Yesterday, I acquired five bottles of wine and a 3-liter metal canister of olive oil. It was our last day in Otranto, and so Pino took us on one final grand field trip. We drove to Brindisi, and a bit outside the city we entered a town call Citta Di Vino- City of Wine. We toured the winery Cantine Due Palme, a large facility with a grand conference room and walls full of awards. They work with hundreds of small and large grape growers in the Salento region, who bring their grapes in by the truckload to be weighed and poured into huge crushing vats. The fermenting tanks are the size of small grain silos. The juice and mash are churned in cement-mixer tanks (not really, but you get the idea), then separated: skins and seeds are sent to be made into grappa, an intensely grape distilled liquor. Red wines have the skins left in them for a day at most- rose wines for 4 hours max, whites not at all. As the wine ferments, the sugar and alcohol content is monitored carefully every day or two, chalked up on a slate attached to each tank. The sugar content of the grapes themselves was measured when they first came in, to determine what types of wine may be made from them.
Cantine Due Palme produces over a million bottles of wine a year- 90% for foreign markets. Most of the wine they sell will be last year’s vintage: only a couple types are aged for more than a year. The oldest is stored in French oak barrels for 3 years, but that is a very select wine not even sold in their store. The winery’s store has wine pumps, like an old-fashioned gas station, where you pay by the liter for primitivo (a regional variety), rosso (red), rosato (rose), bianco (white), or moscato- you may bring your own jug or buy a reusable plastic one. While we were there, a man brought in a big green glass jug wrapped in straw netting, filled it with rosso, and then left, walking out to his bike and putting the bottle in the front basket. The store also has a wall of bottled wines, from which I made my selection after the rest of my group was done mobbing it: I got a bottle of rose spumante, one of chardonnay, one of the spicy red negromaro we tasted on the tour (found only in Salento), one of a dark primitivo that won top standing in an international competition, and a slender, beautiful bottle of sweet dessert moscato. I think everything but the spumante will be taken home with me, although it depends on what other wines I manage to accumulate along the way. The grand total for my five bottles? Roughly $36.
We then visited Pino’s olive oil factory, a small nondescript building in an industrial park. Olives don’t ripen until November, so the building was clean and empty. The equipment for washing and pressing the olives took up only a small corner of the room- one person could run everything if need be, although all the bottling must be done by hand. After the oil is filtered, it goes into a tank about as tall as me, next to the bottling table, where bottles of all sizes can be filled with a big yellow funnel. There was no stock of any kind kept during the off season, at least in the factory. We were all rather disappointed, as we were hoping to buy some oil from our host’s own company before we left. One of the girls asked Pino where all the oil was, adding a pout like a grandchild who was expecting presents. Pino just laughed and led us back to the main entrance, where we had all overlooked a stack of 27 three-liter canisters of extra virgin olive oil. “Oneh for each”, as Pino said. We swarmed the stack, each cradling one of the huge containers in our arms like a baby, in awe of the unexpected gift and the virtually infinite supply of oil we now had. What could we possibly do with it all? How much weight would this add to our luggage? Pino had told us that to make 1kg of oil, you needed about 12kg of olives: I roughly calculated that I held the product of 44lb of olives in my hands. Between our entire group, Pino had given away over 1,000lb of olives. I wish I could adopt him as my Italian grandfather.
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