A single sprout in the vineyard, a long summer ahead, and the promise of the moment every Brunello lover waits for
In the vineyards of Montalcino in April the canes still look bare from a distance, but the first sprouts have already pushed out: small, translucent leaves, green and blushed with pink, trembling in the cold wind that still comes down from Monte Amiata.
This is where every bottle of Brunello begins.
We have been walking these rows our whole life, and yet every spring the same thing happens: you step between the vines, you see that first shivering leaf, and you remember how fragile the whole story is. The winter was long this year. Gray. Weeks of rain, fog settling in the valleys, the vines pruned down to almost nothing. And then, one quiet afternoon, the sun came back, and with it, these stubborn little leaves, already reaching.
Between this trembling leaf and the first cluster of Sangiovese cut from the vine, a whole summer has to happen. It is easy, standing here, to think that harvest is impossibly far away. It could seem a long road from April to September. It isn’t.
May will bring the flowering, a week of nervous waiting, when a single storm can decide the size of the vintage. June will explode into green, and the winemakers will be in the rows every day (I’m one of them now, but that’s a story for another time…), tying shoots, thinning leaves, arguing with the vines about how much fruit they are allowed to keep. July and August will test everyone: the heat, the dust, the cicadas so loud you cannot think, the long evenings spent watching the sky for clouds that never come.
It is slow work. Quiet but hard work. The kind of work nobody photographs.
And then, around the first week of September, something shifts. The light changes. The mornings turn cool. You walk the rows and notice the grapes have stopped growing: they have started becoming. The skins darken, the seeds turn from green to brown, the juice thickens with sugar. One morning you taste a berry, and you know. Harvest!
Back to the leaf
But that’s still five months away. For now, the vineyard is almost silent. The swallows are back. The soil is warm again under the sun. And this one small leaf, is doing the most important work of the year: waking up.
We like to come here in April, on purpose, before the work begins in earnest, to remember that every great vintage was once this quiet. That before the tractors and the baskets and the long harvest lunches, there was only a farmer walking the rows, and a leaf trembling in the wind.
Next month we’ll write from the vineyard again, when the flowering begins and the whole hillside turns into a fragile white cloud for a few days. We hope you’ll walk it with us.
And if, reading this, you find yourself thinking you’d like to be here when the year comes to its point, when the grapes finally come in and the cellars fill with the smell of new wine, we keep a small group at the Brunello harvest in September. We’d love to have you.
