The Correct Way to Eat Grapes for Breakfast
The Correct Way to Eat Grapes for Breakfast
Grapes in Salento
When I arrived at 7:30 am, Oronzino, his brother, his father, and a few other white-haired Italian contadini had already been harvesting for over an hour. I followed the men into the rows of grapevine, stooping slightly beneath the hanging bundles of golden grapes.
The night before, planning the final vendemmia, or grape harvest, on a stiff couch in his bare living room, Oronzino had seemed out of place. He was a middle-aged farmer with strong, weathered hands and crow’s feet deep from decades of sunlight and warm smiles; his home was in the vineyards. In the early morning light, his quiet liveliness animated the thin air. There was work to do.
He handed me a pair of clippers, showing me how to cup my left hand underneath the bunch of dangling grapes with care and snip the vine with my right. Oronzino moved through the grapevine with precision, snipping and slinging bunches of grapes into the plastic buckets. He had been growing and selling grapes for his whole life. I, on the other hand, had not. Clumsy from lack of practice, I fumbled and missed the buckets, grapes crashing to the ground.
We were working in the fields just outside of Campi Salentina, a small town a few miles outside of Lecce. This area of Italy, deep in the “heel of the boot,” is usually referred to as Salento, though it’s technically in Puglia. We were harvesting Malvasia bianca, a round, juicy white grape found throughout the Mediterranean and used in a variety of different local wines.
It had been a particularly good year for the grapes, with intense heat and little rain, Oronzino explained. “They’re all sugar,” he said, tossing a handful of the round, golden-green globes into his mouth. He handed me the rest of the bunch. “Try some,” he encouraged.
I plucked a grape, just slightly larger than a blueberry, from the stem with my fingertips and popped it into my mouth. My enjoyment of the burst of sweet, bright juice was interrupted by Oronzino’s father, a stooped and deeply-wrinkled old man who had worked the land for all his life: “You don’t eat it like that, with your hand!” he called out disparagingly. “You eat it like this,” he said, bending his white-haired head towards a large bundle in his left hand, snapping the grapes off with his teeth.
I laughed and followed his suggestion, biting a mouthful of grapes straight from the vine. They were sweet from the sun, light and juicy and delightful. I took another bite, straight from the cluster I held in my hands. It felt rogue, munching away at a cluster of grapes as if it were an apple. But so, so satisfying.
Until I realized that Oronzino and his father were already feet ahead of me, nimbly clipping and tossing their way down the row of the vineyard. I tossed the half-eaten bunch of grapes into the plastic bin and hurried back to work.
Oronzino liked to pause beneath the arched leaves of the grapevines for a mouthful of grapes every once in a while. “On days when we harvest,” he told me, “I never eat breakfast. All I need is the grapes. They’re like candy, or even better.” And they were. When his wife arrived at the vineyard at 10 am with a pitcher of warm, sweet espresso and store-bought chocolate tarts, no one ate them.
Within a few years, Oronzino plans to raze these plants to the ground and replant the vineyards with a new kind of vine, one that can be harvested with efficient machinery instead of skilled fingertips. The cost of handpicking his grapes is getting too high, he explained. It’s not worth it anymore.
I like to think that before he guns the engine on his hulking machine, he’ll take a moment in the quiet morning to wander through the vineyard with his clippers, snipping with his right hand and collecting the bunch of grapes in his left. He’ll bring the grapes to his face and take a big bite straight off the vine, with an easy, unassuming grace. I like to think that Oronzino’s home will still be among the dappled leaves of the grapevine. I like to think that he won’t succumb to his wife’s mid-morning store-bought chocolate tarts for breakfast.