A Tuscan Vintage.
All Tuscany had been busy with the vintage. The vintage! Is there a word more rich to the untraveled Englishman in picturesque significance and poetical associations? All that the bright south has of glowing coloring, harmonious forms, teeming abundance, and Saturnian facility, mixed up in the imagination with certain vague visions of bright black eyes and bewitching ankles—all this, and more, goes to the making up of the Englishman's notion of the vintage. Alas! that it should be needful to dissipate such charming illusions. And yet it is well to warn those who cherish these couleur-de-rose imaginings, and who would fain shun a disagreeable désenchantement, that they will do wisely in continuing to receive their impressions of Italian ruralities from the presentations of our theatres, and the description of Mrs. Radcliffe. To those inquirers, however, of sterner mould, who would find truth, be it ever so disagreeable when found, it must be told that a Devonshire harvesting is twice as pretty, and a Kentish hop-picking thrice as pretty a scene as any “vindemia” that the vineyards of Italy can show. The vine, indeed, as grown in Italy—especially when the fruit is ripe, and the leaves begin to be tinted with crimson and yellow—is an exceedingly pretty object, rich in coloring, and elegant in its forms. Nothing but the most obsolete and backward agriculture, however, preserves these beauties. If good wine and not pretty crops be the object in view, the vine should be grown as in France—a low dwarf plant closely pruned, and raised only two or three feet from the ground; and than such a vineyard nothing can be more ugly. Classic Italy, however, still cultivates her vines as she did when the Georgics were written; “marries” them most becomingly and picturesquely to elms or mulberries, &c, and makes of them lovely festoons and very acrid wine. Again, it must be admitted that a yoke of huge dove-colored oxen, with their heavy unwieldy tumbril, is a more picturesque object than an English wagon and a team of horses. Occasionally, too, may be seen bearing not ungracefully a blushing burden of huge bunches, a figure, male or female, who might have sat for a model to Leopold Robert. But despite all this, the process of gathering the vintage is any thing but a pleasing sight. In one of the heavy tumbrils I have mentioned, are placed some twelve or fifteen large pails, some three feet deep, and a foot or so in diameter. Into these are thrown pell-mell the bunches of fruit, ripe and unripe, clean and dirty, stalks and all, white and red indiscriminately. The cart thus laden, the fifteen pails of unsightly, dirty-looking slush, are driven to the “fattoria,” there to be emptied into vats, which appear, both to nose and eye, never to have been cleansed since they were made. In performing this operation much is of course spilt over the men employed, over the cart, over the ground; and nothing can look less agreeable than the effect thus produced. Sometimes one large tub occupies the whole tumbril, the contents of which, on reaching the “fattoria,” have to be ladled out with buckets. Often the contents of the vat, trodden in one place—a most unsightly process—have to be transported in huge barrels, like water-carts, to another place to undergo fermentation. And then the thick muddy stream, laden with filth and impurities of all sorts, which is seen when these barrels discharge their cargo, is as little calculated to give one a pleasing idea of the “ruby wine” which is to be the result of all this filthy squash, as can well be imagined. Add to this an exceedingly unpleasant smell in and about all the buildings in which any part of the wine-making process takes place, and the constant recurrence of rotting heaps of the refuse matter of the pressed grape under every wall and hedge in the neighborhood of each “fattoria”—and the notions connected with the so be-poetized vintage, will be easily understood to be none of the pleasantest in the minds of those acquainted with its sights and smells.—Trollope's Impressions of a Wanderer.