The First Leaves

This morning, the first leaves appeared.

They are small and reddish,  pushing through the wax-sealed tips of the vines.

I stood there longer than I expected, looking and letting my eyes adjust to what is now here, to what for so long existed only in plans and papers and conversations.

We moved to Italy five years ago.

We came as a family. My husband is from here, and our children, who have grown up between places, are now more and more rooted in this one.

For the last four years, we have been preparing to plant a vineyard on the land that came with our house.

It is a beautiful piece of land, one that has historically produced wine. But when we arrived, it had been abandoned and overgrown, no longer productive and not easily restored.

What followed was not romantic.

It was years of learning, planning, and networking. It was meetings, courses, certifications, and paperwork layered upon paperwork punctuated with delays. It was a long, slow movement through systems that felt far removed from the simplicity of vines in the ground.

It was slow, very slow, like swimming through molasses.

Then, suddenly, it was not slow at all.

On one bright Saturday, seven men came to the field. They arrived with quiet focus, with tape measures stretched across the earth, and with hands that knew what to do without explanation.

There were 4,300 plants.

Each one was about a foot and a half long, with one end dipped in paraffin and the other holding a small cluster of roots, waiting.

They were carefully placed in long even rows and  pushed one by one into the ground.

In a single day, those seven men planted every plant by hand using simple tools, requiring no automation.

They had watched the weather, and they told us it would rain in a few days. They came to our land that day because they wanted to give us the hope of rain which would help the plants take root.

We selected three grape varieties slowly and carefully. We wanted to get it right, knowing that once they were in the ground, the decision would carry forward for years.

We chose what we believed would give us the best chance at something of quality and something that belongs here.

Now the plants are in the ground.

The rain has come. The roots have begun their work, unseen.

And above the surface, the first leaves have appeared.

It felt very slow.

Then, all at once, it felt very fast.

Each morning, I walk out to the field.

I stand among the rows and look closely at the new growth, at the small leaves opening themselves to the light.

I stand there feeling both the weight and the exhilaration of what has begun.

It is not finished.

It is not even close.

But it has begun.

This is the first in a series of reflections on the planting of our vineyard and the long, unfolding process of becoming stewards of this land and, eventually, makers of our own wine.

If you would like to follow along as this vineyard and this life continue to unfold, I invite you to subscribe.