Harvest 2015, San Colombano Al Lambro (Milan, Italy). I did an internship in a winery according to the food and beverage course i was doing. It’s been a great experience but first off all an unforgettable adventure. I actively participated to all stages of the winery process. From summer pruning to grape harvest till the bottling. The hardest step was the eradication of sick vine because in July the heat is getting intolerable in north of Italy (in 2015 it has easily reached 100 degrees Fahrenheit! I was forced to get up at 5.00 am to start eradicating or pruning no later than 7.00 am.
The grape harvest was the step everyone is working for and it decrees the success or the failure of one year of hard work. But when the final countdown end his run there is a feverish action moving on.
August and September are the months of harvest, the heat and the moisture are still beating. Now I can finally touch with my fingers the amber white grapes filtering the afternoon sun and I can identify the different varieties of the black one from the shape of their leaves, the size and the color of grape. After one month you are quickly skilled to collect the right grapes, to discard the damaged or sick one. Day by day, fatigue by fatigue, heat by heat all the grapes are collected, up and down the field, every day. Sometime the foreman gathered all laborers for a drink (hem ehm, maybe two or three) around his Apecar transformed in a pick-up Bar! But don’t worry when you work hard on the field alcool is simply transformed in fuel! The last grapes are generally collected at the end of September, sometime later. But the work must go on inside winery, with crushing and vinification of grapes already collected and bottling the wine of 2014.
Unfortunately the drinking of 2015 wine, which had smelled and tasted my personal commitment was to be waiting 2016
It didn’t matter, to celebrate the success of the season we drank all the stock of 2014!!
#wine #harvest #vinolombardo