Hot Times, Part II

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!