The Sweet (And Slightly Yeasty) Taste of Patience

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!

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

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....

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

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

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

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.