The Italian Job

The alarms went off at 5.30am and the small apartment slowly came to life. Strong coffee was poured, first cigarettes were rolled and hands lurched for stiff gardening gloves, head scarves, sun cream and heavy hiking boots.
I was ‘WWOOFING’ in Tuscany, Italy, during the final weeks of my swollen university summer holiday. Wine has been made in this valley’s micro-climate since the Etruscans and I was helping to continue this tradition.

Previous days had seen my fellow intrepid volunteers and I neatening the bases of the trees ready for the oil harvest. They now looked like Tuscan palm trees standing on small shaven islands among the waving grass. Today, however, was the main event: a full day spent in the vines preparing the grapes for the coming rain.

The Albanian land manager showed us what to; the importance of the task emphasised. Under the gaze of the enormous, fifteenth century castle on the hill we went to work.

I soon found a rhythmic shuffle that saw both hands teasing, testing and ripping the leaves. (Shuffle, test, rip.) We were each completely isolated by the head-height vines.
A couple of hours later, with the sun starting to burn through the gauzy clouds, we realised with delirious horror that it was taking 3 hours to complete each row. They stretched in their dozens across the valley, an optical illusion of perfect linearity that offered a silent threat of the work to come.

As the hours plodded on and the sun’s rays changed from warming to furiously intense, everything outside of the leafy walls started to melt away.

Snail trails of discarded leaves appeared silently beside each row and I started to doubt whether anything other than vines ever existed. My thoughts slowed and were consumed by sensory experiences: the scratch of the dead leaves collapsing in my hand; the ache in my lower back; the heat reflected back to the sun from my glowing skin.

I turned the end of a row and suddenly, amazingly, we were finished! Woozy with fatigue, we let out a victorious war cry that echoed through the cooling evening air across the Tuscan valley. Stiff-legged and chattering, elated and sun drunk, we wound our way back to the castle ready to drink the spoils of a previous year’s labour.

A bed has never been so welcome. I certainly haven’t looked at a bottle of wine in the same way since.