Montecchio being on the water table for countless kilometres of limestone hills above, the ditches are soon full to overflowing. Even the emergency ditches begin to fill, something that happens only once or twice a year. The water is a muddy brown flecked with white as it bears away the heaps of litter people have thrown there. Before the week is out, water floods the section of road by the Cassa di Risparmio di Verona, Vicenza e Belluno, the village’s one bank. The Communist Party is quick to get out posters complaining that, while the council has plenty of money to spend for all sorts of other projects, it has never solved this simple drainage problem. The head of the local Christian Democratic Party ducks (as it were) the question at a meeting held in the local library which is temporarily closed for book borrowing because the librarian is away for his military service. Finally, the rain becomes so violent that it fills the emergency ditch to the brim, bursting the stout wall that protects the main road and covering it with water and broken masonry.
How can we possibly bottle prosecco in this, Giampaolo complains. He taps his barometer. I’ve never seen it so low. We watch an evening’s TV together over the last of the previous year’s bottles. On one of the smaller channels there are frequent ads for talismans (by post) and the services of local astrologers, but nothing on how to get the right combination of atmospherics and lunar cycle for our sixty litres of bubbly. The news quotes the huge sum the government has already promised in compensation to keep the farmers sweet. Should we, perhaps, prepare a claim for our possibly ruined prosecco?
Then the miracle happens. The weather clears two days before the weathermen said it would. The pressure is suddenly rising. Giving us a twelve-hour window to do our stuff before the full moon.
31. L’imbottigliamento
AMIDST ANCIENT ACCOUNTANCY reviews and stacks of Nuova Alta Tensione in Patuzzi’s cellar, stand about a hundred cobweb-ridden wine bottles. Giampaolo inspects them, turning them over in his hands, looking inside, putting his nose to the neck. There’s a grave expression on his face. It’s Friday night. Saturday is our last day for the waxing moon. His own bottles stand in sparkling ranks by his cellar door, each with a square of snap-wrap on top to keep out the dust. Clearly we should have thought of this problem before.
Our neighbour goes away and returns with a bottle full of metal shot and a big cast-iron tub. His instructions are precise. We boil the bottles ten at a time in the tub and for at least five minutes; we then half fill each bottle with the metal shot and, thumb over the top, shake vigorously, up and down and round and round. The shot must be rinsed between each bottle. After which the bottles can be washed in normal fashion, rinsed three or four times to remove the soap, and placed in a position where they can drain off thoroughly before tomorrow morning. Already I’m beginning to wonder if we mightn’t perhaps have stuck with supermarket bubbly.
Rubber gloves are required. And infinite patience. But the radio has just the thing for us. As we work late into the evening there’s a quiz show which involves people answering questions about intricacies of bureaucratic red tape: ‘In what situation might you be asked for a document of esistenza in vita?’ ‘Should an application for a no parking sign for your garage or gate be made on plain paper, or stamped paper (and, if the latter, how much does the stamp cost?)’ ‘How many years less does a woman teacher have to work for her pension if she has three children?’ ‘When selling a second-hand car, is it sufficient for just one spouse to take an oath before the solicitor, or do both spouses have to go?’ ‘When given a prescription for an X-ray, for how long is it valid?’ The respondents are quick on their buzzers. We try not to slosh too loudly because the answers are frequently surprising. Actually, it’s a pretty useful programme.
Then Saturday morning early, a blond thumbprint of moon only a sliver away from being full, it’s straight down to Giampaolo’s cellar to do the deed. Like his mind, this tiny space of four or five square metres is admirably tidy and well ordered. There are two shelves of wine bottles, all carefully hand-labelled: the type of grape, the area they come from, the harvest year, the date of bottling: Cabernet — Friuli — vendemmia 1981, imbottigliato il 2 Maggio, 1982; Traminer — Alto Adige — vendemmia 1982, imbottigliato il 15 Aprile 1983 … On the shelves below are boxes and cabinets full of tools, hardware supplies and the like. Again there are painstakingly prepared labels: 2 cm anchor nails, 1 cm self-tapping screws, 5 mm rawplugs … The air rarely moves down here. Along the top shelf are hundreds of editions of the topical magazine, Panorama (which may be worth something one day), plus twenty or so volumes of a now outdated but still formidable encyclopaedia. Almost at once I feel I’ll have to be on my best behaviour.
Out comes the equipment, handled with the special care of the fetishistic object. A clear plastic siphon with a tap, lengthily boiled and rinsed the evening before. There’s something disturbingly surgical about it. A corking tripod with handpumplike lever. As you bring this down the fat cork is squeezed pencil thin and forced into the top of the bottle. Molto valido, this piece of equipment, and a bargain at 50,000 Lire from a friend. The action is discreto. Although of course the quality of any corker is relativo, since what counts above all is the quality of your cork.
And we swing into a long lecture on the various corks the market offers. Giampaolo has purchased different kinds for the different wines he is planning to bottle, although there is also an element of experiment, he explains. He is eager to see how much effect different corks will have on the same wine bottled the same day from the same demijohn. He has corks made from a single piece of quality cork; these are the most expensive, since they retain their springiness and breathe well. Careful to wash your hands before touching them. Then there are some cheaper corks made from putting together pieces of cork in layers. These are OK as long as you’re not planning to keep your bottle too long; they’ll do for the prosecco, which will last a max of a year, but not for the Cabernet he’s got which should improve with age. And, finally, he has a bag full of plastic stoppers, which have the advantage of being very cheap: you can insert them by hand and remove them by hand, but of course they don’t breathe. It will be interesting to see if this makes any difference to the prosecco.
He’s also going to do five corker of each wine he’s got in clear rather than green glass, to check how far the light factor affects the quality. I point out that to do this he will have to open two bottles at once, otherwise he won’t be able to make a direct comparison. But he’s aware of that. When the in-laws come to lunch, it won’t matter if one bottle is not quite up to scratch. Apparently, the tight space of the cellar is breeding a sense of complicity.
We lift the first demijohn on to a chair to get the height required for siphoning. This has to be done with immense delicacy so as not to disturb the sediment at the bottom. Bent over, muscles tense, it is as if we were shifting a tactical nuclear warhead. Then with the Murphy’s-law cussedness which upsets even the best-laid plans, the chair turns out to be rickety, or the floor uneven, and the big jar tips perilously from side to side doubtless displacing clouds of sediment inside, like mud in a pond. There’s a hunt for pieces of paper and cardboard to slip under the chairlegs, but the damage is done now and we will have to wait at least half an hour for the sediment to settle. In the meantime, we siphon off half a jugful, examine it for cloudiness, then pour a little in and out of our first ten bottles (dark green) to rinse and prime them. Immediately the dankish air down in the cellar takes on a very heady smell indeed.