The grape harvest, effort, passion and much more!

19 October 2022

Since I started photographing the winery Nuovi Poderi, I have had the pleasure of entering a world that I partly thought I already knew.

Actually, I only understood a small part of the huge work of a winery.

There are many things to know about Nuovi Poderi, but in this article I want to tell you about the Grape Harvest.

We all know this word and we are sure of what it means: the harvest of grapes to produce wine.

But it is much more.

It’s effort, sacrifice, it’s breaking your back, it’s precision control, it’s synergy of work.

Nowadays, we are led to think that everything happens in a mechanized way – and perhaps for some wineries it works like that -, but not for Nuovi Poderi.

The grape harvest is made as it once was, by hand. Hours and days under the sun, bent down among the rows to cut all the bunches that must be placed in the boxes, previously arranged along the row.

We are in Sardinia, in August/September, the temperatures are decidedly summery, especially this year.

Try to identify yourself in this situation: from early morning bent under a sun that, from the first light of dawn, beats down hard for hours. Now, repeat this effort every day until the last bunch.

You have no idea how hard these people work, how strong is their passion and love in this phase.

Now that the boxes are full, they must be collected.

Then, after hours spent cutting, we move on to another hard step: lifting and loading the boxes onto the vehicle that will take them in front of the hopper.

This activity is repeated within each row, box after box, up to the last centimetre of the vineyard.

The big part is done, you will say… not even remotely!

Now the boxes must be emptied one by one into the hopper.

Here begins the real birth phase of wine.

The screw presses the bunches and sends them to the crusher-destemmer, which separates the grapes from the stalks, which are sent to the tanks where the first phase takes place: the alcoholic fermentation of the sugars that will turn the must into wine.

We are talking about a long process that involves continuous “tastings” and checks to verify its evolution.

Inside the tanks, the residue of the skins is deposited on the bottom, which is extracted “manually” to be squeezed.

At this stage, we can say that the harvest is over,

even if it is only the beginning of the work that will be done in the winery to put the wine into the bottles.

But this is another story.

I close this article with an invitation: don’t forget the hard work of the people who work in the fields every day to bring to our tables the products we like to eat.

The company’s point of view could not be missing.

These are the words that Luigi Giuntelli wrote to tell you about the Grape Harvest!

“The grape harvest. Perhaps for some people it is simply that time of year, at the end of Summer, in which the grapes are harvested and processed to turn them into wine.

Sometimes you meet people for whom the harvest has different sounds, flavours and meanings. You can recognize these people immediately, because a light immediately shines in their eyes: perhaps for having lived an experience with their grandparents, or for having worked as a boy to scrape together some money, sweating and suffering and sharing entire days among the rows from the first lights of dawn.

In the minds of those who “breathed” the grape harvest, an idyllic and magical idea was built around that period.

The grape harvest is probably all of this! ! Experience, passion and love for work and for a type of fruit with an infinite versatility.

The grape harvest is the planning of the new year under all the business aspects of a wine company. The magic of the harvest lies in its ability to close a year of countryside, earth, mud, sun, rain, clouds, greenery, plants and grapes, of harvesting and processing – which for us in Sardinia coincides with the late summer period between August and September -, and directly opening the following year with the new objectives on the production and management of the company, to then return headlong to the countryside, earth, mud, sun, rain, clouds, greenery, plants and grapes and harvesting and processing…

It is the closure of a cycle, but also the birth of another.

I’m not here to tell you about the sound of the scissors cutting the base of the stalk, the sound of the bunch of grapes lying inside the boxes, the crawling of the boxes on the ground, the deep breaths to raise and lower the boxes from the ground to the trolley and from the trolley into the first processing machine.

The grape harvest is the union of a group of people who share an experience, the effort, the laughter, the sun, their opinions, a few quarrels, more or less recent songs, but, above all, their time for a few weeks.

The relationship raised during the grape harvest remains even after one or more years, and the task of continuing to remember all this is ours, of our oenologist, of our wine…

The wine of Nuovi Poderi”.