Podere Orto
The Journey continued on to the heart of Italy - A month of harvesting grapes, siestas under olive trees, and falling in love with food all over again, one ingredient at a time.
One month in the heart of Italy, one month of learning what the heart yearns for. Simona and Giuliano, the wine growers, makers, marketers, and masters are some of the most dedicated and passionate people that I have come across in my WWOOFing journey. The couple left their thriving and successful life in Rome in pursuit of a new dream - living closer and more connected with the earth and giving their daughter Maia, now a teenager a more honest life.
Most of time working on the winery was spent harvesting grapes across the various vineyard plots splashed across the Lazian countryside. Mornings started around 5:30 am, waking up and starting the day with a cup of Bialetti and butter + orange preserves on toast. Then a early morning ride across county roads, windows down, sun rising, and an ever changing mix of tunes (80’s Italian synth pop, British punk rock, and early Moby hits). before settling into the monastic rhythm of cutting grape clusters one by one from the old world vines, checking each cluster as you go for signs of disease or rot so as not to contaminate or give off flavors to the future wine. These hours gave way to silent contemplation mixed with tones of Italian opera when Giuliano was nearby with his portable radio, the rhythm of frogs and crickets from a neighboring pond, and when looking for a bit of amusement, the drawling tones of Richard Poe’s voice as he read East of Eden through my earbuds. Never-ending sky with clouds rolling by in endless ballet and scents of wildflowers and fennel, soft dirt, and sweet mountain air wafting past.
A 1 pm lunch break punctuated the day, often a prosciutto and fresh fig sandwich packed by Guiliano eaten in the shade of an olive grove, soft wind stirring up memories only experienced through art museum gazing. It was hard to believe that only a few months prior I had been losing hair over NYC real estate developer meetings and and client calls.
These are the days that will live in infamy in my mind - but the evenings were where I began to fall in love with food again, not even realizing that I had fallen out. Simona’s cooking was a elixir, a love story, to her family, the land, and the history she was born from. Every meal she prepared was made so that you could taste individual ingredients. the sweet onion and butter, the pungent rosemary, the spiced edge of the black pepper. Pumpkin risotto, spaghetti Pomodoro, rustic pizza, fennel potato soup. The beauty was in the simplicity - never more than a few ingredients per dish so you could taste the honesty and beauty of the land. But the flavors were not where the food ended, for her the food was political. Every ingredient in the kitchen she knew the story of. The chèvre farmer across the hill, the meat producer the town over, the miller and bread baker sold in the local market. knowing where your food came from and consciously choosing to buy ingredients only if you knew and believed in the people producing them is a full time job in itself but something Simona saw as a nonnegotiable
Once again an experience of a lifetime packed into a few short weeks - a time when Italy inevitable wove her magic into my life in a way thaht I am not soon to forget.