The Calm After the Storm

Well the weather sure has been playing up again! Saturday turned out nice, which was just as well as we went to a Guy Faulkes celebration with a bunch of ex-pats further up in the Lunigiana. It’s funny the things you do when you move abroad. I’ve never attended a bonfire night in November when I lived in England; for a start I always have had sympathies for the anarchist burning down the Houses of Parliament. Well after all the rains we had had the bonfire never lit anyway, but we had some fireworks, mulled wine and bangers and mash and a jolly time was had by all. On the way there we stopped at Villa to check on the progress of the wine and cider. The cider has nearly finished fermenting and smells divine. Shame there’s going to be less than 15 litres by the time we’ll siphon it off it’s sedimets. Won’t last us long the way we drink…

Sunday afternoon the rains set in again and it soon developed into a downpour, which lasted all through Monday and Tuesday, culminating in an enormous thunderstorm Wednesday early morning. The photo was taken in the morning after the skies finally started clearing again. As usual after a storm our phone lines were down again and have only just now come back on. Luckily the power cuts only lasted a few minutes and water supplies remained uninterrupted this time. After having been stuck indoors for over 2 days, we were glad to get out again yesterday to check both in Arcola and Villa for any storm damage. Everything was fine albeit muddy.

All that rain and the still relatively mild temperatures meant that weeds are coming back in record time. My radicchio, Swiss chard, fennel, and cabbage that I sowed relatively late are all covered in weeds. We were going to attack them today as the weather looked fine this morning looking out of our window facing south. However as we arrived on the west facing side of the house we saw dark clouds brewing and even heard a few distant rumbles of thunder. We went to Arcola anyway, but, sod’s law, as soon as arrived there it started to drizzle. This is the trouble if you don’t live next to your land. It’s fine just nipping in and out of the house, but for us it’s a 10 km trek every time.

We picked a few more windfall olives though, as I put the first lot into jars. I followed another recipe out of ‘Liguria in arbanella’ (I shall add this book to the list at the bottom of this blog), Olive alla Taggiasca. Taggiasca is also the name of the best olive variety in Liguria, although ours are almost certainly Razzola. Taggiasca is a very small variety giving very delicate, fruity flavours, whilst Razzola is slightly bigger and a bit more spicy in flavour.

To preserve them for eating you immerse the olives in a brine of 1 tbsp of salt to 1 litre of water for 4 days, changing the brine daily. Then you make a brine with 150g salt to 1 litre of water, add a large sprig of rosemary, a bunch of thyme and 8-10 bay leaves and bring the lot to the boil. Simmer for 3 minutes and leave to cool. Drain the olives and fill into jars, adding a small sprig each of rosemary and thyme and a bay leaf. Drain the herbs from the brine and top up the jars with the herb-infused brine. Seal and wait for some 40 days to 2 months.

Finally, I (or rather this blog) have had a mention on the forum of Italy magazine (http://www.italymag.co.uk/forums/) in the last couple of days and visitor numbers have jumped up all of a sudden during the couple of days I couldn’t even get on the net. So thank you to the person concerned based in the Marche I believe and welcome to any new readers. I shall add the link to the forum to my other links on the side. It’s a useful forum for anyone interested in all things Italian.

Vendemmia

Well autumn definitely has arrived. The last few days it has been raining and it has got a lot cooler. So time for autumn jobs, the ‘vendemmia’, the grape harvest. Well, in actual fact, we hardly got anything off our vines at Villa. They succumbed to fungal attacks. As they hadn’t been looked after for a couple of years and I hadn’t quite pruned them to their final form yet, they obviously needed a greater attack of anti-fungal spray to become productive again. So to make the meager harvest worth while, we bought some 90 kg of Montepulciano grapes so we could test out the new winery equipment. Well when I say new, it’s new to us, but I have seen bits like these in a museum…

The hardest part of the job is the cleaning of the equipment.



Next the grapes go through the crusher. Montepulciano grapes have quite a dark juice already, so it is not necessary to leave the skins on the must for long, i.e. in our case we left them on for a couple of hours. We tested the potential alcohol content and it showed a massive 15% AbV! That’ll keep us happy…

Finally the whole thing is put through the press to squeeze out the juice. We got about 60 litres of must. Now it goes into large demijohns to ferment. Hopefully it’ll turn out fine, I’ll keep you posted.

Other than that it was Susan’s birthday, which meant she got a bit of cash through the post and relieving our crisis. We spent the rainy days stocking up on some storable basics and even better, there was a closing down sale at a nearby electrical store and we managed to pick up a cheap freezer, which we went and filled up with several goodies immediately, special offers meats and fish, as well as home-made pesto. Also made some of my special tomato chutney yesterday. On Saturday was the last of the outdoor parties in the village. Mauro had invited the neighbourhood as well as the members of his band for an afternoon of music and food in his back garden. Towards the evening it was getting decidedly chilly though.

The sun appears to have made a re-appearance this afternoon and, if it stays like this we shall plough over a terrace or two in the next couple of days and plant broad beans and peas. Also on the schedule for the next week or so is cider making with the same equipment we made wine with today.

Our New Winery

Well with the recently more bearable temperatures (it’s not cold by any means, don’t get me wrong!) we have again been very busy today. We went out early to George’s at Villa beating back the weeds on the lower terraces and around the newly planted grapevines with the strimmer. Susan in the meantime busied herself filing the door I very badly made for the house to make it fit it’s frame, watering the vines, freeing an apple tree from lianas (you know the sort of things Tarzan swings himself through the jungle on) and picking plums.

The door bit was quite important as we have a few days ago moved our new winery into there with all the equipment courtesy of Pam and John’s cantina. It’s not likely that anyone comes to our remote piece of land to nick a few bits of fairly old equipment, but the door and the window, which I also fitted are mainly to keep the wildlife out. We have already evicted a family of bats. As you can see we now have a crusher (background), a press, a corking machine and a few large demijohns. All of it needs a bit of cleaning up and maintenance of course, but hey it’s a start. Thank you very much Pam and John. Right, enough of the idle chat, now I have to turn some of those plums into plum jam.