ROOM 02

TRADITION

Room 02 - Yesterday's viticulture

Welcome to the second room of our museum, here we want to tell you about our traditions and about the annual cycle of the vine on a typical farm in the early 1900s. As we were ourselves.

We decided to take advantage of the important testimonies of Isidoro, the farmer of Montresor Family. Isidoro plays a fundamental role in the management of the Winery and the farmland so no one could safeguard our knowledge better than him.

For example, did you know that the vine used to be usually tied to a tree? Doing so a perfect pair of spouses was formed. Hence the name Maritata (married) vine.

Countryside life is spiced up with proverbs: "if you want to have must, you should hoe the vines even in August." A precious advice to anyone who wants to have good and copious grapes: you should hoe the vines several times a year, starting in February and ending in October.

Grape harvest, as peasant custom, is not just harvest time, but it is a real party! A party to which all family members, relatives and even neighbors participate. You climb the ladder to reach the ripe grapes higher up, you carry the baskets on the bins and from here onto the cart. The end of the harvest is then always celebrated with lunches, dinners, and moments of great conviviality.

Once the work in the countryside is over, the work in the winery begins, and as the saying goes, "the harvest is done with the hands, good wine is made with the feet." Grapes used once to be poured into special hoppers with a false wooden bottom, which would hold skins and stems and allow the must to go down. Young and lightweight people were doing this work, obviously with very clean feet. You needed the stamina of a marathon runner and the agility of a ballerina.

Isidoro knew himself and worked for many years for Montresor family. He had many talents indeed, but the best one was knowing how to store wine, the good one, the one which was set aside exclusively for the owner and his family. Would you like to want to know how he did it? First, he needed a well-built underground dry wine cellar. All tools had to be always clean and made of a special wood. Isidoro knew the secrets of all types of wood. The best one is oak, but chestnut and moraine are not bad either, followed by “ceresaro” (cherry wood) and “salgaro” (willow).

It is now time to bottle, but what should you bottle? The good wine? And where is the good wine? In the small barrels. At that time, it was common to use small wicker wine bottles with long necks and narrow bellies: an exceptional wine in a small container.