Vineyard Days

In September, the sun rises in a dewy vineyard.

  

Its rays light the morning fog to a warm amber, before burning it away to one of those startling September days of intense color, abundance, and cider-sweet air. The orchard smells winy as apples drop and ferment, the grapes are about to pop from their skins. 

 Ending my work day, the sun sets against a violet horizon. I arrive home in my old hometown, and for the second night in a row rainbows span the Cuyahoga. I go to bed by the light of a full harvest moon. September, the golden month.

I work in a vineyard. That's poetic. Or biblical. Or something. This I know to be true: with each passing year, I relish the seasons more. 

Days in the vineyard are days well spent. We capture the sun's rays. The grape's insatiable leaves unfurl palpably on warn and sunny days, and noticeably dwindle when the sun, as it does, chooses not to shine on Connecticut's old Western Reserve.

On more days than you would think possible, however, this old corner of Plain Township feels like Tuscany. Or, the way a guy who's only foreign travel is to lands drizzlier than his own...Ireland...England...bonny, misty Scotland...imagines Tuscany to feel.

The equinox approaches, the days grow shorter, but here in the vineyard the grape tendrils grasp and pull higher. New clusters emerge, with no hope of ripening before a deadening frost.

 Life abundant. Overflowing.

Of course, a certain tinge is in the air. By evening, it's sweater weather. And Virginia creeper, ascending a shagging barked silver maple, is on the cusp of turning full out crimson.

Veraison arrived in June, that fleeting time when the grapes turn from green to purple. The birds dive in frightening, voracious hordes, stripping at least an acre bare before we secure the netting.

Six weeks hence, clusters linger on the vines, sweetening by the day. Wasps and yellow jackets swarm. Most likely, on the equinox, we will harvest.

A cold late start to the summer means we let them linger on the vine a bit longer. More will be lost to birds and wasps, and possibly, thanks to abundant rain, mildew. But, it was once said, grapes, when they suffer, produce finer wine. Our young vines, on this new vineyard, on an old tree farm in the old industrial burg of Canton, Ohio, produce their first fruit this fall.

We’ll pick on the day that summer finally ends.

Another season. Don’t let it be said that we did not outstretch ourselves toward the sun, and find succor in these golden vineyard days. The clouds roll, impossibly pillowy over fervid blue skies. Here, In Northeastern Ohio, the flowers outdid themselves in vigor, thinking, just for a moment, this was a sun-drenched vineyard, somewhere in Tuscany.