rewind to Wednesday. Weather satellite shows a low pressure bowling ball rolling from Spain over Sardinia, headed for a perfect strike in Tuscany. Big rain is expected to start Friday and fall all weekend. But the grapes at Tana Lepre are in the zone for sugar (22 -24 Brix) and acid (pH 3.2 - 3.3). The back-up grapes Elisabetta offered at the ancient pieve San Stefano in Castelmuzio are even riper and the birds are eating them fast. "Vendemia tomorrow!" I tell Sally, who's just returned from Rome. "First thing in the morning."

Full moon. Storm coming. Fiat throwing a white plume of dust down a twisting dirt road. This was the opening shot yesterday morning at 7:30 a.m. By 10:00 a.m. we had gotten all the grapes at Pieve, about 250 liters of bunches, and we dropped an equal amount on the ground thanks to oidio.

Back at Tana Lepre, while Sally and Alesio culled imperfect grapes and sorted bunches, I single-handedly harvested what was ripe in the upper vineyard, about 8 rows, throwing half to the ground because of oidio. By 4:00 p.m., the trees were swirling and the first spritzes of rain were hitting the ground, but the harvest was complete. We had a total of 350 liters of Tana Lepre grapes including the 50 liters of appassimento malvasia (see earlier post), and a little colorato for color. The 230 liter vat was full of bunches to be crushed a piedi (by foot). The 100 liter vat held the most perfect bunches, to be stripped a mano (by hand) for the whole berry carbonic maceration that will gives extra fruit nuance to the blend. After crushing and adding the whole grapes and passato malvasia clusters to the big vat, we had 175 liters of that sweet grape slurry vintners know as "must." Every drop of it organic.

Threshold crossed at last. But this wasn't just the culmination of 4-plus years of work, it was the penultimate step in a lifetime of garagiste wine dreams. The Tana Lepre vines were planted 40 years ago by the village butcher of Montisi, one year after I made my first batch of wine as a kid. I have waited exactly that long to create my first wine from noble vines I've nurtured myself. And now, with the harvest finally in after a difficult year of homebuilding, disease and broken bones, I can breathe again. Just in time to savor the perfume of wine fermenting in the cantina!

A domani!

Good Grapes & Bad Grapes

2010-09-06T11:32:00.008-04:00

Here is what a bunch of grapes (Sangiovese) look like long after the powdery mildew has attacked. Cracked, runted, rotten ... you can barely tell they are purple. If I tried to make wine with these it would have aromas and tastes of wet fur and sweat in the mix. No kidding!

Here are the grapes I did harvest (Malvasia).

The trick I mentioned is two-fold. The first part is called appassimento. This is letting the grapes "raisin" a little before making the wine to concentrate the essences and sugar. This is done by laying them on straw or wire racks for good air circulation in other parts of Italy, or, around here, by hanging on wire hooks in long chain. If you've ever had an old style Amarone, you know the the taste of wine made by passato grapes. It is also how, using Malvasia and Trebbiano, Tuscans make the famous local desert wine known as Vin Santo (The good stuff you want to sip like port and NOT dunk biscotti in). Here's what I ended up with in my underground garage cantina.

Makes a pretty wall paper pattern, doesn't it?

OK, this buys me some time before I have to do anything with these grapes. And since I don't plan on making vin santo (takes at least 7 years and many barrels), and I do like the Malvasia grape, I will use these passato grapes in the second technique which was invented right here in Tuscany. It's called governo and it involves the addition of the pressed juice of passato grapes to the the red wine to give it a boost when the primary fermentation is almost done. This not only kicks the fermentation up to another level of alcohol and complexity, but helps initiate acid-softening secondary malolactic fermentation. I've only heard of one winery that does governo anymore. That's because it's easier to make mondo vino wines like everyone else. So, with crows and oidio forcing my hand, if I want to use these grapes, I have to bring back the governo technique and make a traditional wine nobody here is making anymore.

What about mixing white and red grapes, you ask? Won't that dilute the wine? Is it even kosher? The answers are, no, no, and yes. In fact the famous Chateauneuf du Pape of the Rhone, including one of my all-time favorites Chateau Beaucastel, rely on the inclussion of white grapes in their blend for their delicious taste, bouquet and mouth feel. And then there's Chianti. Not the stuff now being made (which according to recent Mondo-vinization of the law, includes French grapes like Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot), but the original recipe by the guy who invented Chianti, Baron Ricasoli. The formula he codified in 1872 included 15% Malvasia along with Sangiovese, Canaiolo, and others, and was only in the 19th century bastardized to include up to 30% insipid Trebbiano to make the watered down stuff in the cute straw covered fiascos that gave Chianti a bad name and, as of 2006, is illegal to make. In fact, white grapes are no longer allowed. Good-bye Baron Ricasoli.

So here I am, forced by factors beyond my control to make a traditional Tuscan wine that according to law and global marketing nobody is making anymore. How about that!

Emergency Harvest!

2010-09-04T12:24:00.004-04:00

Yesterday, I was remembering Aesop's fable about the fox and the grapes and wondering if Boots, our visiting fox, had been the cause of the denuded clusters I found in the middle of two rows of our white grapes. But that seemed preposterous, foxes eat voles and lizards and other small wriggly things.

I was scratching my head about it, looking up the row of what I have deduced are Malvasia, one of the four grapes Giovanni told me were planted in my vineyard, and the ones that should ripen first, when this guy flew by.

It was a European hooded crow and he had a lucent green orb about the size of an olive in his beak. It wasn't an olive.

Grabbing some used DVDs to hang in the vineyard (their flash is said to keep crows away), I went out to walk the rows. I found even more missing grapes than yesterday. One out of every 10 clusters was down to bare stem, or almost. Then I remembered a home winemakers maxim: When do you harvest your grapes? Answer: When the birds are eating them. They know exactly when they are ripe.

Yikes! Grabbing my spectrometer, I plucked random grapes and measured their sugar content. Double yikes! At 22 to 25 Brix, they were already overripe for white grapes (19 to 21 is ideal). I checked acid and found that they were not 3.1 to 3.3 pH range one wants, but had dropped much of the acid essential to making a lively wine. Then I heard the crows cat-calling from the tree nearby.

Luckily, yesterday, I had bought some grape harvesting shears. They are designed to carefully snip the stem and to pluck out bad or green grapes without puncturing good ones. I grabbed one of the cassettes I also bought and went to work picking only the best bunches. Unfortunately, crows like only grapes that don't have oidio. Still more clusters went onto the ground, but by the time I was done with the row and a half of confirmed Malvasia around lunch time, I had harvested almost 2 cassettes worth, maybe 70 pounds. The crows would get no more.

Now what? It's not enough grape to make much wine (about 4 or 5 bottles). Not to worry. I already had a plan. Because I'd already guessed that these vines were early ripening Malvasia, and that they wouldn't make much wine, I had decided to do an old trick invented, so the oenological lore goes, right here in Tuscany. I had to work fast so the grapes wouldn't be damaged. But more on that in the next blog.

Outside-In

2010-09-04T12:05:00.005-04:00

As I was putting up the electric fence to keep the caprioli (tiny barking deer) from eating what's left of the grapes, this guy runs across my path, literally, right through the vineyard. He paused to stare at me like "What the heck are you looking at?" then trotted on.

I call him Boots because his paws look dipped in ink. He's a European red fox. At night, he's been leaving little gifts shaped like a popular log-shaped chocolate confection of my youth. On the front porch. On the back porch. In the kitchen when I leave the door ajar at night. Last night, the sound of a wine bottle falling over downstairs woke me and I knew who'd done it.

In the morning, as I had coffee (after removing the poop from the kitchen) I heard a rustling in among the paper bags in one corner. Worried it was the fox (Do they have rabies in Europe? Answer: yes.) I carefully approached, only to find it was a big fat toad with golden eyes. The outside has it's way of coming in here. If even in the "stolen views" through our windows.

Or the bats that wing in and out of our bedroom on balmy nights.

At night, the death watch beetles in our roof beam tick tick tick, reminding me that the minutes, even here, are numbered. And that outside my grapes are ripening quickly.

Palio! At Last!

2010-08-31T11:40:00.012-04:00

In the 15 years since we started coming here, and the 3 since buying the property, Sally and I had never made to Siena’s famous Palio -- partly because of schedule, partly because it is a claustrophobic’s nightmare. Determined that if I didn’t go this year, I’d probably never go, I got in the car and drove to Siena on August 16, arriving at 2:00 p.m. At that time it wasn’t too crowded in the Campo, but people were already camping in the best spots. You can see the clay packed street that is the racetrack.

The contrada chest thumping and flag waving (a contrada is a community group or brotherhood), began around 3 o’clock.

Another contrada...

One of the race horses

Another contrada....

The parade around The Campo starts ...

... and takes 2 hours to complete

Sea of People. Not for the claustrophic.

VIP Balcony.

Mounts and Jockies before the costumed paraders.

The race is starting.

Here is the race on You Tube Tartuca (The Tortoise) Wins!

They thundered past so fast in such tight quarters that I forgot to breath, literally. Afterwards, all I could think of was getting out of the crowd and to my parked car as quickly as possible to avoid the crush. Since couldn’t do that without crossing the track, I stepped out onto it as soon one of the guards holding back the people turned away. That was both a discovery and a mistake. For the jockey had decided to dismount the winning horse and remove his jersey right in front of me. Meanwhile, one contrada of sore losers had pulled off their shirts and were ready to rumble.

The winning horse.

I'm close!

Way too close!

The Victors...

Photographer...

More Victors...

Sore Losers.

The Rumble begins...

Parting Shot. I got out just in time!

The End in Sight!

2010-08-26T08:58:00.005-04:00

Dropped another 10% of the grapes 3 days ago to the dammed oidio! 10% is now what I hope to be left with. That's still enough to make some wine, maybe 80 bottles. Meanwhile, we are eating our first garden melons and pears and lots of tomatoes and lots of mustard, arugula, broccoli, and other sprouts from the Fall/Summer garden.

And the clean up of the construction work site continues. This was the view out our back door, at the southwest corner of the vineyard, yesterday.

Here is the same view today!

At last, I am done with the basic heavy lifting around the house! The chaos of big stones, earth, broken brick and other construction debris, wood scraps and firewood! Finally, I can walk around the house outside and not trip over things or step on nails or get stung by wasps or spook vipers! Finally, I see order when I look out a window! Finally, I can sit down and write. Well, almost. There's still a lot to do.

Today, I bought a 230 liter food grade plastic vat as a back up vessel to start the red wine in if things happen faster than I expect. Certain reds grapes (Ciliegiolo) are already at 15 Brix (That's a measure of the sugar in the grape) and certain whites (Malvasia) are at 18 Brix. Ideally, I want to harvest the reds around 22 to 24 Brix and the whites a little lower. The time is fast approaching! Now I need to organize and build the wine cellar and production area in our underground garage. I need to build a work bench and storage racks and make sure everything is sanitary. But that is pleasant construction in cave cool conditions. I'm out of the hot Tuscan sun at last!

My Garden's Earthly Delights

2010-08-13T00:34:00.003-04:00

Spent 2 days after returning from the Alps planting the fall garden and getting the maturing summer garden in shape. We have melons on the vine, tomatoes, eggplants and more, but my favorite season is autumn, in the garden and at the table.

These are the some of the fruits of our labor. Despite being poised on the verge of failure in the vineyard and still overwhelmed by the persistence of homebuilding tasks, I do have moments of pleasure when I go into the garden and the garden goes into me.

Bunches of Woe

2010-08-11T12:41:00.005-04:00

Walking the vineyard again, I am dropping half of the half of the clusters left on the vines because of the oidio damage. Damaged grapes will not make good wine. And I’d rather do the culling now so I won’t have to do it when I harvest or explain how to tell what’s good from bad to anyone who helps. And I don’t want the sick bunches infecting what’s left of the good.

In the end, who knows how many good grapes we’ll be able to harvest. Right now we are down to a quarter of what I estimated in the spring. But now I have a new problem.

Because I decided to resurrect a dying vineyard of old vines (40 years is old by Italian standards), mine are not the orderly conduits of a modern vineyard efficiently delivering sugars and nutrients to each consistently sized leaf and cluster at precisely meted intervals along each branch. No, my vines are – even though I’ve moderated their sprawl a bit – all over the place. You can still see vineyards like this around, more and more of them let go to weeds. Also, because I’ve removed almost all the clusters on some vines, the fruit loads are different for each. And not all the clusters are the same size or growing at the same rate. And they are not all at the same place in each vine’s nutrient pipeline. The point is some of the clusters on some of the vines are starting to turn pink! This is veraison, the transition to ripening signaled by a change in color of the grapes. This usually happens in August, but it usually happens to most of the clusters on most of the vines in a vineyard at the same time. But not in mine. Oy! Or should I say Oidio!

With the grapes all ripening at different rates I will not be able to harvest them all at the same time or begin a single vat fermentation as I had planned, and, from the looks of it, they could reach the stage of ripeness weeks apart. This means I either have to ferment several small batches or keep adding grapes to the primary fermentor over a graduated harvest. The first option is tedious, requires much more equipment, and is guaranteed to render inconsistent results. The latter risks contaminating the single batch each time I add grapes. What to do?!?

For now, my plan is to ferment in two batches and to pick within a ripeness bracket where the grapes that ripen first are not too ripe and the ones that ripen later not unripe. This involves measuring both the sugar and the acid in the grapes, but I will come to this later.

Meanwhile, since I can no longer spray copper sulfate to control the oidio once veraison softens the grapeskins, I can only hope the oidio doesn't return with the fogs of autumn and enough good grapes make it to harvest to make at least a little wine.

I am not a praying man. But I am beginning to see how one becomes one.

Oidio Update

2010-07-28T12:11:00.002-04:00

Everyone in Tuscany is complaining about the malady. Powdery mildew is hitting all the vines, especially the older ones. The record wet year has caused this plague. Sadly, we are not spared. Sally and I just spent two days in the vineyard throwing away infected clusters. About half of all the fruit. I have learned some lessons from all this: Spray more copper sulfate on the north side of the rows. Prune the vines near trees more severely. Leaf prune on the morning side to allow more air and light to hit the clusters. And never underestimate powdery mildew.

Thus far we have survived the caterpillars. We have gotten half our fruit through the fungal plague thus far. If we can escape the oidio, we only have the deer and the birds and the wasps to worry about. Oh, and because we've removed a more than ordinary amount of leaf canopy, there's sunburn.

We will be lucky if we can make wine at all. But then, that's the deal every year.

A Pergola!

2010-07-14T08:09:00.004-04:00

102 in the shade isn't bad when that shade is provided by your own homemade pergola. Built of chestnut posts, hemp rope and the cane that grows like a weed on our property, I think ours is perfect for long Italian lunches!

The Famous Outdoor Shower

2010-07-04T00:34:00.006-04:00

It isn’t just caldo (hot) today, it’s caldisimo! Perfect for a nice outdoor shower.

Because they just don't understand our need for it, our Italian builders call ours "la famosa doccia esterna" (The famous outdoor shower). In Tuscany, at least, famosa (or famoso) is a word usually said with touch of sarcasm. Famosa or not, I don't know how can anyone live and work and sweat here without one?

Maintenance free and much cheaper than a swimming pool, I installed our famous shower yesterday. Simone, our plumber, wanted over 500 Euro to install one of brass that would last a lifetime. I opted for some galvanized iron pipe and a faucet found at the European equivalent of Home Depot. Total cost: 80 Euro. Well, the shower head cost us $100 dollars in the US back in 1995 when we built our loft, but we didn’t have high enough water pressure to make it work right. Here, however, its gentle rain is much appreciated. Chalk another one up to reuse, the greenest kind of recycling.

Oh! And every drop of water is recycled in our vegetable garden.

Oh Oh! And every drop of hot water is heated by the sun for free!

That Ain't Hay!

2010-06-23T05:28:00.005-04:00

Sally and I spent this last rainy weekend in Ravenna, once the seat of the Roman Empire and home to 8 UNESCO World Heritage sites noted for their Byzantine mosaics. Outside one of them, the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia, I was surprised to see this art installation. It is made of splinters of glass mosaic tile and would look right at home grazing with the flock of bales in the background of my recent post "Haying Time."

Canopy Management

2010-06-18T01:21:00.008-04:00

Yesterday, I was in Rome, teaching story basics to first-year script writing students at the national film school at Cinecitta`, home of the great Fellini, Rossellini and others. Today I am back in Tuscany among my vines happily wondering if I should have been a little more careful in what I wished for.

I have spent the last 3 years since purchasing the property, returning the vineyard to as much health as possible: raising the fallen vines and repairing the trellises, pruning for vigorous growth and the reestablishment of healthy roots and trunks, leadering (rooting sections of long vine trailers in the ground) to create new vines in the gaps left by the dead , keeping the brucchi (grapevine caterpillars) at bay, and training the vines as much as possible toward the time I could at last make wine from their grapes. Well, the vines are TOO HEALTHY! I now need to stop saving the vines and pruning for health and need to now prune for healthy grape clusters. There are too many stems, too many leaves, and actually, too many grape clusters. All this, with the Napa Valley sort of fogs we have on mornings like this one, will lead to the dreaded oidio (mold) that is the bane of sangiovese's existence.

Sangiovese, the primary grape of Brunello and of Vino Nobile di Montepulciano and of Morrelino di Scansano and of Chianti, already comes with a characteristic handicap -- tightly packed clusters -- so they need a lot of air circulation. That is what I'll spend the next few days providing by removing all branches that do not have clusters on them and all lower leaves that are damaged by brucchi or touching the new clusters. This is mainly a pinch and a flick of finger and thumb, but it is repetitive and time consuming work. Later, as the clusters grow, I will thin them so no two touch each other and make sure they hang correctly.

Why?

2010-06-15T05:56:00.009-04:00

This is Irio Perugini. He was a contadino for 45 years until he became a carpenter. Yesterday, after he finished the installing our windows and doors, he showed me how to leaf prune, to give this year's abundant grape clusters plenty of air and light and thus avoid oidio (mold).

Both Irio and our next door neighbor Guilio Manzi tell me its cheaper to buy fine Brunellos than it is to make one’s own wine. Can this be? Actually, because of farm subsidies and the wholesale economics of factory farming and chain supermarket distribution, yes. As far as I can see, growing ones own anything makes little economical sense. In fact, for what we’ve spent on our modest Tuscan farm, Sally and I could spend yearly vacations in fine hotel suites in exotic locations for most of the rest of our lives. If so, why the @#$%^&* am I working so hard?!

“Small scale doesn’t really pay,” I told Sally, as we sat sipping prosecco, waiting for the first Italian match of the World Cup to light up the screens in our village’s parking lot. “It used to be cheaper to grow your own corn and chickens, if you wanted to eat chicken. But mass production has changed all that.”

“Is that true of your garden, too?” Sally asked, remembering I’d spent $600 just for seed.

Generally speaking, after the initial outlay for tools, tillers, tractors, transportation (amortized over time, of course) and fencing, there are the costs of gas and oil for tiller, truck, weed eater, grass mower, etc., string, plastic ground cover, variety tags, mulch, fertilizer, pesticide, herbicide, compost bin materials, seed and plants, seed starting containers and medium, electricity for lights if you start your own seed, labor (at least to water and weed when the gardener is away on vacation), water and electricity to pump it and more weighing down the balance sheet of any garden or farm. For us, it’s a little different.

So far I have spent about $200 dollars for garden tools, plastic, and fencing, $700 for seed (usable over 3 seasons) and transplants, and another $50 for soil organic improving inoculants and pest controls. Let’s call it an even thousand. If I weren’t practicing organic no-till gardening and had bought a tiller or a tractor and the petrochemicals that go with it, if I hadn’t brought over in my suitcase almost all of my hand tools, if I hadn’t started my own seed in soil blocks I made myself, if I didn’t mulch with the vineyard cuttings and recycled newspaper to keep weeds, watering and labor down, if I had hired help, the costs would be at least tenfold. At the moment anyway, I am absolutely certain that our garden will provide us with produce into winter for less than the cost of putting it in. Never mind that since mid March, I’ve spent an average of 15 hours (with Sally adding another 5 or so) per week putting it in and maintaining it.

The real point is cost vs. value. We are already eating watercress, a dozen kinds of lettuce, 3 kinds of radish, onions, chicory, spinach, mustard and other greens and we look forward to whatever succeeds in my grand experiment to see which varieties will grow and bear the best produce with the least care out of the dozen kinds of heirloom tomato, the dozen pumpkins and squash, dozen types of melon, dozen kinds of pepper (many chilis), the half-dozen eggplant varieties, the two kinds of potato, the many onions, etc. It makes my mouth water just to list. But is it really worth all the work? I am not alone in thinking so.

Firstly, there’s the matter of what you do not get when you avoid buying food in a cost-effective a grocery store of any kind (Whole Foods included). On the health and planetary consciousness side, you do not get pesticide and herbicide residues; you do not get (using heirloom seed) Monsanitized food (like “Round-Up ready” soy and flounder genes spliced into strawberries, for instance); you do not get meat that has been fed things it is not designed to eat including parts of its own kind; you do not get the huge carbon footprint that comes from shipping ridiculous things ridiculous distances (like water from Fiji, for instance) and produce out of season in your own hemisphere in superfluous packaging; you do not get under-ripe tasteless-but-shippable fruits and vegetables and the lack of enzymes and vitamins that go with them.

On the soul side, when you buy in a store you do not get (except for the friendly exchanges with nearly extinct local grocers you actually know) gratifying human interaction; you do not get fresh air, exercise, bird and insect song, a sense of weather and season, a firm connection to the natural rhythms we are actually inextricable from; you do not get escape from the onslaught of corporate advertising and mind-numbing food aisle decision making; you do not get a chance to meditate on much of anything, and you do not get (if you are at all aware of the above) the shot of dopamine to the prefrontal cortex that lights up your reward center and makes you feel you have done something right and are being truly accomplished.

Besides outright praise, here is my short list of things that make one feel directly and deeply and satisfyingly accomplished: the smile of someone you have shown love, care, or compassion to, the reaching of a goal (a passage well-written, a ball or fish caught, a kiss responded to in kind), and perhaps most directly and immediately, the sweet complex taste of something perfectly ripe you’ve just harvest and put in your mouth (or harvested and prepared, like wine and oil). If there is a fold in the brain that remembers paradise, it must be the one involving taste.

That’s why.

Haying Time

2010-06-11T08:46:00.006-04:00

The hot weather is setting in and everyone's trying to get done the major outdoor chores before things go dormant in summer's scorching heat. That means hay.

I've got things mowed in the vineyard (with a scythe) and am using the wild oat and vetch straw and hay to mulch the garden.

Today, while doing that, I rolled the Ape, turned it turtle, belly up. Very dramatic. Sort of. But it was so easy to flip back upright (with the help of my neighbor Giuglio who saw me fall) that I forgot to take a pic. Next time, I promise!

Now I understand why there are two doors on the small one person cab. It leaves an escape route no matter which way it tips.

Up, Up in the Air

2010-06-06T07:51:00.004-04:00

That's me. First time in a balloon of any sort. Tethered, of course. But I'm the one with my hand on the throttle (and the "red line" for letting the hot air out during too rapid an accent). This was at the birthday party last night for balloonist Robert Etherington, who gives splendid hot air rides over the best part of Tuscany, the Unesco World Heritage designated Val D'Orcia.

Good Friends, Bad Luck, and Ugly Breaks

2010-06-03T07:54:00.005-04:00

These are our best Roman friends, Giancarlo Ullman and Elisabetta Bruscolini. We had just gotten out of a trolly together after attending the posh opening of Rome's new museum of modern art, the Maxxi. We'd taken a tram because we couldn't get a cab anywhere near the mobbed museum and had exited it in a less busy place neither of them had been before, but where both were sure we could more easily get a cab.

The night before, we attended the Nastri D'Argento (Silver Ribbon) exposure gala where Elisabetta's first produced movie, Dieci Inverni (Ten Winters), earned her a contender's spot beside 4 other Italian producer, all behemoths compared to her. The director of her film was also nominated for best new director as well. The winners will be announced in a month.

Happily for me, Elisabetta introduced me to important faculty members of the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome, where I will start teaching a "story" workshop to aspiring screenwriters in 2 weeks. Sadly for Elisabetta, while dancing in celebration of the success of her movie in the little village square of the Tuscan village of Castelmuzio the following evening, she fell and broke her wrist.

Heal fast, Elisabetta! I'm betting you have more handshaking to do!

Ah, Internet!

2010-06-02T01:17:00.006-04:00

Well, let's see. We have internet now. But first the electrician had to drill a hole through our foot-thick cement second floor for a cable to the receiver antenna. When water started gushing from the hole it took a while to shut it off, calm down, and figure out he hadn't struck the underfloor heating (which would have been a real nightmare). 3 hours of jack-hammering later, with everyone who built the house standing in a circle like engineers trying to figure out why a rocket wouldn't launch, the plumbing was repaired. Now we just have a hole in the ceiling/floor that needs fixing and a big pile of cables and equipment beside the bed.

This is how things go here: one step back, two steps forward. At least we have internet.

So You Want To Be a Contadino, eh?

2010-05-25T10:25:00.002-04:00

When I first heard the term contadino applied to me by a smiling local, I took it as a compliment of my willingness to work. Lately I've understood it can be a bit of a class slur.

Never mind I am trying to finish building a house in a foreign land, trying to learn a foreign language and trying to figure out how to make a living during the worst economic crisis in a century.

There are not enough hours in a day for me to be me! And now the garden needs planting before the dry season.

I have 6 months to go. Six months to nurture the grapes on the vines and turn them into wine.Six months to cultivate the olives and turn them into oil. Six months to manage the grain fields in one way or another. Six months to turn the fertile bottom by the spring into a real vegetable garden. And six months to learn all I can from real deal contadino Giovanni Mangiavacchi (even though all he’s doing these days is cutting and stacking next winter's income-producing firewood).

Invasion of the Grape Snatchers

2010-05-21T10:07:00.004-04:00

Not only is there still much mowing to do in the vineyard thanks to the grass-nourishing rains, but now the brucchi are hatching and munching as you can see below.

To stop the larvae of the European Grape Moth (Lobesia Botrana), a pest first seen in Napa Valley vineyards only last year, I have to walk the vine rows with a pump sprayer full of Bacillus Thuringiensis spores. This organic remedy is like stomach flu for caterpillars and will stop the ones I can’t see. I hope.

For the ones I can see, there’s the pincer attack. Thumb and forefinger. Pop! This activity is decreasingly disgusting and increasingly satisfying as one goes, I assure you.

Joy of Mesclun

2010-05-14T05:10:00.003-04:00

Our first radish! From the first seed I planted in the orto (garden).

For lunch, the first thinnings of the Marvel of Four Seasons and Rosso di Trento lettuces, thrice washed and arranged on a white plate and topped with flakes of Sardinian bluefin tuna and roasted red pepper strips and moistened with a slurry of sour orange juice, dijon mustard and a dab of mayo.

Buon Apetito!

Moka Explosion

2010-05-08T12:55:00.012-04:00

This is what happens when your sleepy wife tries to make coffee with a Moka, senz aqua, and the rubber gasket melts and you come along and try to make coffee with water and you wonder why it's taking so long and lift the lid to see what's up . . . just at the right moment.

No worries. The scalds healed quickly and I was wearing the red down vest of the last blog, which protected my chest from most of the blast. Good thing!

Leaves of Grass

2010-05-06T05:37:00.009-04:00

It has rained a lot since we got here. The wild oats and mustard are high among the vine rows. If I leave them, they will eventually load with grain and fall over dead, completing and beginning another cycle. But I will not let this happen.

I must cut them down right now because the rain and grass are a bad combination in a vineyard, keeping the young shoots and blossoms damp and promoting the malady here called oidio, mold, that fuzzy grape eating fungus that hit so many clusters in the resurrected vineyard last year because I couldn't manage it on a broken leg.

And so I mow. Tomorrow's blog: "Scythe vs. Weed Eater

Right Now!

2010-04-30T02:42:00.010-04:00

In Italy, they are gemma in the singular. I call them gems, the little buds with flower clusters popping up on the vine nodes in the vineyard just today, right now. They are extremely tender and I must be careful as I move among the vines, pruning, setting posts, and tightening trellis wires. They are also susceptible to late frost. Thus starts the winemaking season. 6 months from now, if all goes well, I will harvest and ferment. And it all starts right here in the vineyard, right now, with the budding of the gemme.

Other runaway tasks begging to be done right now? Just like the grapes, the two dozen olive trees that are in the worst shape, need to be pruned because they are going to bloom any minute. The beans and corn need to be planted in the garden before the season turns too hot and the lettuces before it turns too dry. The dozens of cuttings I took yesterday, of lavender, rosemary and honeysuckle, need to be rooted in potting soil or I’ll have start all over. And the wild oats and mustard running riot in the vine rows, garden paths and near the house need to be scythed before they fall over on their own.

This is what I came for! The right nowness of it!

[Photos by Sally. The post is 150 lbs. of concrete cement.]

Moving Day

2010-04-21T01:20:00.007-04:00

While the rest of European air space shut down and flights out of New York were cancelled, Sally's plane out of Newark was allowed to make for Italy by flying a longer southern route around the ash plume of Eyjafjallajokull.

I always wanted to write unpronounceable words.

I have been running running running since I got here, getting the house ready enough that when Sally got here we could get it ready enough to move into. Today we make the final moves, sweeping, mopping, arranging, unpacking the carload of Ikea housewares we loaded up on in Florence yesterday.

And yet it is not ready. Not really. We will camp there tonight all the same. Day One at Tana Lepre, tomorrow.

In the late light, the hare was in the wheat, watching.

Best Laid Plans (of Mice and Bees)

2010-04-15T01:33:00.019-04:00

Yesterday, I pulled back the black plastic tarp covering the patch of "no-till" garden where I intended to plant potatoes. After one month it had done it's job. The weeds and grass were pale and dead, last year's weeds were crumbly and semi-composted, ants had built an antropolis in the twilight zone at one edge, and the soil surface was littered with the nutritious casings of earthworms happily plowing, aerating, and fertilizing this patch of artificial night 24/7.

There was a strange low mound in the middle of it all, created by some burrowing creature I hoped I hadn't fenced in.

As I was forming a shallow furrow in which to insert the seed spuds, a tiny nose and two beady eyes popped out of the mound directly in front of me -- the scared little field mouse whose roof I'd just ripped from its home. We regarded each other a moment, then went back to what concerned us.

As I finished planting my potatoes, I gave the now impressively large mound (for a mouse) a wide berth because I suspected there was a nest of blind, hairless and pink baby mice somewhere inside. Wishing the mouse luck in finding a new home elsewhere before I returned, I set about moving more building debris into attractive consolidated mounds in preparation for the arrival of my mate. To do this required the use of a bee.

I'm referring to the motorized wheelbarrow seen hugging the roadsides all over Italy. Known as an Ape (pronounced Ah-peh), Pioggia's cousin of the Vespa (Wasp) is a vehicle of choice for the rural elderly, the illiterate, the under-aged and the mentally impared because it doesn't require a driver's license to drive. It is a favored delivery vehicle for light loads. Not even the tuk-tuks of Thailand are this small.

The Ape is the littlest enclosed passenger vehicle in the world and with the tiniest engine of any motorcycle (50 cc), making it the greenest, gas-sipping passenger "vehicle" there is. They are ubiquitous and comic to see trundling along emitting their nee-nee-nee drones. And they are notorious for tipping over. A search of You Tube will quickly reveal how an Ape is unloaded.

Leaving the mouse to sort out it's housing issue among the potatoes, I loaded my nearly mint, previously-owned-by-a-fastidious-old-lady-from-Petroio (the other next village over), just-purchased-two-hours-earlier, Ape with a couple hundred pounds of field stone and firewood. I cranked it up and gave it the gas. Immediately the throttle cable snapped.

Piano piano (slowly, slowly), I walked back up to the hill to get the other wheelbarrow.

Shipwreck Syndrome

2010-04-12T02:51:00.007-04:00

I feel like a castaway madly tidying his island hideaway as he waits for the rising tide to lift the ship of mail order brides recently grounded on the reef too far out to reach.

Sally arrives at the end of the week and ...

Rather than neatly sorting coconuts and shells into tidy piles, and raking the beach and sweeping out my hut, I’ve spent the last month arranging stones and scrap wood and other construction detritus and sweeping the cement dust out of our new garage. I’m pruning the trees in a widening gyre around the house. I’m fencing the garden against porcupines and badgers. I am putting like things with like things, making bigger neater piles from the many messy mounds around the property. I’m painting the bedroom. I’m building a rustic table of scrap wood for the many meals we will eat out of doors. I’m picking bits of plastic and wire and metal and glass from the soil around the worksite. I’m building stone retainer walls and dumping wheelbarrows of earth behind them from the mounds and piles that need to be flattened. I’m raking and shoveling and hoeing and flattening all the terrain left rumpled by the Brandinis and the plumbers and electricians. I’m scything the weeds that have grown a foot and a half since I got here. I’m burning prunings and rubbish.

Yesterday, I washed the dishes and my laundry.

Today I install a bathroom mirror.

On reflection, this isn't exactly what I came all the way to Tuscany to do.

Hoepoe

2010-04-08T01:21:00.008-04:00

Thornton Wildee called Rome the northernmost point in Africa. Tuscany is just a little north of Rome. It, too, is Africa when it comes to birds and summer heat.

For three springs now I've noticed the first feathered inkling of Africa, right around Easter, above the tiny pieve (chapel) marking the turn to the white road that leads to our property, sitting on a telephone wire as it's mate forages on the ground. It is the pushme-pullyou hammerhead of birds. Somewhat woodpeckerish, in low light you can't tell which way it is looking because it seems to sprout beaks from both sides of it's head.

It is a bird of habit and of place and reassuringly returns each year to this same little pocket of Africa at the northernmost edge of its range. It is the bellwether bird. And for 3 Tuscan springs I have known the good weather has arrived when I see the hoepoe perched on the line at the turn-off to Tana Lepre (Hare's Den). This morning, there they were -- the hoepoe and il bel tempo.

Tomorrow the bed arrives and I will nestle in!

Hunger Appetite Famine

2010-04-05T02:12:00.009-04:00

It is Pasqua, Easter Sunday, and I am driving in a driving rain up into the hills over Lake Trasemino above the plain where Hannibal's army ambushed and slaughtered a legion in a humiliating defeat that ran the waters of the lake red with Roman blood. So I am thinking of history and food.

Chef and TED Prize winner Jamie Oliver says his big wish is that Americans teach their kids to have a real relationship to food. Real food.

Generalization: Most Italians have a different relationship to food than most Americans. Until sometime in the last 10 years, 80% of all Italians grew some of what they ate.

I remember my first trip to Italy in the mid-90's. On the train from Rome to Venice, I was amused by the little gardens tucked into every centimeter and inch of usable space along the tracks the entire way. In empty lots, in yards, in parking lots, on balconies, in tractor tires... you get the idea. Now you see less of this, but not much. This is not something you see in the States. Not yet.

Try to explain the Easter Bunny to an Italian and he'll smack his lips and dream of stewing it in wine, wild garlic and mushrooms. It's not cute, it's food. Many in our area over the age of 70, and there are many around here over 70, can remember something else few Americans can relate to -- "the famine" of the fascist years.

I've always had a good appetite, and the only true gnawing hunger I've known was as a kid. Once, I was rifling through a dumpster bin at a rest stop in the Sierra Nevada's near Mount Shasta after my car broke down near the end of a cross country trip. I was 17. I hadn't eaten anything but coffee in over 24 hours. I'd found a bread bag with a crust in it, a cereal box with a few corn flakes left, and a peanut butter jar with two finger's worth of goo. I'd caught a crawfish in the little mountain stream burbling behind the parking lot in a coffee can and was contemplating eating it raw like Richard Harris did in the movie A Man Called Horse. And of course this was before sushi had become an American household word.

As I was rifling some more, a girl about 12-years-old tapped me on the shoulder. She was holding a paper plate with a big piece of chocolate cake on it. She had a sandwich bag with a tuna sandwich in it. She had a can of cold orange soda fresh out of the family cooler. She held them out to me with stiff arms. "My mother thought you should have this." I looked over at the picnic table where her family sat. They were gawking, but not impolitely.

I accepted the gifts and sat down at the far end of their picnic table where I devoured them. I showed the girl the crawfish in the can. Then we both let it go. I thanked the mother and the very quiet father and the girl. And I've always remembered how my discomfort -- not just this once, but many times over the years -- was eased by the easy generosity of strangers. What happened for my stomach that day wasn't as profound as what happened for my sense of humanity.

This is how, as I drive through this verdant farmland to Easter supper with friends in Umbria, I contemplate the deeper meaning of today's feast, here in Italy, and in my life. Perhaps it is something we should all do a little more of.

Buona Pasqua and buon apetito!

Forest For The Trees

2010-04-01T12:22:00.005-04:00

It's been virga all day across the Val d'Orcia, rain never reaching the ground. Big mats of cloud scudding along like pewter jellyfish, their tentacles dangling down over this undulant ancient sea bottom as freshets of wind churn the budding trees like corals and seaweeds in strong current.

This is what Giovanni and Arnaldo have spent the last two weeks since the big snow doing, harvesting one meter long logs from the snarl of wild bosco at the bottom of their property, just across from the castle ruin. It needs to be done now so next year's firewood can season all summer. It needs to be done now because the leaves are down and it is easy to see how to thin the stand best for the future.

This is what the managed wood will become in another 20 years. Truffles anyone?

The Double Standard And The Beauty of Also

2010-03-28T03:37:00.012-04:00

I live on a slippery slope. This is what our hillside becomes when it is wet with nebbia (fog), piogia (rain), or neve (snow). Which it seems to be often these days. Because of this the terrain itself is teaching me a thing or two as I try to turn a worksite into a home.

Today I am 55, and I have built a house in Tuscany.

Problem solving is the thinking half of getting things done. Do it right and you cut your work in half. As a reader, writer, speaker and listener, I like words and phrases that say more than one thing at a time. I am not talking about efficiency. That is an industrial age term aimed at increasing production over time and orderly accrual of wealth. And I don’t mean practical either. Practical only concerns itself with the doing part of getting things done.

What I'm talking about is the act of satisfying the creative need and the aesthetic need at once. Not dual purpose, but dual result, a double standard of the best sort. The payoff is not instantaneous, but more meditative and accumulative. The quiet everyday Eurekas found in ordinary acts, these are akin to the feeling of inspiration Zen monks, poets, and even military strategists must know.

Today, I have a new rule when it comes to getting things done. After Rule #1, “Avoid solving problems with bigger problems to solve,” Rule #2 is: "Whenever possible, solve for more than one problem at a time." The key is forethought. Here is a short and simple list of some ways I try to achieve this:

Never go anywhere empty handed. When moving from point A, no matter how casually, always take something that belongs to point B and leave it there.

Never go from A to B without considering what is in between. If there is a weed that really needs to be pulled, pull it. Then take a moment to notice the change.

When pruning, gather firewood.

When mowing, gather mulch.

When fencing the garden, trellis peas.

When engaged in physical labor, exercise.

When stopping to rest, heal and gather force.

When removing eyesores and trash, improve safety.

While heating pasta water, cook broccoli, green beans or boiled eggs.

When clearing a field of stones, gather building material.

And while I’m at it, a few do’s and don’ts:

Remove the word "disposable" from my vocabulary. Before discarding anything, assume it has a “next purpose” and reuse or recycle accordingly.

Never pull a weed without knowing its purpose in the ground.

Never do something practical without seeing the aesthetic in it.

Remove all military vocabulary from my landscape. There are no "invasive” weeds. Armies invade. Weeds are more like common citizens, they move into neighborhoods suitable to them. And one does not "battle” pests. Insects want to eat my cabbage as much as I do. But they rarely kill the cabbage and devour it with relish I will.

Fencing 101

2010-03-24T12:58:00.003-04:00

In Tuscany, in particular, a fence is a record of invasions by wild boar and porcupines, and of the gardener's intervention. I cannot say how old the fence around my orto (vegetable garden) is, but I can say it is an archive. It is not beautiful. It is rusty and snaggly and patched together with bailing wire. And now, with the first seeds of spring sown, it needs to be replaced, or patched once again. I have chosen to patch it. Patch it where the wild things have burrowed through. Patch it where the diesel dinosaur of the excavator ripped through it to lay our utility lines at the start of construction.

Again I find myself patching, repairing, healing what is crippled, broken, old, abandoned, but not yet dead or useless or done. Like the property itself. Like the old men a women seen doddering up and down the roads here after mealtime.

My initial instinct was to rip out the old fencing and crooked fence posts and replace it with a shiny straight new fence. And I suspect that I eventually will. But not this year. What is left of this old fence, the few places left where it is still intact, is also a record of where the animals have not gotten in. Yet.

The First Step (after many)

2010-03-18T02:33:00.010-04:00

It's been a week since the blizzard and I can finally get to the house without leaving the car by the road and walking. Giovanni is down in the woods bucking up downed trees. I will help him stack next year's firewood tomorrow.

This may not look like much, but it's the first step, literally and literally. The first step I've taken to finish the house (and get settled in). The first step from the old love shack (I'm reusing in the new). Everything else has been cleanup after the final flurry of construction and of snow.

Sono Qui! (I Am Here!)

2010-03-13T12:37:00.006-05:00

I am back in Tuscany for the next 8 months, to finish what I came here to start.

3 days ago it snowed for 2 days straight. Very strange for our area. This morning I just had to go to the house to check out the situation and satisfy myself that the roof hadn't caved in. On the way, I took a half an hour to get a little stuck. Then I took another half an hour to get a little more stuck. Then I spent most of the morning digging the car out.

But not without walking a long way, carrying a suitcase on my head.

When I first saw the shuttered house across the snowy field, I felt a little like Dr. Zhivago returning to Varyniko after years.

Triage & Vinage

2010-02-27T15:48:00.006-05:00

The very next day Russell brought his crew of groundskeeping lifesavers over to save the drowning vineyard. It was a searing hot day and very humid. Russell, Momo, Luciano (Gato), Mateo, Gabor, and I worked from 7:00 a.m till sundown. We got 3 rows of grapevines up and trellised and a lot of smothering weeds and vines whacked down. We also freed the pear, olive and other nearby trees of tree strangling wires and vines.

Many of the vines were sick with rot and mildew and the Italians on the crew wanted to prune them back severely. But I knew we were stressing them just to bend them back upright and expose them fully to the harsh Tuscan sun. Every leaf is a sugar factory and I wanted to let them use every one to recuperate. So we only cut back what was necessary to straighten and untangle them.

We put in some new posts and ran new trellis wire where needed.

And in the end, we had to prop them up with what we had on hand. Very contadino.

It wasn't pretty and it wasn't healthy, but Sally and I now had the start of the vineyard of my dreams.

Second Attempt

2010-02-21T07:41:00.005-05:00

Sally and I discussed the minimum items necessary to "camp" cheaply and comfortably at the property. These included: A propane stove and refrigerator, a composting toilet, a solar hot water set-up, a wood stove, a futon, a table and chairs, a water tank, a cell phone, and some kind of transportation. A list that was about to be rendered moot.

May 22. Noon. Back in the notary's office, after asking if we had the cashiers checks, Mr. Kopini read through the deed and transfer papers and permissions to build, etc. Even the black sheep were on good behavior. After the last fiasco, this felt, as Sally said at lunch afterwards, "positively anti-climatic."

Except when Mr. Kopini read the part of the complicated Italian title transfer that said we agreed to begin restoration within one year from the date of signing, and would complete all construction within 3 years from the start date OR WE WOULD FORFEIT THE VOLUMES WE’D JUST ADDED, without which no habitable house could be built on the property. Ever.

Blink. Blink. This was the first Sally, Stefania or I had heard of this. Sally and I stared at each other, but neither of us said "we can't do this." Neither said "the deal is off." Neither said what we were thinking (Is this the beginning of a chain of such add-ons and costs?). We could have ripped the cashiers checks up and walked away. But we didn't. Our sense that we had already accomplished something beyond our dreams wouldn't let us. And our optimism provided a rationale: Possession is nine-tenths the law. We can sort this out later.

And so we walked out into the bright Siena sun, owners of a little piece of Tuscany, willfully oblivious to the fact that we had solved the problem of buying the property with an even bigger problem to solve.

Riding Around on the Carouse-e-el

2010-02-18T09:40:00.008-05:00

While waiting for the re-wired money to be accepted by our Italian bank this time, I must run to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia to meet Prince Sultan bin Salman, who in 1985 went up in the NASA Space Shuttle.

On the 5:00 a.m. drive to Rome we pass, at the turn off to the new property, a burning car that has driven into a roadside ditch and exploded in the early morning hours . I don't believe in omens, but my Italian driver grabs his crotch and suggests I should do the same anyway. A gesture to ward of bad luck.

2.5 hours later, at Rome's Da Vinci Airport, I board my plane to Frankfort, Germany, where I expect to catch a flight to Riyadh. 2.5 hours later, I arrive in Frankfort having missed that flight. At the Luftansa info desk I am told there is simply no other plane that can get me to Riyadh in time for the meeting that day, so, after a 3.0-hour lay over, I board a return flight to Rome and arrive back at Podere Villore around ten 0'clock that evening.

But there is some good news: The money has cleared, and the family has agreed to reconvene for the sale on May 22nd at noon.

The Deal Is Off!

2010-02-17T10:04:00.017-05:00

In Siena we park beside a spinning carousel, unaware of how apt it is as a metaphor.

Stefania asks what we intend to do. In Italy it's illegal to write a bad check, so our choices are really only one. We can sign the checks and find ourselves in jail, or we can tell the truth and hope the notary, Mr. Kopini, will do everything but transfer legal ownership to us.

This is disconcerting because we would not have driven to Siena if this was the only option. Why didn't we discuss this before traveling all the way here? Because Stefania and her husband Antonio were buying a second small parcel from the same family and it was convenient for them to transact the sale at the same time.

As we walk, Stefania warns us about something she calls "Italian bluster." She says not to be alarmed if we experience it at the meeting. But we don't have to wait that long.

On a quaint street before a quaint door outside the surprisingly modern Notaio's office, we converge with Daniele and the family of sellers. When Stefania pulls Daniele aside and explains the money situation in hushed tones, Daniele's face turns bright red and he speaks rapidly. "The truth must be told!"

We enter the office and stand in the waiting room. Mr. Kopini enters and greets us. Stefania pulls him aside and has a word with him while the rest of go into the meeting room.

At the long boardroom table, the family arranges itself while Sally, Daniele and I sit at the Notary's end of the table, leaving a chair for Stefania between us. At the far end of the table sits a dignified, immediately likable, English speaking man, a Florentine banker here to represent his recently indisposed wife. Beside him is a regal looking older woman and another well-heeled man in a suit (a power attorney from Grossetto). There is also a doctor and his pretty wife. This is the Bracciali clan, the elegant, educated part of the family. They hold one-half of the property shares and are the ones who took the trouble to introduce themselves to us in the foyer.

From the middle of the table down sit the members of the Manzi clan, owners of the other half. These include the aging car mechanic of Montisi and his brother, as well as a tightly wound, 40-something woman with witchy black hair that has in it, the more I look, seed pods of some kind, as though she's just crawled out from under a bush. She sits directly across from Sally and glares. Beside her, across from me, is a man I assume is her brother. He is wearing sunglasses, and a baseball cap pulled low over his eyes, and several gold chains around his thick neck, and a tee-shirt. He is slouching in his chair, arms folded (I'm not kidding) like James Gandolfini. Did I say he's wearing sunglasses inside? Sunglasses and a cap that he will leave on all through the meeting?

Stefania comes in and explains in English that the Mr. Kopini refuses to do anything at all until we have the money in hand, and that we need to explain the situation to the family. Sally and I are mortified, of course. And when Stefania explains in Italian the reaction is palpable and dramatic.

"If I’d known, I wouldn’t have driven all the way from Grossetto," says the lawyer. Sally pleads that we are sincerly sorry and Stefania even shows the bank memo explaining that the money was wrongly returned. But this is where the division in the family becomes clear. the seed pod coiffed woman and her shady brother erupt in machine-gun Italian too rapid and simultaneous for me understand or recount here. Finally, the elegant banker at the far end of the table injects a voice of calm: "We know you are honest. It is just a mistake." The black sheep go quiet for a moment.

Seizing the moment, the notary asks Sally and me to excuse ourselves and tell Antonio to come in so he and Stefania can at least go through with their own purchase. But seed pod woman slams her fist to the table. “I am mad," she says to Stefania. "I was in an institution!” Then she points to Sally and me. "Without their money, no deal." The pair of shades beside her nods agreement. Now everyone is talking, including Mr. Kopini, trying to convince the two black sheep that Stefania is only our translator and the land sales have nothing to do with each other. But they won't listen. Everything is off unless all the money is here. Period.

Embarrassed and feeling bad for Stefania and Antonio, I'm tempted to take this as a sign and forget the whole deal. But the Notaio, all business, invites the sellers, if they still want to sell, to give power of attorney to one or two representatives, making it easier when the money is is in the bank. Everyone does except the black sheep, who immediately leave in a huff.

And that is why I have no picture of the family to show.

The Circus Begins

2010-02-16T14:02:00.006-05:00

Delirious with jet-lag the day after I started chopping vines, I made the mistake of asking Daniele if it was OK to do this. He said no, the owners were liable if I got hurt, but he said it staring off into space as Italians tend to do when they really think something is your own private business.

Sally and I discussed it that evening and agreed that: A) We absolutely needed to know as much as possible about the property before we committed thousands of dollars of our savings to it, and B) I would absolutely not sue if I did hurt myself. So, I put on my gloves and went back to work.

Two mornings later Stefania called to say we needed to go to the bank RIGHT NOW! to get a bank draft to transfer to one of the ten owners to get the chicken coop volumes added on the maps in Siena so the property would be ready to buy when the entire ten-member clan sat down together at Mr. Kopini the notary's office at 5:00 p.m. on May 15th, 9 days. It was the first we had heard of this date.

I won't go into the complicated way money is handled in Italy at this point, nor will I bore you with the crazy loopy way we had to assemble our weak dollars, convert them to Euros, and wire transfered them to our bank in Montalcino to cover the checks we were about to write in fractions of 26ths. Suffice it to say that when the 15th rolled around, our best efforts would inevitably, but not predictably, be thwarted.

Over the week I hacked and flailed and pulled and stacked, surprised by how well the first vines I'd unsmothered were doing, and by how many vines and fruit and nut trees were actually alive under the strangling canopy. During breathers, bright red field poppies, yellow broom, purple wisteria, green winter wheat, cherries and salmon pink peaches in bloom, were the more distant impressions I took in. While the cuckoo's woodwind complaint mocked me, Sally crawled around staining her knees and keeping an eye our for vipers, but not for the beautiful cock pheasant that spooked her when she nearly bumped into it and set it to flight.

For some reason, though we'd wired it from New York with time to spare, our money was not showing up at our branch bank account. Sally made countless calls to the States only to be assured that it had indeed been wired. Somehow it had disappeared in wire-space.

On the morning of the 15th, $150,000 was still not in our account. But our Italian bank had figured out where it was: It was now back in our New York account, where it had been rerouted, quite arbitrarily, by someone at the main office in Rome.

In a few short hours, we would meet the sellers holding checks that were essentially worthless.

CRAWL! By Sally Gall

2010-02-14T11:46:00.010-05:00

As I was using a sharp machete to discover the features of property we didn't yet own, Sally was crawling around on hands and knees using her sharp eye to discover a world where much goes on unnoticed except by babies, soldiers and picnickers. It's a jungle down there at ground level, and the beautiful photographic exhibition she created from the point of view of the newly born, the resting, and the dying has introduced us to a new kind of natura morta.

"Grand Jete"

"Salad Days"

"Pas de Deux"

"Study for a Roman Fresco"

"Tossed"

And So ....

2010-02-10T06:31:00.008-05:00

Stefania called in March. The members of the family had agreed to converge in Siena sometime in early May, date undecided, for the sale and transfer of title. Until now, I'd had a very maybe-it-will-and-maybe-it-won't-happen attitude. Now it seemed all too real. To out Italian the Italians, we would go over at the beginning of May and give ourselves a whole month to arrange the transfer of money from the States, the sale, the buying of permits, everything. That seemed like plenty of time.

These are the first tools I packed in my suitcase. Note the blue machete and the red sledge hammer.

May 2, 2007. Arrived in Tuscany and went immediately to the property, jet-lag and all. Somehow I could see more clearly the work that was needed RIGHT NOW. It was a riot of vegetative chaos. More grapevines had fallen over and died, their support stakes and trellises rotten and snapped. Living trees had been used as trellis posts and many were being girdled with trellis wire. And then there were the clematis vines (vitalba) strangling and pulling whole peach and cherry trees to the ground. Many trees had branches broken under the weight of last season's untended fruit. And there was junk everywhere. If I was going to buy all this in 2 weeks, I needed to know what was here, and I needed a plan for discovering it. That plan was to begin quietly hacking my way through the vines right away.

May 3. The first thing we had to do if we were going to transact any business at all in Italy, was get a Codice Fiscale. It's like a social security number but for taxes to. Stefania took us to Siena to get it, and then to Montalcino to open a bank account so we could transfer the money and write checks at the time of the sale. When we got back to Villore, Sally went immediately to bed. Me? I had to know what was under all that vine. So I borrowed Russell's four-wheel Suburu and went over to the property to begin the triage of trees and vines. And began whacking away with the machete.

That day, I liberated 8 grapevines, 5 peach trees, a big cherry tree, and one plum tree from the smothering vines. All the while a solitary bird in a nearby tree mocked "Cuckoo. Cuckoo. Cuckoo."

Stefania

2010-02-09T13:38:00.005-05:00

The woman at the center of this picture, taken during a village chestnut roast on Monte Amiata, is Stefania Alboreti. She is an Irish ex-pat married to Antonio, the guy standing behind her. She helps stranieri (outsiders) find and maintain properties in the area. Because Momo would be traveling this winter, and because Sally and I have pitiful little Italian, Stefania would be our paid interpreter. And since her husband Antonio is a respected builder in the area, we'd get some good structural advice as well.

It turns out there were a few hitches in acquiring the property. For one, one of the owners of record had actually died in 1997, so her successor had to be officially registered. On top of that, there was a little issue of volume.

In Tuscany, restoration laws are strict. Basically, you cannot build where no structure has previously existed, and you can only restore the amount of volume that was originally there. In our case, Daniele said we'd be allowed to add the two chicken coops and the lean-to attached to the volume of little sharecropper's shack, plus we could dig an underground garage as long as it couldn't be seen from the road, for a total footprint of about 98 square meters. That would create a cottage of about 321 square feet. Not very big. But a nice livable love shack size if we ever got around to building. And besides, you don't go to Tuscany to stay inside.

The problem was that the chicken coops were not on the official platt registered in Siena. They would have to be added. There would be a fee to the commune of San Giovani d'Asso under whose jurisdiction the property falls. It would be about 6,000 Euro. 6,000 Euro no one in the selling family wanted to pay out of pocket before the sale.

After several months of round and round, I proposed that I would pay it and we could subtract it from the total paid at the time of sale. Everyone agreed. But there was a much harder issue to get them to agree to: When could all 10 owners the property converge from all corners of Italy in the notary's office for the sale?

A Crashing Boar or Three

2010-02-05T08:56:00.017-05:00

Returning to the property one morning alone, I began a thorough assessment of its physical resources, the plants, the stones, the junk. Every rotten plank and broken brick were an asset to be considered for reuse in the spirit of whatever contadino had carted it there from somewhere else to reuse himself. And every mature tree, vine or herb would save me a a lot of landscaping. Rather than sculpting additively (by hauling things in to plant), I would reclaim the old farm, if we really bought it, by subtractively pruning and clearing--like chipping away marble to find the form hidden within, or chiseling a rough diamond. Except this little gem was green and living and dynamic.

Being mindful of rusty nails, broken glass, and hidden bailing wire traps, I walked the entire property starting at the top cataloging what I could see beneath the smothering rovi (blackberry vines) and vitalva (summer clematis). I found: 93 olive trees, 16 peach trees, 5 walnut trees, 4 cherry trees, countless wild prune trees, 2 big fig trees, 1 umbrella pine, and about 200 grapevines. And I was sure to discover more under the canopy of wild vines when I started clearing.

Working my way down the perimeter of the property where the lower grain field borders a small wood, I was also careful to avoid the ankle-twisting grubbing holes pocking the fields.

When I first heard the threatening grunt-snuffle-snort from under the expansive mat of blackberry bramble on the other side of the property line fence, my heart raced and I backed up, watching the brambles undulate like a giant mole was tunneling under them. Happily it continued tunneling away from me, even after I stepped into a grubbing hole and fell flat on my back, certain what I was hearing was a cinghiale, a wild boar.

My new acquaintance, artist and gardener Sheppard Craige, had told me a story over coffee just 2 days earlier. He was doing 55 miles an hour down a windy Tuscan road when a wild boar sow charged his pickup truck's left front tire. Within a mile the tire was flat, the sidewall punctured by a razor sharp tusk. Cinghiali, wild boars can get to be 700 pounds around here.

Cinghiale are rabbit fast and can rip the femoral artery out of a man's thigh in a heartbeat. Needless to say I gave that part of the property a wide berth.

At the very bottom of the property is the orto or vegetable garden area. Not only is the richest soil there, but that rare and most important resource in our area, a spring. It is a very slow trickle, but constant all year long and shaded by some pretty vinca, willows. The neighboring farmer had recently used the abandoned orto to grow corn and melons, the season's dry stalks stood in rows like so many straw sentries. Threading my way through them toward the stand of cane at the woods end of the orto, I began to fantasize about the great garden of heirloom fruits and vegetables I could grow. The soil was surprisingly moist because of the spring, a good sign.

I was savoring the song of warblers and thrushes and mulling all this over when I heard it again, not 6 feet from where I stood, the snuffling under the brambles. This time it seemed angry. Apparently, we'd both done a big loop and ended in the same place. The brambles undulated again, but toward me this time and fast. Then I saw the fawn-like backs of two boar piglets leaping away.

Knowing the big undulation was a boar sow coming my way, and that thin bit of wire fencing between us couldn't stop it, I turned and bolted face-first into a rattling cornstalk that scared me more than the mountain lion had. Barely controlling my bladder, I felled stalk after stalk before me as I ran to the opposite end of the orto. I never saw the sow, but I'll never forget her sour earthy musk. The only thing I can liken it to is the territory marking scent of tiger urine that raised the hackles on my neck in Sikkim some years earlier....

1st & last images are by David J Slater at DJSPhotography UK.

The First of Many Obstacles Removed

2010-02-04T09:09:00.003-05:00

Late that August, Momo placed a call to New York to tell us that the foot dragging 93-year-old woman had actually died months earlier and her lawyer hadn't bothered to inform the family. With this stumbling block removed, and the rest of the family still willing to sell, Sally and I would need to return to Tuscany soon to work out the details ... If we were still interested.

Meanwhile, we more earnestly entertained the fantasy of actually owning the property. I insisted that I would take this in a no hurry, no stress, carefully thought out and executed sort of way.

"How will we live there?" Sally asked.

"For the first 1-3 years, we'll just kind of camp there. I'll patch the roof in the little capanna (shed), well get a composting toilet and a solar shower and we'll cook on wood fires and eat from the land while we think about the next step. If at any point it stops being fun, we sell."

"Right."

On October 21, 2006, we returned to Italy.

World Cup 2006

2010-02-02T08:37:00.005-05:00

I have forgotten to mention the single most vivid moment before we started looking for a piece of Tuscany, the galvanizing moment when Sally and I knew we wanted some part of it. In fact, it was the spirit of an entire village that drew us in, made us feel part of a small community we were very much stranieri, outsiders to.

Independence Day, July 4th, 2006, Sally and I joined the 200 or so villagers of Montisi to munch pizza and watch a soccer game in the alpenglow of a warm Tuscan evening. The ancient Etruscan road into and out of town had been barricaded , an old white bed sheet had been hung across the road between the old stone walls and chairs were set up many rows deep.

Italy had not won a World Cup in 24 years. For the match deciding who would meet France in the final game, Germany had the home field advantage.

There is simply nothing like sitting-standing-sitting-standing among an entire village of passionate Italians of all ages, genders and castes, cheering, jeering, laughing, spilling wine and occasionally, during bad calls, leaping up to punch the referee projected on the bed sheet screen with their fists.

That night, underdog Italy took a chance and won. A few evenings later, on July 9, Italy took the title in overtime. I am not too embarrassed to say that Sally and I danced in sprays of uncorked spumante like everyone else. Sleep came late that night.

The next day, we started looking in earnest.

Daniele

2010-01-25T07:35:00.005-05:00

This is Daniele Monacchini. He is the geometra, the surveyor in the village of Montisi. He was charged with selling the property by the extended family who owned it. With Momo as interpreter, we learned that the property was 2 hectares (about 5 acres), that it came with precious vine and olive rights, that it was for sale for 100,000 Euro flat (plus 20% tax), and that it was owned in various fractions of one-twenty-sixths by ten different members of a two-family clan spread all over Italy.

There were only two catches. We had to get all ten to meet at a notary's office in Sienna, and one of them, a 93-year-old woman in Florence, didn't want to sell.

On Second Thought

2010-01-24T17:51:00.008-05:00

Returning to the property, I wanted Sally to take a closer look at all five abandoned overgrown acres, including....

The tiny delapidated sharecropper's shack...

And the severely listing chicken coop beside it...

And the dying vineyard...

And the disheveled unpruned olive grove...

which happened to have some million-dollar views.

But when I tried to paint the picture of the place a little fixed up, Sally couldn't see it.

So I tried another tack and said I really wanted to give it a try. This caught Sally's attention because I rarely say I want anything. But it wasn't until I said I would turn the dilapidated two room shed into a love shack...

that she agreed to meet the sellers.

The Next Day

2010-01-21T06:54:00.007-05:00

The next day, Sally and I went to look at properties with a real estate agent named Anne Marie. Over the better part of an afternoon, she showed us a dirt floored garage that reeked of gas and oil, a roofless caved-in grain mill, and a small farm house abandoned by the amateurs who'd recklessly half-restored it. The garage went for $300,000, the farmhouse for $600,000, the mill was claustrophobically attached to occupied apartments. None came with any land, let alone the olive trees and vines essential to the dream. By the time any one of these dismal properties was fixed up it would cost a million dollars or more.

It was depressing and it was clear: "location, location, location" had driven the price of Tuscany well over our budget. That evening over dinner we reluctantly agreed we'd simply have to remain perpetual visitors.

But all that night I lay awake, haunted by the abandoned property Momo had shown us. The rogue peach and grape leaves I'd seen thrust above the smothering vines like the hands of drowning swimmers, they'd been waving at me. They needed a lifeguard. They needed pruning. The next morning I woke with my heart racing, convinced I could heal that broken piece of land, reclaim it from the wilderness and make it our dream retreat.

"Sally," I said over coffee, "we need to go back for a closer look."

Momo

2010-01-09T09:00:00.007-05:00

While staying at Villore that summer, Sally and I wondered for the first time aloud whether it was possible to have our own little piece of the wild Crete Senesi, our favorite part of Tuscany. On a whim, Sally asked Villore groundskeeper, Momo Brubeck (the first American to live full-time in the area), whether he knew of a any fixer-uppers that might fit our unrealistically tiny budget. This is Momo.This is what he showed us.

And this was Sally's response: "Nah."

The Arabian Connection

2009-12-30T09:35:00.007-05:00

For the last 3 weeks I’ve been in Laguna Beach, California, working with my friends Greg MacGillivray (Director) and Steve Judson (Editor) at MacGillivray Freeman Films, where we are finishing Arabia, the 3D IMAX feature that will be released in theaters this February, 2010. Needless to say, it is another link in the chain to my Tuscan dream.

In July 2006, I was returning from a 10-day scout in Saudi Arabia, to Rome where I would meet Sally before another relaxing and productive stay at Podere Villore. It just happened that Mark Strand (American Poet Laureate and one of my favorite foodie friends), was in Rome at the same time. He invited us to join him for dinner at the home of Patrizia Cavalli (the Italian Poet Laureate) for a delicious meal featuring an amazing stinco (ox shin slow-cooked in wine all day) and more than one bottle of--what else?--red wine. When Patrizia proudly served the wine, she asked if anybody at the table happened to know it. By happy coincidence, I did. It was Il Bosco, created by my friend Massimo Alessandro at his vineyard in Manzano, near Cortona. Here we are among his award winning Syrah vines during a visit. Ciao Massimo!

Cougar!

2009-12-29T08:41:00.012-05:00

They don't have anything like this in Tuscany, so this may seem like a diversion. But before Sally and I decided to make our second home in Italy, we had to make a road trip out to the Great American West – 14,000 miles to be exact, 18 states in all. We were looking for a beautiful piece of desert on which to build a dream retreat in one of the other regions we love.

With my 1993 Ford Explorer packed to the gills, we rambled all over, camping most nights and eating fresh caught trout, wild mushrooms and foraged greens. We are especially fond of southern Utah and the arid Four Corners area. At the end of one long day's drive, we stopped at the remote campsite overlooking renowned Cathedral Valley in Capitol Reef State Park where Sally wanted to photograph at dawn. It was dusk and we'd just eaten dinner when the incident occurred. To read one of the closest recorded cougar encounters without injury, just follow this link to the official mountain lion report and report with pictures.

Aqueduct

2009-12-20T19:30:00.006-05:00

Those ambitious ancients really knew how to multitask.

This is the Pont Julien in southern France, built 2000 years ago. During a picnic Sally and I took there in 2002, I began to sketch out the character of a young Roman architect who’d fallen in love with the architectural detail known as the semicircular arch.

During a visit to the Pont du Gard aqueduct in nearby Nimes, the highest stone arcade the Romans ever built, I realized my architect was also the historically forgotten hydraulic engineer who designed and built it. In an apartment in Rome, and at Villore during the summer and autumn of 2003, I began to flesh my engineer out in words. His name was Hiero Anasus (Hiero the Duck). The son of freed Greek slaves, he was a Roman citizen at the time of Caesar Augustus when the Pont du Gard was probably built. In about a year I’d written the first draft the novel I'm now polishing as AQUARIUS. But I left one thing out of the story -- politics.

Then came the 2004 re-election of George W. Bush. I knew the book had to be politically substantial. I did my homework and learned that a two-party system was at least partly responsible for bringing the Roman republic down, among other things. To express my deep disappointment in my countrymen, and to illustrate what happens when too much power is handed to one man, I refocused the story. And that is how my ancient hydraulic engineer became a Tribune of the People at the moment democracy died in ancient Rome.

Fishing in Tuscany

2009-12-13T10:42:00.004-05:00

There isn't any, really. Not where we go. I just needed a hook.

After seeing a show of Sally's photos in Montalcino, Russell Wilkinson and Eileen Guggenheim (who run the New York Academy of Art where Eric Fischl mentors) were inspired to call and tell Sally how much they liked her work, which inspired Sally to invite them to dinner, where I was inspired to invite Russell fishing, which led us to bob around in my little 17-foot Boston Whaler in the Atlantic off Montauk, where we hooked sharks longer than the boat (and let them go), which gave us the subject for one of the tales that now gets told at the table of Podere Villore, the villa Russell bought near Montalcino the same week he saw Sally's photos, in Tuscany, where we've returned many times ever since Russell offered to let me use his guest house as a writing retreat while Sally taught her photo workshop during the scorching summer of 2003.

Roman Daze

2009-12-07T08:46:00.005-05:00

Despite appearances to the contrary, this is not Roberto Benigni.

When Eric received a fellowship to the American Academy in Rome in 1997 (still pre helmet law), he and April invited Sally and me to spend Thanksgiving week there. We had a fantastic time in la citta' eterna.

How Do You Keep A Dream?

2009-12-04T08:42:00.021-05:00

In our case, we didn't know it was a dream yet. We just kept dreaming it. Year after year we returned to Italy. For the air. the light, the people, the food, the history, the culture. For the Toscana Photo Workshop where Sally teaches. For the Roman wedding of friends.

Besides certain brain wave patterns and terror, sleep researchers have found only one other thing that differentiates dreams from nightmares: Dreams turn into nightmares when the dreamer becomes helpless to change her situation.

Here's a real example: Sally and I are at the check-in desk in the international terminal at JFK. We are on our way to to Rome, to participate in the wedding of two of our dearest friends, Eric Fischl and April Gornik. We place our passports on the counter and the agent picks them up.

"I'm sorry sir, but your passport's expired. I can't issue you a ticket."

"Can't we get a new passport here?" Sally pleads.

"No. You'll have to go through the appropriate agency."

Sally's tears don't work either. So we both turn around and cab back into the city.

That was a waking nightmare. But luckily, I was able to get an "expedited" passport, and after a full day's hustle we were on our way to Rome.

The wedding was beautiful, intimate, Italian. On motorini (Vespas, pre helmet law), the wedding posse buzzed suavely through the city in skirts and suits, treating traffic lights as suggestions like the Romans do, and stopping for photo ops at ancient sites. The bride threw her bouquet into the muddy Tiber from a bridge. The meal in the Hassler, atop the Spanish Steps, was grand. The whole thing was one of the best dreams I've ever eaten.

Someday, sleep researchers may reveal how to turn nightmares back into dreams. Until then, here's a warning: If you are afraid of nightmares, don't come to Italy. You will be forced to dream here ... frequently.

Vine Among The Ruins

2009-11-30T16:12:00.003-05:00

“You should have a vineyard!” said Sally.

“There’s a fixer-upper!” said Jack.

They were just kidding; they knew they could never afford it. But they drove all over Tuscany, falling in love all the same.

The Dream Begins

2009-11-29T13:30:00.008-05:00

Right now I have 10 months left to make my year-delayed vintage. Ten months to become fluent in Italian. Ten months to learn the contadino art. Yet here I am in New York, hustling work during the holidays. At times it seems daunting. Have I bitten off more than I can chew? How did my life get so complicated?

It starts in 1995. Sally has been invited to teach landscape photography at the Toscana Photo Workshop near Montalcino, home of the greatest Italian red wine besides Barolo. Though I’ve long been an oenophile, and know about it from my neighbor, Robert Parker, the wine critic,

Brunello di Montalcino is not a wine whose taste I am acquainted with. Yet. So, while Sally teaches, I will work on a novel in mornings, sometimes model for her class,

and visit the Brunello vineyards Robert recommends to sample and learn.