I really am a farmer...

23 luglio

Spannocchia

Time really does fly

I talked to mom, who read this blog, and really had no idea of what I was going to do in Italy. She said I am really a farmer, and I laughed! I am only helping with a little bit of each huge job that makes up this incredible farm...

The castellina and the wood piles

Riccio in the plow, Michael and Haley as we get ready to gather the potatoes

Jeri pushing the cart with newly-harvested thin skinned, creamy potatoes

Newly harvested garlic in bunches, drying in one of the pottery sheds

Jeri and Sheila sorting potatoes in the pottery shed

Andrew and the 500 liter French oak barrel

Erica pouring Toscana vino rosso into the bottler. The tall stack in the background is vino bianco, and the short stack is the vino rosso we bottled earlier in the day.

I last wrote on Monday, the day I was moving into the Fattoria. I like it very much, except (and this is a big except) it does not cool down at night. My old room in Pulcinelli had a door and a window on kitty corner walls, plus a window in the bathroom. This room is beautiful, high wood beam and tile ceilings, an old non-functional fireplace, three twin beds, a large old dresser with tall mirror, a desk and chair, and a row of hooks on the wall. But, only one window which faces the north east, so it gets plenty of afternoon and early evening sun. It’s on the second floor, at the end of a long large hallway, and there is a window on the other side of the hallway about half way down… so it really doesn’t provide much cross ventilation. Allora… I use a fan and try to not wake up too much. I imagine these buildings are both hot in the summer and cold in the winter…

On Tuesday I worked stacking wood in the morning, then in the cantina with wine the rest of the morning and in the afternoon. On Wednesday I stacked wood, harvested potatoes, and weeded the vegetable garden, and didn’t work in the afternoon. I did all of these things with different groups of people. Can’t remember if I’ve written this yet, but my schedule since the second week has been two mornings (7-1) and one afternoon (3-5) each week.

It is hard to describe how much wood there is on this property, in stacks and all manner of size and configuration of piles. And, I am sure I have only seen a bit of it. Of the ~1100 acres, most of the land is in forest, and Spannocchia practices sustainable forestry, growing and harvesting wood for sale, and to use on the property. I have heard that the forestry operation is subbed out to another company, but somehow this still leaves plenty of work for staff and volunteers on the farm to move and sort part of that wood. One day on my first week there was a huge truck/trailer on the road from the main road, with a huge load of wood.

On the first floor of the Fattoria there is a “caldaia” which is a big wood burning stove that provides the heat in winter, and hot water year round. I believe it services the Villa, the Fattoria, Pulcinelli, and the houses for the owners and staff that surround the villa, as well as a couple of guest residences in the same area. One of the jobs of the tutto fare interns is to keep the caldaia stoked with wood—it takes logs about 4 feet long.

Working with wood is interesting because it supplies both exercise and feeds my need to organize things. The first morning was a bit chaotic, with many people working, but for only an hour or so. The second morning was better, as I stayed in one place sorting and stacking as others brought wood from another pile. I learned a new word—when you are stacking wood (these logs are aobut 4 feet long) you need something to hold the end of the stack, so you use larger, straighter logs to build a castellina, or little castle. It’s just wood stacked in alternating criss-crossed rows, and is effective like a bookend on the stack.

After wood on Monday I went with the tutto fare, Andrew and Erica (who I had trimmed grapevines with on my first day of work) to the cantina. By the time I got there, they and Angelo the winemaker and vinyard manager had already set up the bottling process. I’ll describe it…

We were bottling the 2007 red table wine, which will be aged in bottle another year before selling. It had been aging in a 500 liter French oak cask—I’m not sure how long it had been in oak. There are a few tall, much larger, stainless steel tanks as well. After we had bottled, Angelo was describing how the wine in oak is stronger because of the way the wine breathes in oak, compared to the way it doesn’t in steel. I am sure he said much more than that, but I didn’t catch the nuance. It was very good, with nice fruit, and I felt very lucky to have a job at 9 am that entitled me to a nice big balloon glass to sip delicious wine! BTW, the glasses that we use for evening wine before and during dinner are those little round wine glasses that you would see in a cheap Italian restaurant. They don’t bring out the best in the wine, but probably discourage people from drinking even more than they do every night.

So, there was a siphon hose set up in the cask, attached to a stick that kept it from going all the way to the bottom to the dregs. The hose went to a filter contraption that had about 10 vertical plastic cells, that each contained a filter, so the wine goes through the whole series of filters, then goes out another hose to the top of the bottling unit. This has a tank on the top that feed into four spring-mounted spouts. You push the bottle up so the spout goes into the bottle, and the bottle sets on a rail. The wine fills the bottle and a sensor (?) tells it it’s full. So, someone stands and removes and replaces bottles, placing the full ones on the table (which sets outside under a tree with three chairs when not in use in the cantina), someone stands on the other side of the table and puts corks in the bottles, and someone else refills the crate of empty bottles from the pallet of bottles, or cleans off the plastic shells that hold the stacked bottles, or takes the bottles from the corker and places on the stack… It was a great way to spend the morning in the cool cantina, with its musty, winey, damp smell, cool, wet, wine covered floors, and brick and rock walls.

In the afternoon Andrew and I cleaned out the French oak barrel, using hot water from the hose to add water, plug, and roll the barrel back and forth on the two rails it was resting on, letting the water swish away the red wine and dregs. We did that 4 times, then left the barrel, hole side down, to dry on the rails.

The afternoon bottling was for use on site, for 7:00 wine on the terrace and at dinner every night. This was the last of the 2005 red table wine, and would not have labels, so the bottles can be cleaned and reused, instead of being used once, transported to who-knows-where, and be recycled. Erica and Andrew filled the wine bottler manually, taking pails of table wine directly from a steel tank from the lower spout, then pouring it into the bottler’s reservoir, then bottling and corking wine.

We then cleaned out the large steel tank, using the hot water hose and using a scrub sponge to clean the dregs from the bottom and the tank fittings. Then hosed down and used a big squeegee mop to clean the floor and send the water to a shallow trough that circles the cantina floor. I also hauled quite a few loads of un-labeled red and white wine to the kitchen storage for on-site use.

After the previous days’ work, I felt pretty fortunate to spend most of the day in the cantina. The following day I would definitely pay my dues!

On Wednesday I spent most of the morning stacking wood and building another castellina. Then, I went with Jeri and Sheila who work in the gardens, and Michael and Haley, the new volunteers who arrived on Monday, to the vegetable garden. Jeri and Sheila had already harvested most of the potatoes with Carmen the week before. There was one more row to harvest, and it was quite a production. Riccio drove a tractor over with a spade like attachment, and started down the row, with the spade pulling up the row of potatoes. We went behind, picking out the potatoes as they were unearthed, with Carmen constantly yelling at Riccio to slow down, “Piano, piano!” and Riccio seemingly not paying one bit of attention. It was a pretty funny event, but hot and exhausting. We then went through with large hoes (I forget their name…) and picked out the remaining potatoes. We spent a few minutes pulling out the green bean plants (fragiolini) that had already been picked, threw them into a compost pile, and went down to the main garden to weed.

Five of us weeded two rows of beds and walkways for an hour or two, split with a good break in the shade, and by the time 1:00 rolled along I could hardly walk up the stairs to the villa—no matter that there were a few flights of stairs to get up to the driveway, but I was entirely bushed. I washed up at the outdoor sink, went to Pulcinelli for lunch, went to my room to put on my bathing suit, took a dip in the pool, and sat out in the shade chugging water for a couple hours. I went around the corner to the pottery sheds to talk to Jeri and Sheila who were sorting the potatoes (big ones, little ones, and ones with the skin not quite intact, or with holes that needed to be used first). I went over to the Fattoria kitchen where the wedding guests had left some beers (Moretti and Peroni) and brought three beers over.  The three of us pretty much agreed that they were the best beers we had ever tasted—Jeri and Sheila were pretty exhausted as well.

Thursday I went to Volterra which was a gorgeous drive through the Val d’Elsa, through Colle di Val d’Elsa, and up and up to Volterra. The Val d’Elasa is just a beautiful valley of farms, farm houses, and where you will look up and see a crenellated tower poking out of the trees… amazing. Volterra is a beautiful, intact, walled city. I went through the Duomo, the Baptistry, and paid 5 E (student rate!) to walk throught the Eutruscan Museum, where I saw an incredible assortment—dozens, and dozens—of carved alibaster funerary urns and other artifacts. Can’t begin to describe it here, so if you’re interested go to the web and I’m sure you will find lots and lots of information.

Today was mostly overcast, with the sun peeking in just enough to remind you how friggin hot it is… But a consistent breeze has kept it reasonable. I have done a lot of school work, some research design reading, and had lunch at Pulcinelli with Michael and Haley. Leftovers of Graziella’s amazing baked meatballs (Spannocchia meat, of course), her ziti with fresh tomato and basil, and braised carrots. Yum:)

Pino came to visit and I gave him the full farm tour… we went through all the common rooms of the Villa, including the chapel which I hadn’t seen before. He is very happy to see me living in the Fattoria instead of Pulcinelli. He said that Liz will be very happy as well. We walked by the pool, by the pottery sheds, then up to pig hill. On Tuesday Julio and Kerry and Molly took a trailer with 37 pigs down to a lower pasture, and on our visit today there was just a couple pigs in one pen, and a mama with her little ones in another. The meadow of mown grass there is so beautiful, and the views and the trees—oh, it’s all just so lovely! We saw Riccio, Julio, and Natalino on the way back down and Pino complemented them all on the work that goes on here. He is so impressed by the incredible work and dedication that goes into not only keeping up the many activities, but in being dedicated to traditional, organic, methods of farming.

Tomorrow Siena, Sunday to Firenze to meet Liz, stay there Sun-Mon nights, and drive back to Spannocchia via the Chianti region on Tuesday. Looking forward to the next few days!

Ciao, tutti!