At four-forty in the morning, the vineyard is still a color I do not have a word for. Blue, but with the idea of green underneath it, and the fog lying in the low rows like a second soil.
The pickers arrive in twos and threes. Nobody speaks much. There is coffee at the back of a truck, warm bread wrapped in a cloth, a crate of scissors, secateurs, really, laid out in rows like instruments before a concert.
Why we begin in the dark
The grapes are cold at this hour. That is the whole reason. A cluster of Sangiovese picked at four a.m. is fifteen degrees cooler than the same cluster picked at ten. Those fifteen degrees decide whether the juice begins to oxidize on the way to the cellar or arrives still composed, still, as Mario put it, _listening_.
By the time the sun clears the ridge above Sant'Antimo, the first lugs are already on the sorting table. By the time a visitor in town finishes breakfast, the day's work has been half-done for three hours.
