Travel

Picking grapes in the vineyards of Lucca, the writer encounters gentle confidences, curious traditions and a precarious living for the tenant farmers. By Ella Mittas.

Grape picking under the Tuscan sun

Harvest time in Tuscany.

Credit: Ella Mittas

I arrived in the Italian town of Lucca in October. La Vendemmia, the yearly grape harvest, was only just picking up pace; some grapes on their vines still needed a few days, weeks, of sun to reach perfect ripeness. Lucca is in Tuscany, on the Serchio river. Its centre is fortified by a series of large, intact Renaissance-era stone walls. But my view was from outside the walls, looking over the town from the surrounding hills, which were lush and green and humid. I waded through long grass in ill-fitting gumboots, sweating.

I had joined a group working for a wine label owned by two friends dedicated to biodynamic farming. Saverio, one half of the winery, has been a pioneer of biodynamics in the region for more than two decades, having worked in Australia in the ’90s. Lissandro, the other half, is the partner of a friend of mine. The pair rented the vineyard, cellar and assorted plots throughout the area and tended to the vines themselves. La Vendemmia marks the culmination of the year’s agricultural efforts so, as we picked and filled crates, they shared some anxiety as to how it had gone.

Throughout Lucca, different varietals are co-planted to mitigate risk – if the season is too hot or too wet. Having different varietals together means that they ripen at different times, so some plots are more laborious to pick than others. Our group picked down the rows, with the vines between us. It was fun that the work was hard, that it was so hot. It was fun because we were choosing to do it, didn’t rely on it, and there were rewards for our efforts. We’d stand sorting through the grapes, picking off the bits of rot and discarding those that birds had punctured. We worked from the early morning until the heat became almost unbearable. Then we had coffee, cold beers, cheese, bread and frittata delivered to us and served from the tray of a ute. Saverio’s partner, Stephania, brought ricotta from the woman who apparently made the best. We sliced it and ate it with salami.

Then we’d go back to picking. Everyone worked together and there was no competition. There was intimacy as we reached towards grapes together, our hands working in tandem. Leaves covered our faces; we could not see each other’s eyes fully. I’ve always found circumstances like this, where you’re completing a task with someone closely but not making eye contact – such as working on the line in a kitchen, or on long drives – bring up a confessional style of conversation. The days were a collection of anecdotes, accounts of life stories.

Laura, who was Irish, told me about her recent relationship breakdown. About her ex-partner, who’d kept telling her he’d move to Italy with her, only to keep delaying the move for the entirety of the relationship. By the time they had broken up, it came out that he had never wanted to move, that he never planned on moving, that he didn’t want to tell her because he feared that she would leave him. Now he was a commercial lawyer, the thing he was always meant to be, she told me, and she was living in Italy. She didn’t really know why she was so determined to start this new life for herself; she only knew that she was determined.

“You don’t have to justify it to me,” I said.

My working life had been spent seeking out moments exactly like the one we were in.

Lissandro told me that before they started out on their own, both he and Saverio had lived on a nearby estate, making its wine. The property covered 40 hectares, and aside from the vineyards, it also grew wheat and vegetables, produced olive oil and honey and raised animals. The main villa on the property was built in the 1500s. The living quarters for the workers were in a separate building. Lissandro said the owner was a blue blood. Blue from the visible blue veins of lighter-skinned aristocrats, who, because of a life of leisure, had less exposure to the sun.

The more he described their working situation, the more the estate sounded like an anachronism, a feudal hangover somehow alive and well. It also sounded beautiful. From within the wealth of the estate, the workers had the liberty to create a completely biodynamic and self-sufficient farm.

“We managed to make a closed loop,” he said, drawing a circle with his finger through the vines.

The farm was a self-contained system that managed all inputs and outputs: recycling nutrients, waste, water. Biodynamics treats soil fertility, plant growth and livestock care as interrelated, but some of its methods seem close to sympathetic magic. One of them, the burying of a cow’s horn stuffed with ground quartz, is said to harvest cosmic forces in the soil.

Lissandro told me they’d lived and worked on the estate for 20 years, until the owners decided that the winery had to start producing enough money to fund the upkeep of the entire estate and to pay everyone working on it as well.

“For their waitress, their personal chef, for breakfast, lunch, dinner,” he said, shaking his head.

“Making wine only gives you the chance to survive in an agricultural system, not to afford all of this,” he said. “For this, you have to reach into your pocket.”

“But did they need money?” I asked.

“No, no, they’re wealthy,” he said.

Lissandro and Saverio then had to build up their own label, but with hardly any capital. The main estate they leased, where the cellar is located, has been put on the market, pushing them into precarity.

“We are hoping for new owners,” he told me.

Once the day’s picking was done, we processed the grapes in the cellar. We de-stemmed them by hand, dragging them over a wire grate on top of a plastic tank, one person on each side pushing the grapes over the grate, back and forth, as fruit fell through. It was so physical, so manual, so romantic. We were covered, deep red, in juice when Saverio walked past us, saying, “432 frequency”.

“What?”

“Frequency, wavelength, energy,” he said. “Pink Floyd.” He pointed to a speaker playing music: “They played at this frequency.

“I play it for the grapes when they are fermenting,” he said.

When I later googled the frequency, I read that it helps to heighten the listener’s intuition and spiritual awareness.

When I probed Saverio about the basis of this and other biodynamic methods, he laughed and said, “We use them because they work.”

When we sat down to lunch – another feast, another table full of wine – Lissandro turned to me.

“I want to come to Australia and work in the mines.”

He said he wanted to go to the desert and make a lot of money to bring back to Lucca. I laughed at the absurdity but was dismayed. A biodynamic winemaker turning his hand to extracting minerals and plundering the earth?

“I don’t think you’d like it,” I said.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on February 1, 2025 as "On the grapevine".

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