Parcel 214/c

The co-operative’s technical declaration for the vintage is a single sheet of A4 with eleven boxes on it, and at the bottom there are two lines: one for the producer and one for the registered oenologist.

I filled it in on the Saturday at the kitchen table with the transfer deed still lying where it had lain for four days. Eleven hundred vines. Four terraces. Yields, hectares, must weights, the lot. And then the two lines, and my own name going on the first of them, and the second one white.

I had never once looked at the bottom of that form. Serena was right about that, and it is not a thing I enjoy writing down. For two harvests a man had signed underneath me and I had never thought about it any more than I think about the wire the vines are tied to.

I put it in an envelope with the second line empty and drove it down to Domaso myself, and the woman at the desk turned it over, and looked at the white line, and looked up at me.

“It goes back,” she said. “It has to have the technical signature by the fifteenth of November or the whole vintage sits outside the scheme.”

“I know. I’ll bring it.”

“You will bring it,” she agreed, in the voice of a woman who has heard a great many people say they will bring it, and I drove home up the shore road with the lake on my left doing nothing at all and understood, properly, for the first time, the difference between owning a thing and being allowed to sell it.

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I went up into 214/c on the Sunday morning with my father’s billhook and no plan whatsoever.

You get in at the west end, where the wall has come down and there is a gap you can put a shoulder through if you do not mind the blackthorn. After that it is four metres of bramble at chest height for thirty paces, and then the ground changes under your boots — it goes from soft to that dry gritty sand-over-stone that does not hold a footprint — and the brambles thin out, because brambles are lazy and will not work for a living on a terrace like that.

And in the middle of it, in the third hour, with both forearms opened up and my hair full of burrs, I found a vine.

Not a bush. A vine. Thick as my wrist at the base, black, twisted the way they go when nobody has pruned them for a generation, with two arms up into the blackthorn and one long cane out along the ground, and on that cane, at head height where it had climbed a thorn, four clusters of grapes.

Small. Loose-shouldered, eight or ten berries to a wing, the skins thick and black-blue, a bloom on them like dust. I ate one and my whole mouth went tight with acid and behind it, quite unmistakably, there was the smell of a nebbiolo that nobody had planted in this valley since the war.

I sat down on the ground in the middle of the brambles and ate four more and laughed like an idiot on my own.

Then I went down and found Ettore at the crush pad and said, “There is fruit in 214/c,” and he put the hose down.

“There is fruit on every bramble terrace between here and Colico,” he said. “It is not worth the diesel.”

“Come and eat one.”

He came. It took him a long time to get through the gap, because he is sixty-three, and he ate one berry and spat the skin out and stood there in the thorns looking at the old wood for about a minute and a half.

“Sandro Rinaldi planted this in 1934,” he said. “Your father showed me the corner stone in 1991 and told me never to go in, because he did not want anyone up here talking about it.”

“Why?”

“Because he bought it off a man who was drowning, and he did not want to be thanked, and he did not want to be watched not being thanked.” Ettore wiped his mouth. “How many vines?”

“I’ve found nine. There’ll be more in the middle.”

“Then you will need six people and two days and a fire,” he said, “and you will not get either of them out of me by standing in a thorn bush. Ask me in the yard like a Christian.”

So I asked him in the yard, and he said yes, and I booked six people for the Monday and the Tuesday at ninety euros a day each and paid it out of my own account, and told Nadia to bring her brother’s chainsaw.

Ettore brought his old employment folder to the kitchen while I was making up the wages sheet. Behind the bank details was a certificate from Milan, 1989, with his name above the word enotecnico.

“You trained there?”

“Before your father hired me. He kept a copy.”

I looked at the name again. Thirty years I had thought cellar master was the whole of him. I put the certificate back carefully, as though that made up for it. The declaration in my envelope asked for an oenologist. I had four men to telephone before Monday and I did not ask what the difference was.

I told Theo at six that evening, at the press house, because he was there, and because I had decided on the way down the hill that I was not going to have a single thing on that property that a man had to find out from somebody else.

“I’m clearing the top of 214/c,” I said. “Monday and Tuesday. Six people. There’s fruit on the old wood, and I’m going to pick it.”

He did not say anything for a while. He had the racking arm in pieces and he kept his hands on it.

“There’ll be nothing in it,” he said. “Four kilos of raisins and a lot of thorns.”

“There are nine vines alive at the west end and I’ve eaten the fruit off three of them and it isn’t raisins, it’s 21 Brix and about nine and a half of acid and it tastes like the inside of a church.”

“Marisol—“

“You don’t have to come up.”

“No,” he said. “I don’t.”

He was at the gap at seven the next morning with his own billhook and his father’s leather gloves, and he did not say a word about it, and neither did I.

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Two days. Six people, Ettore on the fire, Nadia’s brother’s chainsaw for the blackthorn stools, and the whole village watching the smoke go up off the top of the hill from four kilometres away and ringing each other about it.

Twenty-nine living vines. That is what was in there. Twenty-nine out of what had once been sixty rows, and every one of them on its own roots, and four of them so far into the thorn that we cut round them and left them for the winter.

We found the corner stone at the east end with 1934 cut into it and no name. We found eleven metres of the old wall standing and forty metres of it down. We found a pruning hook with a wooden handle jammed in the crotch of a vine, so rusted the blade came away in two pieces when Nadia lifted it, which meant somebody had put it there in 1998 meaning to come back for it after lunch.

Theo worked the east end on his own for most of the second day. I went along at about four with water and found him with the thorns cut back off a vine that was not a vine any more, just a black stump with one live cane on it, and his hand flat on the wood the way Ettore puts his hand on a tank.

“That one’s the oldest,” he said.

“How do you know?”

“Because it’s on the end of the row and the end vine is always the first one planted.” He took the water. “He was nineteen. My grandfather. He planted this the year the bank took my great-uncle’s boats, which is a thing that happens in my family about every thirty years.”

I took the numbers off the fruit that evening on the sorting table under a light: 21.8 Brix, total acid 9.6, pH 3.05.

“Pick tomorrow,” Theo said.

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We had it out in the yard, and I am glad it was in the yard, because Ettore was there and Nadia was there stacking the empty crates and it meant there were witnesses to the part I got right.

“There’s a front coming Wednesday afternoon,” he said. “Twenty millimetres. On fruit that’s been in a bramble bush for twenty-eight years, with skins that thin, we’ll have botrytis in every cluster by Friday and we will have cut a terrace clear for nothing.”

“And on Tuesday it’s 21.8.”

“21.8 is a wine.”

“21.8 is a wine that stops,” I said, and watched that land on him, because it was his own sentence out of my father’s tasting room and he knew exactly where I had got it. “Those berries are thirty per cent skin. That’s the whole point of them. If I bring them in at 21.8 with the acid at nine and a half I will have made forty litres of something sharp and green that I will spend the rest of my life explaining to people.”

“Then you’ll have forty litres. If it rains on them you’ll have nothing.”

“It isn’t going to rain on them.”

He stopped. He put the crate down. And then — and this is the part I have kept — he did not refuse me, and he did not go and find a job. He stood in the middle of my yard with his sleeves down and argued with me for eleven minutes like a man arguing with another man.

He had the chart from the regional service on his phone and the isobars on it and he was right about all of it, the timing, the millimetres, the temperature behind it. And he was wrong about one thing, and the one thing was ours, not the chart’s.

“You told me in September that a front sits over this water for two days when there’s nothing behind it to push it through,” I said. “There’s something behind this one. There’s a high coming down off the Engadine and the pressure’s been climbing since Sunday night and the cypresses at the top of the drive have been going over to the south since yesterday morning. It’ll rain Wednesday evening for about four hours and then the tivano will get under it and take it down the Valtellina, and we’ll have Thursday and Friday cold and dry with the wind off the north end of the lake, straight up that terrace, which is the only terrace on this property that gets it.”

“And if the high stalls.”

“Then I lose seventy kilos of grapes and you get to be right in front of Nadia,” I said. “Friday. Half seven, when the dew’s off. Six people. I’ll book them tonight.”

Theo looked at me for a moment.

“Friday,” he said, and went and got the crates down off the trailer for Friday.

It rained on the Wednesday evening for four hours and ten minutes. Thursday came up hard and cold with the tivano going through the wires so you could hear it in the house, and it blew all day Thursday and all Thursday night, and on Friday morning at seven the terrace was dry to the stone and the skins had gone tight and every cluster in that parcel was clean.

23.1 Brix. Acid 8.7. pH 3.14.

I have been right about things before. I have never in my life been right about something out loud, in a yard, against Theo Rinaldi, in front of the cellar master and a woman from Menaggio who has picked this hill since before I was born.

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Seventy-four kilos. Four small crates and a bit, off twenty-nine vines, for three days of six people’s wages and about seventeen hundred euros all in, which as a piece of agricultural economics is indefensible and which I would do again tomorrow.

We carried them down through the gap in the wall by hand because you cannot get a trailer up there, one crate at a time, eleven crates’ worth of walking for four crates of fruit, and at the bottom of the track Ettore had the sorting table set up in the sun with a cloth over it, which he had not been asked to do.

He put his hand out for the first crate and did not take it. He looked at it, and then he turned round to the six of them coming down behind me with their gloves off and the thorn scratches on their arms, and said, loudly, in the voice he uses for the co-operative driver:

“The first fruit off the 1934 rows in twenty-eight years. Picked on the Friday, against advice, by the padrona.”

Nobody cheered, because that is not what happens. Nadia said something to her brother about the price of thorns. One of the Domaso men asked whether there was cake.

But Ettore Lombardi said it in front of six paid workers and a man on a trailer, having said it twice before in his life to my face and never once in front of anybody, and I stood there with my arms full of another family’s grapes and felt something go into the ground under me and set.

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We destemmed them by hand into a plastic bin that evening, the three of us, at the table in the yard with a lamp on an extension lead, because seventy-four kilos is not worth starting a machine for.

It took two hours. Ettore told a story about my father and a stolen pump that I am not going to write down. Theo took the second-crop bunches out without being asked and did not tell me about them. At the end of it there were fifty-one litres of crushed fruit in a bin under a cloth in the old dairy, three metres from tank six.

Eleven days, I wrote in the book. Press at eleven days. Gentle.

At about ten Theo came out to where I was sitting on the wall with the last of a glass of the 2024.

“In January,” he said, “when the wood’s dormant. There are nine vines up there worth taking cuttings off. If they go into the nursery at Colico in the spring we’d have two hundred plants by the winter after next, and in six years you’d have the terrace back.”

“All right.”

“That wasn’t the question.” He was looking down the hill at the water, the way he does. “The question is whether you’ll let me do it.”

“You don’t have to ask me.”

“Yes I do,” he said.

And I sat on my own wall with the tivano still coming up the lake and sixty-nine days left on the year and seventy-four kilos of grapes in a bin in the dairy, and I was happy. Plainly and stupidly happy, for the first time since the ninth of September two years before, and I want that written down in the middle of all this, because it happened and because of what came afterwards.