The resounding crack of a sledge hammer striking a post is my earliest
recollection of working in my grandfather’s vineyard. Each spring every post in the vineyard needed to be re-set after the frost heaves of winter. Grandpa William’s farm was in Middlesex, NY, just east of Canandaigua Lake, one of the eleven Finger Lakes of Western New York. The view from his vineyard west was dominated by The Great Hill, birth place of the Onöndowa’ga:’, the native people of this fertile land of hills, lakes and valleys.

As we gathered to start work, the spring sun would struggle to warm us as it climbed over our home on East Hill. My grandfather would hook a trailer with an elevated platform to his Silver King tractor then my brothers would climb aboard. Before he had the Silver King, he did this job accompanied only by his team of horses, Babe and Ruth. His life was made easier by the addition of a tractor and later some strapping grandsons.

My brothers could have been stand-ins on the Ponderosa. Stuart–the oldest, was the steady influence, smart, and the one who usually ended up driving the tractor. George- the gentle giant, warm and friendly, at six foot eight he introduced the slam dunk to the high school gyms of the Finger Lakes League. Dale-handsome, a people magnet, and gifted athlete. He was pursued by cheerleaders and loaded with expectations by alumni well past their own glory days. I was five years his junior, so early on, no doubt, patronized as I tagged along for the job at hand. Their job consisted of standing on the moving trailer swinging a coffee can-size hammer over head, striking the top of the locust posts. Every post was whacked until it was tight in the ground. Any brother needing more than three whacks was heartily derided by the others.

My job was to walk ahead with Grandpa and look for broken posts by testing each one. If one was tipped but not broken I had to hold it while one of my brothers enthusiastically, but carefully, pounded it straight. If I found a broken one, we pulled it out and made a new hole with a “bar”-a long metal rod with a cone of steel on the end. Grandpa said: “You never put a new post in an old hole. It will just rot again.” Looking back, I do not know if he was being philosophical or practical. He would sharpen a new post with an axe, I would hold it straight, and my brothers would pound it back in the hole and away we would go.

There is a cycle to keeping a vineyard. In the winter, each vine is trimmed to remove excess wood and leave the proper number of fruiting canes. After trimming, the loose brush is pulled off. Both are cold weather jobs to fill the lull of winter. Spring starts the trellis work, which has to be done before the delicate buds swell with the rising sap. When the canes become pliable, groups of women (until very recently always women) tie each cane to the wires in a prescribed pattern so the foliage and grapes receive sunlight and air. Summer is for cultivating, spraying, suckering (cutting off unwanted new growth), and layering (propagating a missing vine with a cane from a neighboring one). Fall is the harvest. In my grandfather’s time the grapes were picked by hand, (again by women), put in wooden trays, and hauled out to trucks for transport to the buyers. Now all but high end wine grapes are harvested by machines and hauled in large bins.

Through my high school years, my brothers, cousins, and I worked in my grandfather’s and uncle’s vineyards doing all of those jobs. My brother Dale recently reminisced about one winter he pulled the brush out of my uncle’s vineyard by himself to earn fifty dollars. He still recalls the sting of the brush whipping his frosted face, but the sense of accomplishment has stayed with him.

My grandfather was a temperate Methodist and always sold his grapes to Welch’s for juice and never to a winery. He would not leave a stumbling block on another’s path of temptation. Grandpa raised dairy cows, sheep, pigs, and beef cattle through the ups and downs of the economy. He grew corn, wheat, oats and hay as needed, but he always had a vineyard. He tended his vineyard and produced good fruit as he and it circled through the seasons.

Grandpa Williams was, of course, not the first patriarch to tend a vineyard. The Biblical flood story tells us that the hero, Noah, after his forty night cruise, first built an alter to Yahweh then soon planted a vineyard near his landfall on Mt. Ararat. This peak is one of the Caucasus Mountains which range between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. They are the prominent feature of Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan. I am not a Bible literalist, but biblical history and empirical evidence do occasionally converge.

Professor Patrick McGovern is head of the Molecular Archeology Laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the foremost bio-chemist in the world investigating the origins of wine. Over the past several decades, he has traveled the world scraping the insides of ancient, carbon dated pottery, then performing bio-chemical testing of the residue. To make a very long story (chronicled in his 300 page book: Ancient Wine) short, so far the earliest proof of wine in a jar dates to about 5400 BC. The jar comes from a Neolithic excavation site named Hajji Firuz Tepe in western Armenia…sixty miles from Mt. Ararat and Noah’s first vineyard.

In a postulate actually called the Noah Hypothesis, McGovern cites archeological, bio-chemical, DNA testing, and even linguistics to claim that wine making from cultivated grapes first appeared in the Caucasus region. From there it spread across the Mediterranean world and beyond. Wine cultures developed and thrived all across the temperate zone. The demand for wine sparked trade between winemaking cultures and the developing cities of early civilizations.

Winemaking can be reduced to two fundamental processes. Wine is the result of a symbiotic relationship between yeast and the wine maker. The wine maker gives yeast sugar in the form of fructose. In exchange, the yeast gives the wine maker alcohol, carbon dioxide, and phenols for flavor. In what some would call coincidence and others divine design, grapes (Vitis vinifera) are covered in a yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) which is uniquely tolerant to an environment high in alcohol and a pH range of 2.8 to 4, both typical of fermenting wine. This combination allows grapes to naturally ferment after they are harvested. Learning to manage and improve on this natural process is the first step in winemaking.

The second step is to insure this bounty can be enjoyed throughout the seasons. Long before grapes were cultivated, wild grapes were undoubtably eaten from time immemorial. Without knowing why, the early Caucasians would have discovered that the bubbling juice in the bottom of a basket of grapes, had a concentrated sweet taste. After a few draughts, they would have been puzzled but pleased to find their lives did not look so brutish. Perhaps they took it as further evidence of a loving god. They would have questioned the depths of that god’s benevolence after they found that unless consumed within a few days, the formally pleasant and warming elixir turned into a nasty, acidic tonic, with none of the spirit lifting properties of it’s former self.

To move beyond serendipity and enjoy the benefits of the new found gift beyond harvest time they had to find a way to preserve it. Fired clay pots were first developed approximately 6000 BC, well before the date of the earliest evidence of wine in them. By 5400 BC, wine makers must have known that once the bubbling stops the wine could not be exposed to air. Without knowing anything about aerobic bacteria, they stored their wine in pottery jugs with soft clay stoppers which expanded to make an air tight seal. Professor McGovern tested this very type of container found at Hajji Firuz Tepe.

McGovern confirmed the presence of tannic acid in the jug’s residue which is a by product of fermenting grapes. However, he found other compounds as well. Through chemical processes with very long names and lots of consonants McGovern proved the most prominent other compound was resin of a local tree. The medicinal value of tree resin was well known in ancient times. Frankincense and myrrh were the most famous and most valued. They were used for healing wounds and generally promoting good health and are now known to be bactericidal. When added to wine they prevent the natural progression of wine to vinegar. Perhaps by deduction, the Neolithic winemakers discovered that the addition of resin prevented their wine from turning sour. Most likely, this discovery was the result of much trial and error over many seasons from much further into the past.

Looking back, the beginning of my own involvement with grapes and wine seem lost in the mists of my own history. From high school I took the expected track to college, only to be derailed by a broken heart. I found myself back home with no direction known. Having left the life of a coddled college student, I needed to find work. So, among other trades, I turned to something I knew and is always a constant in the Finger Lakes– vineyard work. I took a course in grape trimming and soon found a winter’s work trimming for local farmers.

Trimming is an art, and there is always more to learn. It requires hard work and concentration to become proficient. At that time grape trimmers tended to be grizzled old men who kept a close eye on any newcomer as they shared their long familiar vines. Trimming a vineyard is a job that brings one face to face with winter. I grew a beard and loaded up on carbs as I developed a layer of fat and the discipline to work through the cold and wind. I learned to appreciate the barren snow–covered landscape engraved with dark skeletal vines. The hills and valleys of the Finger Lakes appear bigger and steeper when under painted white and bare of the softening green of summer.

As much as I enjoyed the work, it was not long before I took note of the gnarled hands, the stooped shoulders, and the antalgic gaits of my older co-workers. I soon realized manual labor was not my calling. After much thought, I decided to turn a passion for photography into a profession. I moved to California to study, and two years later returned once again to my Finger Lakes home and began my career in the photography business.

My business did not immediately send a shudder through the competition, or launch me into photography stardom. To supplement my income, I once again turned to vineyard work. This time I worked with a team manning a mechanized harvester. The harvesters are an ungainly collection of big tires, a noisy engine, hydraulic hoses, and fiber glass rods to pummel the grapes from the vines. The contraption straddles the row driven by an operator perched twelve feet above the ground. The grapes are shot out of a chute overhanging the adjoining row into one ton bins carried on a trailer. Tractor drivers shuttle the trailers in a synchronized dance to keep empty bins along side the always moving harvester.

Another job is to “inspect” the grapes as the bins are filled. With a rake in hand, the inspector has to remove any leaves, large pieces of vine, and the occasional dazed mouse before they are buried by the relentless flow of berries. Depending on the winery’s schedule, tractor trailers needed to be loaded and delivered at pre-arranged times. This meant often working into the night, through rain, snow or wind to full fill an order. Being the rookie on the team, my last task of the day-or night-was to power wash the machine free of all debris and grape juice.

As in all farming, the harvest creates a sense of urgency. All the hard work, good and bad luck, and the money invested come down to the success of a few weeks time. Bad weather, broken machinery, or human fatigue offer no excuses for getting the fruit of all that labor to market on time. A sense of accomplishment, but also that of tragedy averted, is felt when the last load is sent off. After the harvest, I again took my trimming shears in hand and worked through the winter on days I did not have a photography job.

By this time, the scars on my torn heart had faded, and I met Joan. The woman I would marry. We shared an interest in winemaking very early in our relationship. My brother Stuart had started making wine and introduced me to the hobby. Our early attempts were crude and basic. Our technique consisted of putting juice in seven–gallon glass carboys, adding yeast and sugar then leaving it in God’s hands. After fermentation was finished, we would eventually separate the wine from the settled debris. Being young and impatient, we would shortly thereafter preserve it with meta bi-sulfite, bottle it, and start drinking the harsh, raw wine, no doubt several grades below that of our Neolithic brothers and sisters.

Over the ensuing forty plus years, we have rarely missed a vintage. We choose our fruit carefully and gently care for the juice. We have become more patient and savor the ever–improving results. Life went on. I abandoned my photography business and followed Joan to a career in Nursing. Joan and I have seen all that life offers: deaths-including my brother George, killed on a farm tractor, a hundred yards from his Grandfather’s vineyard. We have had all the blessings as well. We gained a wonderful home, friends, family, and a son to raise. Over those years we also witnessed the re-birth of the Finger Lakes wine culture.

In 1900 there were twenty-thousand acres of grapes cultivated in the Finger Lakes region, supporting fifty wineries. In 1919, along with the effort to wipe out distilled spirits, the wine industry became collateral damage of Prohibition. Only a handful of New York wineries survived by producing juice (most of which was sold to home wine makers) and sacramental wine. Now, one hundred and forty-four wineries are established in the Finger Lakes Region. These wineries host over five million people a year, contributing to the almost three billion dollars tourists spend in the area. Restaurants, large and small, scattered around the lakes cater to wine drinkers. They feature food and wine pairings sourced from this terroir of shale and limestone slopes overlooking the
fertile–valley farms and gardens. The Finger Lakes region is an evolving force in the world of viniculture, continuing the long story of wine.

For the last 7500 years, in all grape growing areas, wine has been central to cultural, religious, and economic life. Every glass of wine you drink reflects that long procession. The grapes and the land that grew them, all the people who labored throughout the seasons harried by flood, drought, frost, and heat, are in that glass. Every autumn, throughout the world, and through the millennia, the harvest has brought a celebration of bounty. The climax of harvest turns the grapes over to a winemaker and their team. Like a composer building a symphony from a melody, the winemaker creates a finished wine from fresh grapes. Once bottled, the wine remains alive, maturing until the decision to open it is made. Then, finally, it heightens a life passage, a wonderful meal, or an intimate time at home shared with the one you love.

Unlike my grandfather, I heartily celebrate God’s gift of wine. As I am sure he understood, any of God’s gifts can be turned toward good or ill. Grandpa simply chose not to partake of that particular gift. Being a student of the Bible, he certainly knew the many verses and parables, from Genesis to the Last Supper, that celebrate wine. Jesus’s first miracle saved a wedding reception from going dry. He shared his last chalice with his closest friends, and asked us to remember him when we break bread and drink wine.

Christianity is not the only tradition to commune with wine. Through all the epochs and all over the grape growing world people have seen their god’s reflection shimmering in their cups. The love of wine continues to shine on every turn of life. It colors our celebrations and brightens the mundane. Memories are triggered by a familia bouquet, and the future is toasted with a sip of sparkling sunshine. It has been said: “wine is summer in a glass,” and that is true, but the best of wine reflects all four seasons. Its character is formed by the cold as much as the warmth. The sharpness of its youth is tempered with age. It lives and grows until it is released from the confines of the bottle.

From my front porch, I can see where my grandfather’s vineyard once stood. I remember him in the rows of posts, among the shaggy trunks of his Concord, Niagara, and Delaware vines. Now, brush and trees grow from the long hummocks where his vines once flourished. When Joan and I enjoy wine on our porch, celebrating a sunset, my grandfather’s easy good humor, the sound of his Silver King tractor, the smell of wet earth, and the crack of a sledge hammer come back, filling me like a treasured vintage.