Grape Harvest. Balance. Peppers.

Travel

15 Oct

The curve of the light is steeper. Chilly mornings swoop into noons blazing with sun and plunge again into cool, early darkness. This Libra season tempers us. It dips our toes in the cold and dark and death to come in winter, then offers a reprieve of warmth and languor… for a while. The year hangs in the balance. We are halfway around the zodiacal calendar and now just edging toward Scorpio when things really start to die back, rot, and let go. Whatever we have built or ripened now drops to earth for its transformation as seed toward new blossoming in the next cycle. There’s a certain drama to this seemingly pacific idea of balance. It’s actually tenuous — will we gather in the harvest in time? Will we move it successfully through the process?

The grapes mark this drama. This time of year in the vineyard we are watching the weather, managing labor forces out picking the fruit and processing it in the cellar. People work long sixteen-hour days, sometimes one person is staying up all night to move the wine press along. There is feasting and many bottles of wine opened, drunk and discussed. In years past, I didn’t even notice the season passing. The work and busyness of the wine harvest is so consuming I felt myself go under in August and emerge at Thanksgiving. This year I am pausing and seeing the dark heavy clusters of fruit being lifted away from the vines — the plants seem always to exhale with relief. They’ve held on so long to their load of transmuted sugars, acids, and all the chemical components that are a translation of this soil, this place, this year. Their leaves turn yellow very soon after the fruit is lifted as though they are exhausted.

Significantly, it is this shift to cool nights with the still-hot days that pulls the fruit toward the balance we call ripeness. Where all summer the grapes were racing toward full maturity, now they pull back. It’s with this decline that beauty develops, the sugars, the flavors, the tumult of the year’s path crystallizes.

Unexpectedly, this time of year is also full of hot and sweet peppers. Red, yellow and purple peppers. Also luxuriant dalias the color of copper fire, raspberry cream and oxblood. Our flint corn and popcorn ripen to glossy shades of black pearl and cranberry. Squash come in from the field in all the shapes and colors of sea creatures.

But we are not eating squash yet. They need a few weeks indoors to cure down and become sweet. We are still inundated with tomatoes in their prime, and the peppers…

In my garden there are Jimmy Nardellos, the long curling, wrinkled fryer you drop in a hot oiled pan and blacken the skin. They are sweet and smoky, eaten with a sprinkling of lemon juice and salt.

Pointed scarlet chiles I pick as they ripen and dry in the sun (or suspended over the woodstove) preserving the spicy fruity flavor for winter greens and beans. Friends are growing blocky pale yellow ones and dense-fleshed squat red pimento and Aleppo chiles. We’ve also grown very hot little paprika peppers from Hungary that make a deep flavored chile flake and the fiery bright gold Fatali pepper. Or once, a short brown pepper that looked like chocolate. And the Turkish Urfa Biber which is traditionally dried in the sun by day and wrapped up in cheesecloth to ‘sweat’ at night. This results in a slightly moist, dark maroon dried chile with a tart flavor akin to sumac.

So much drama in the pepper world, a last hurrah of color and flavor pulls us back momentarily from the brink of winter.