With the current times, with the offensive against wine, as if anyone who indulges in a glass is a drunkard, as if every glass is a deadly attack on health, reading these words by Iolanda Maggio is a breath of hope.
I’m from Puglia, where in the 1980s, wine was for many families still a food. There was still sharecropping, and I’m not talking about the 1800s but the early 1980s. Modest but honest family. Wine was with soups and bread-the kind that smelled of wood and lasted a long time-always at the table. About 150 kcal per glass. Maybe a little more.
In our area almost everyone had a vegetable garden, two rows of tomatoes, the fig trees, a few almond trees, maybe a mulberry tree, I remember an arbor of very sweet Pizzutella table grapes That made shade in the yard, where I played among the rabbits and chickens. The trees painted in white lime. The dark, almost red earth. And the rows of vines. Mixed. It was never all of one kind.
Dry-stone walls marking the boundaries with prickly pear blades framing them.
Land, countryside, neat. The “challenge” was to make the wine taste better than the neighbor’s.
As a child on the way home at the beginning of school, the smell of must rising from the cellars could be smelled on the village streets. Unmistakable. A little almost “damp,” thought I child. Grandfather’s hands rough and dyed red. But it was a party. The concrete tanks. The carboys. Simple, rustic but who knows how good it came and everybody was happy. Sometimes it was a little strong and diluted with water so it was even more.
Wine was aggregation, family, table and a break from hard work.
I think I am not the only one who has these memories, alldough vague. I’m of the generation that children and grandchildren instead had to study (that you want to end up picking tomatoes? The worst threat). So college, the city away from the country and family.
But the memory of the joy, the scents and from the taste printed in the mind as imprinting.
The search for that and the discovery of much more. Finally then the wines, the ones made well for real. And the world that opens its doors wide to you like the little mouse Remi before the gourmet Paris.
That’s why I drink wine.
Because I am Italian, because it tastes like home and because it is good.
