“In the United States, what do you call the place where they make the wine… is it a wine brewery?”
After hearing about it for three weeks and passing up a weekend trip to the Dolomites with my friends, I finally got to go to vineyard and pick grapes. The vineyard belongs to Davide, Novella’s boyfriend, and it’s located in the hills outside of Padova in Petrarch’s hometown, Arqua Petrarca. Davide also grows olives there, but I don’t know what one calls the place where olives grow. Anyway, we got up really early and drove with one of Novella’s teacher friends to Davide’s house, and when we got there, there were already people working. Everyone there was a friend of Davide or Novella, which was cool and nice. The first thing I did was walk around and take some pictures, and the views out of the yard and down the hill were more beautiful that any of my pictures are able to show. I don’t know how to describe it aside from saying it was one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been.
After looking around, I headed up to the vineyard behind the house. I got a pair of gloves and a pair of scissors and got to work. There were about six rows, each about the length of a football field, and we basically just walked along cutting bunches of grapes off the vine and tossing them into bins. It was a really nice day, and although it actually ended up being fairly hard work, harvesting the probably 100ish bins or grapes was relaxing and pretty enjoyable. After a couple hours we took a break to eat prosciutto and mortadella sandwiches that someone brought out, and after about another hour we finished and headed back to the house. While some of the women got lunch ready (I offered to help but was turned away) we sat in the backyard and drank wine, ate bread, and enjoyed the amazing view.
When lunch was ready we all sat down at a huge table in an outdoor patio area. There were about 20 people there altogether. We ate spaghetti, stuffed tomatoes, salad, and a vegetable stew type thing, and for dessert, Novella made cake that was half regular flour, half polenta, raisins, and almonds with sugar on top that is apparently a typical Veneto dessert. It was really good. I tried my best to keep up with the conversations that were going on, but I missed a lot of it. At one point someone asked me if I knew what people were talking about, I said no because the whole conversation was centered around one word they kept using that I didn’t know, and they used broken English and hand motions to tell me they were talking about the wild boars that live in the area. In my head I was saying, “Oh yes, wild boar. That’s the first word we learned in remedial Italian… not” Also awkward was the fact that they talked about me a lot, and I couldn’t really understand them. There were at least a couple of inappropriate comments made that all the old men laughed at forever. It was a bit awkward, but I’m getting used to being referred to as the “ragazza americana,” the American girl.
After lunch I chilled in the backyard some more, took more pictures, and walked around a bit. Novella showed me a fruit that she’s been telling me about for a while. It’s a little brown fruit that kind of looks like a brown olive and this little town is the only place in the world where it grows. It looks berry-ish, but the inside is more the texture of an apple, and it has a bit seed in the middle. It wasn’t the best thing I’ve ever tasted, but it was ok, and it’s cool that it only grows there. Eventually we closed up the house and headed back towards Padova, but we stopped along the way at the cantina, the place where they make and sell the wine. We stopped there so Novella could buy some wine, but I got to see our bins of grapes being dumped into the… grape smasher and starting to be turned into wine.
Overall, it was a great day and a really fun experience. I got to spend quality time with all Italians, and I think Novella appreciated my enthusiasm and eagerness to participate. I’m really glad I went, even though it meant spending a weekend alone in Padova.
