Time for wine – harvest, that is!
There was an article posted recently that talked about the difficult harvest season that northern Italy may have to face this year.
It seems that too much rain and low temperatures have had a negative effect on the grapes’ ripening process.
Reading up on the harvest season brought me back to my youth. It’s hard to find a descendant of Italian immigrants who did not have at least a little vine of grapes growing in the garden.
Italians are very proud of their green thumbs!
Even if you had the smallest strip of a yard in Brooklyn grandma and grandpa were sure to make use of it. I can still see the grapes hanging overhead as we used to play in Zio Mario’s backyard on 59th Street.
Our patriarch, Paolo Mosconi, or Nonno as we called him, used to return to his place of birth every year for his summer holidays. Nonno would leave for Piacenza in May and return to New York City in September. During those months he would spend a lot of time in his garden cultivating enough produce to satisfy his palate.
One year, while visiting him there, he proudly showed me the fruits of his hard work. Then he took me to a small cantina attached to his humble abode.
As he opened the old, rickety, wooden door I could immediately smell a musky, sweet fragrance, but what really amazed me was what I saw. There were bottles of sparkling white wine stacked with such an artistic precision that it should have been on display in an art gallery.
And so, with the memories of that sweet wine on the tip of my tongue, a toast of “Good Luck!” for a fruitful harvest to the Italians back home working hard to put wonderful wine selections on our tables.