Page 28 of The Wrong Vintage
"She's your wife," he growls. "Treating her with disrespect is the same as treating yourself with disrespect. Remember that."
With that, he walks away, leaving me feeling worse than I have since my engagement to Alessia was announced.
7
ALESSIA
Green harvest ends the way it always does—without ceremony.
One day, you make the last cut. The next, the vines simply stand, relieved, as if they know the worst of the judgment has passed.
The buckets are stacked.
The shears are cleaned and oiled.
The crew moves differently—less urgency, more conversation.
Untilvendemmia.
This year, I expect harvest to begin in about four weeks, sometime in mid-September, and stretch into late October if the weather holds.
Merlot will test us first—sugar climbing quickly, acidity dropping faster than I'd like if the heat lingers.
Cabernet Sauvignon will come in last, as it always does, patient and stubborn.
Cabernet Franc will sit between them, sensitive to night temperatures—the aromatic compounds are fragile if we misjudge the window.
Knowing when isn't instinct alone. It's also data. A whole hell of a lot of it.
Anyone who thinks a winemaker's job starts and ends with the vines is right—but we detour constantly to the lab.
I spend hours in Excel cross-tabs, tracking patterns across vintages, overlaying them with everything we know about each parcel of land on the estate.
Modern winemaking is granular to the point of obsession.
This is why Tenuta Pietra Alta outperforms the other estates.
Matteo says how I do it is the difference between farming by instinct and farming by understanding.
Papà calls it overthinking. He believes in gut. In tradition. In the idea that experience alone sharpens judgment—and to his credit, it once did.
But the climate has changed.
The margins are tighter.
The consequences hit you faster.
Gut without data is just memory pretending to be wisdom.
Matteo knows this. All the good winemakers do, all those who will survive in the future do.
This is why he pushed me toward the lab as hard as he pushed me into the fields. This is why he insisted I learn to read spreadsheets with the same fluency as vine stress. And this is why universities know my name—not because I'm an Alighieri, but because Pietra Alta is one of the few estates willing to share real data over time.
And whether Papà likes it or not, this—this—is the modern face of the House of Alighieri. I am.
Ultimately,vendemmiais not a date. It's a negotiation. And when it begins, it won't care how tired we are, or what else we thought we had planned. It will demand everything—again. And when it's over, I won't sleep, because that's when the next vigilance begins.
I will worry about yeast strains and nitrogen availability.
