Vino Etrusco: Stickiest Day Ever

So I've made it to my next temporary home, which turns out to be a honest to goodness medieval castle surrounded by vineyards and olive groves, with views of surrounding hilltop towns (of a few hundred residents each) and a path down to a beautiful river. I promise to include more pictures of the interior of the castle in a later post, but here's one to pique your interest:




I've also once again happened upon a large group of young people, but these are a little more international: three South Africans, two Australians, an Irishman, and two Texans. The castle is owned and run by three Brits, and there's an Albanian-Italian family that lives here and runs the farming and some of the bed and breakfast housekeeping. The Brits speak English and Italian, but I've fallen into the role of interpreter for the day-to-day work.




This week, the highlight was making wine like the Etruscans did thousands of years ago. Most of the wine they make at Potentino they make the modern way (although they do use a handpress), but every year they make one small batch of Etruscan wine. Just across the river on the neighbor's land there's an Etruscan wine stone!




We went out in the morning and picked grapes, pretty much the same way I did last week. But this time, instead of throwing all the grapes in the de-stemmer and pumping the juice and grapes into the wood vat, we took them down to the stone by the river.




We pulled all the grapes off the stems by hand and threw batches of grapes in the top basin, stomped until we had broken all of the grapes we could, and then filled buckets of juice from the bottom basin, and juice and skins from the top basin and filled a stainless steel container on the truck.




Then repeated. All day. At the beginning, people couldn't wait to start stomping. By the end, we had to ask people to please stomp some grapes so we could all stop being so sticky.




After we had finished, I went with a few of the others and jumped into the freezing cold river, which seemed like the only way to get all the grape juice off. We had to scrabble down a rocky slope to get to the swimming hole, and every time I tried to stretch my leg out, my thigh would stick to my calf, etc. I can't remember a time when I was stickier in my life.




The Etruscan wine will ferment for about three months in a steel vat (no oak barrels), and won't be aged, so it will make a very simple wine, hopefully without the slight nose of feet...

Coming up: the olive harvest, more castle pictures, a dress-up birthday party, and more!

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Location:Potentino, Seggiano, Grosseto, Toscana, Italia