Grapes get disease, wines age and mothers cry.

We’ve started. The first copper and sulphur treatments are wetting our vines. Plant by plant, leaf after leaf, as if enveloped in a London fog. We have been spore-stalkers for thousands of years. Not that we want to totally wipe them out, but reduce them as much as possible, to save leaves and bunches from the deadly fungus. Against which no serendipity or magic right on Earth can have effect.
Today we have modern machinery, pressurised cabins, to use the utmost precaution not to pollute our fruit, soil or our climate: they are our wealth and collateral. But neither do we want, as farmers, to suffer damage of any sort.

I can clearly recall my grandparents, that died at almost a century old - but only by chance- come out from the vines with a pump of Bordeaux mixture on their shoulders, copper and lime, as blue as the loveliest sea, blue like the clearest of skies, blue like the bluest cloak of Prince Charming. Then just rinse off with water from the well, drink a glass of wine, praying that it wouldn’t rain too soon.

Only from the most healthy of grapes can you make excellent wines that, each of them, in a year or in a hundred years, will be newborn, adolescent, adults and great veterans, but unavoidably will die, just like the most fortunate of us all. No wine maker will produce wines with the intention of trying to make them last a hundred years, it’ll be the territory, the vintage, the method of vinification, the conservation of the bottles….to decide. I have met great old guys and run-of-the-mill youngsters and viceversa, but inevitably the mothers, that know our weaknesses, that encourage us, that scold us, love and when they are especially happy, cry, like a vine shoot cut in February.

---