Here’s a little spring bouquet for you in a precious vintage wine bottle often used as a centerpiece for our kitchen table. It used to be filled with red wine from the “Cantine Scolastiche Niccolò Machiavelli”, the famous Saporello of 1995, produced by a collective group of sommeliers who made and tasted the local wine that year, namely my son Benji and his entire first grade class.
It all began when Benji came home one day that fall saying his teacher had asked that each child bring to school a bunch of grapes from a local vineyard. It was that time of year when our neighbors were harvesting their grapes in the field by our house, and they happily complied to donate a big bunch for Benji’s class project. His teacher set up a large vat in the classroom so the children could throw in their bunches and - all together - begin squishing the grapes with their little hands. That day Benji came home with purple fingers and a permanently stained school smock, along with tremendous enthusiasm that surpassed any class project he would ever do in his elementary school career.
When the time came, each child tasted the various stages of their makings: the sweet nectar of the mosto (the freshly squeezed and filtered juice), the first fizzes of fermentation, and lastly a tiny sip of the vino novello, the “new wine”, that had reached its bubbling peak, ready to be aged.
Scandalous? I suppose it would be to a culture that has to wait for a drinking age to get drunk on wine or hard liquor and thinks little of the big white drunken elephant in the room, then yes - a first grade class making and tasting wine would most likely get the teacher in prison and most of the parents having conniptions. But we’re in wine country, surrounded by the luscious vineyards of SanGiovese grapes birthing the famous Chianti. To get children used to the area’s very livelihood, what better way than to get them to acknowledge the vast wine production of their Tuscan countryside?
The class learned how to cork the tiny juice bottles filled with their artistic endeavor. They colored and signed the wine label and gave each of us parents a memorable gift for Christmas. We didn’t wait for the “aging process” of course, but popped the tiny cork that year for everyone to have a little taste of Saporello (which actually means “little taste”). And what a lesson for all those children who have grown to enjoy and appreciate the labor and love that goes into making one of Mother Nature’s favorite potions. How wonderful it is to see Benji, his brother and friends come for dinner with a well-chosen bottle of wine, or to see a bunch of boisterous young people in a restaurant feeling “happy” but rarely “drunk” from drinking their wine with dinner.
Even for an “aperitivo”, or cocktail, here in Italy alcohol is normally served with something to eat or nibble on - never on an empty stomach, mai fuori pasto (“never outside of meals” - a common phrase around here). I think we all have heard of the health benefits a glass of wine at mealtime can bring because it “helps digestion”. As a child, when our family lived in Detroit, I recall my folks offering me sips of our homemade wine or putting a few drops in my water to tint it a faint pink, just to help me develop those necessary enzymes. My dad and grandpa (the first ones to immigrate in our family) used to make their own wine from the California grapes that would come into Detroit’s central market; I still remember the sweet scent of fermenting grapes floating up through the basement door. I didn’t really appreciate the taste until much later, but I remember how that tinted glass always made me feel included at the table, and how we happily toasted alla salute! to good health. Were we all being illegal there in our little kitchen in Detroit? Oh yes - outlaws at their finest. But they can’t get the old folks now.
At times it is difficult for me to go back to my home in the U.S.A. and notice how the culture’s favorite pastime of drinking has become so incredibly exaggerated and out of control. Drinking profusely has sadly created an exorbitant amount of alcoholics and a population with poor health habits. Granted, every place has its pros and cons, but when I go back, I see and feel the many contradictions that I was somewhat blinded to previously. I’m trying to stay on topic, but the most confusing and illogical point is how the legal drinking age in the U.S. is 21, while most states maintain the minimum age to buy an assault rifle stands at 18. To think the main reason for raising the drinking age to 21 is for “safety reasons”, but if you put that point next to the ease of an 18 year old buying an assault weapon in the U.S., well then, nothing makes sense.
But hey, don’t get me wrong. Italy also has its quirks when it comes to law enforcement. For example, you can’t buy a rifle in Italy unless you’re 18 and pass a costly, hard-to-get hunting license for hares and wild boars, and you can get hammered with a substantial ticket by carrying it loaded outside a hunting area. But law enforcement can get a bit confusing around here. Believe it or not, Italy actually does have a “drinking age” at 18, but unlike the rifle law, the drinking age is loose and hardly enforced- how else can you get around those rooted cultural traditions when you’ve been told your whole life that wine - in moderation - is actually good for you? Unfortunately the lenient drinking law is abused by myriads of American students coming to Tuscany to study abroad (lots of trouble lurking behind), but like a visiting friend of mine said referring to the traffic signs in Italy - laws may exist but they’re only suggestions.
Here’s Lil’s suggestion: tint your child’s water with a good red, stop with the Prohibitionist attitude and maybe getting drunk may lose its appeal once the magical 21st birthday comes around. Do this around your kitchen table at mealtime and toast to those very important enzymes that will avoid drunken stupors at a ridiculously controlled “drinking age”. Alla salute!
Here’s a little poem inspired by one of Emily Dickinson’s poem that I dedicate to that first grade class now good and grown:
Ode to Vino Novello
Inebriate of wine am I
As I watch what masters do,
And tip their makings in glass wings
To see the world anew.
In lofty bubbles grapes subside
To tender calm in vats.
But why the farmer comes to sing?
The air inspires that.
Torrential fermentation cries
In operatic grace
But what marks the waiting deep within
Is the first autumnal taste.
"Just not so!" I may say to those
Who claim that wine must age
For it’s the newness of those bubbled rinds
That makes this nectar great.