Wine Grape Harvest in Italy

The vendemmia, or harvest of grapes designated for wine production, has always been celebrated with food festivals, tastings in the wine cellars, and other merry-making. The important days of the grape maturation and harvest were traditionally a joyous time for villagers, with their hands stained with grape juice and their arms tired from repeated movement during the warm, humid days of September. The ancient Romans, with festivals honoring Dionysis and Bacchus, marked the occasion of bringing the grapes into the cellar and the first juice produced from them.

In the countryside, the date of the beginning of the vendemmia was established by the headman, who repeatedly tasted the fruit to evaluate its sugar content. Entire families moved from farm to farm, competing with each other to be the first to harvest the row of vines assigned to them. A tree, often an elm, was the support for the vines, and the grapes grew high off the ground. For this reason they were harvested with ladders and baskets with hooks. The grapes were transferred from the baskets to tubs at the ends of the rows, and from there to the cellar on carts pulled by oxen.

In the past, grapes were an important food resource, not only for the wine produced from them. Grapes were incorporated into bread dough in the classic recipe for sciacciata, a sweet foccacia. The first gift of the grapes was the unfermented juice, a refreshing drink after a hot day’s work. And from the fresh “must”, cooked slowly with walnuts, figs or apples, a sort of syrup called sapa was prepared and bottled to be used in a variety of sweets and desserts.

Even today, the vendemmia in Italy is often celebrated with local festivals and special wine tastings. People of all ages participate in the harvest. University students often work for a week harvesting grapes to make a little extra money, and there are many “vendemmia tours” offered by tourist agencies to give visitors a “hands-on” experience in this still important time of year in Italy.