Abundance

2015 Festa Gervasi Harvest Wagon

Each year at Festa Gervasi, our vineyard crew builds a celebratory harvest wagon. It's become something of a tradition.

Everywhere in the world grapes are grown, elaborate traditions have arisen to celebrate the harvest.

Our Canton, Ohio harvest wagon is an adaptation of Italian harvest traditions. when the last grapes from the vineyard are loaded onto a decorated wagon and hauled into the village, where blessings and celebrations ensue.

Our Festa Gervasi wagon is a celebration of our Canton, Ohio acres and the bounties they yield: everything on the wagon comes from the 55-acres of this old farm.

Festa Gervasi always an enjoyable day, and has the added benefit of helping raise funds for the United Way of Greater Stark County.

The harvest wagon begins inauspiciously, as a pile of scrap wood scavenged from the property, including a few vintage barn boards from our 1820s Ohio bank barn:

Asters, goldenrod, and other wildflowers are gathered from our meadows, a few hydrangea blossoms from our landscaped grounds.

Crabapples, pokeberries, and black walnuts come from our fence rows, along with bushels of apples and pears from our orchard.

Our actual grape harvest dates do not always coincide with our harvest festival date, but we bring in any late grapes that may still be lingering on our vines  (this year, it was a few Vignoles and a second crop of Frontenac Gris.)

In the past we purchased our pumpkins and gourds, this year we grew a few of our own, in straw bales, along the road to our South Vineyard.

And this year, our newly released Family Reserve wines, from the grapes patiently nurtured in our own vineyard, had a place of honor on the wagon:

Every year the harvest wagon is different: different flowers, fruits, and foliage will be at their peak at the end of different Septembers. Each wagon is a snapshot of a particular date in the harvest season.

Every harvest is different: some exceed our expectations, other years we may have hoped for more.

But the celebratory spirit is constant.

 (Photo courtesy of United Way of Greater Stark County)

Tending the earth in all seasons, coaxing a crop, you are acutely aware of all the things that can prevent a harvest at all.

So when harvest arrives, you take some time some time to celebrate, before the work of the next season begins.

Vineyard Assistant Holly Brown. (Photo courtesy of United Way of Greater Stark County)

So the morning before each Festa Gervasi begins, we spend a few pleasant hours building our wagon and piling it high with the fruits of our fields.

We then throw the vineyards open to our guests, and celebrate the abundance of this place, and the slow patient magic of baby grape plant to vineyard, and of grape into wine.

Vineyard Manager Brian Gregory.  (Photo courtesy of United Way of Greater Stark County)

Tomorrow

Late summer days in a vineyard, the bounty borne by years of patient nurture drips from the vines.

Aromella clusters in the South Vineyard, September 2014

Clusters of amber, bronze, apricot, and deep purple bear a perilous, and transitory, prosperity.

With each passing day under a slanting September sun, the color deepens.

The fruit sweetens.

As the crop ripens, birds circle overhead, menacingly.

We worry about our perilous prosperity, borne as fragile fruit.

On misty vineyard mornings, a doe and her speckled fawns seek to breach the bird netting, and sample forbidden fruit.

As the poet observed, nothing gold can stay.

And that goes for September, which swept in with a blaze of goldenrod along the creek bed, and the transitory bounty of the crop this golden month bears.

Before we turn the page to October and autumn’s demise, all of the fruit, or that which does not succumb to the appetite of the creatures with whom we share this temporary paradise, will be harvested from the vines.

Frontenac Gris in the North Vineyard, September 2014

Our winged and hoofed friends sweep in to glean what remains.

There comes a day, after the last harvest, when we walk the denuded vineyard rows, where the jeweled tones of the crop we nurtured are replaced by lemon yellow leaves, with the first crinkles of brown fringing their edges.

The skeletal remains of rejected grape clusters, stripped clean by crows, litter the vineyard turf.

We’ll allow ourselves our moment of melancholy.

And then we shift gears to next year, the bounty of future harvests, the rich nectar now safely aging in winery tanks.

A sign on a piece of aged barn wood in my backyard reads: to plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow.

In the vineyard it is perpetually tomorrow.

No sooner are the last grapes plucked from the vines, than attention turns to next year.

Furrows are tilled.

Bird netting rolled.

Nursery orders placed.

Canada geese, flying in a perfect wedge, migrate overhead. Their somber call dissipates into the horizon.

On these October days of fading goldenrod, something about the plaintive wail of migrating birds makes me think that they understand what we ourselves have come to know:

Each tomorrow brings us closer to another golden season, a tomorrow in which we dream of another bountiful harvest, dripping from the vines, in extravagant jeweled tones.

The bounty of our acres, on display at our harvest festival, September 2014.

Tradition

2014 Festa Gervasi Wagon

If you do something twice, it's a tradition, right?

And so it is with our harvest wagon.

Last year, for Festa Gervasi, our grape harvest festival, we had great fun putting together our inaugural harvest wagon.

Building on Italian grape harvest traditions, we thought it would be fun to transplant the tradition to Canton, Ohio.

Everything on the wagon comes from our acres:

Scrap lumber left from construction, wild flowers from the meadows, bedding plants from our grounds, grapes from our vineyard.

I don't think anyone would ever guess that below our inaugural wagon was our aluminum airboat trailer.

Well, for this year's wagon, we started inauspiciously with pallets.

And loaded it up!

We look forward to continuing this tradition each year.

Each harvest, like each season, has its own personality and traits. And we look forward to each wagon looking different from those that came before.

Tonnage

A dewy Arandell cluster at veraison, culled from the vines.

Vineyard work is often solitary work. But that's not to say those of us who tend the vines don't enjoy visitors in the vineyard rows.

We absolutely love it. 

Sure, these 4,000+ grape vines and this bevy of swans can be amiable companions. But conversationalists, they are not.

This time of year, the most frequent question we get from guests who stroll into the rows: What are you doing with all of those grapes you are picking? 

Baskets and bins of them. Sometime a full Bobcat load.

No, we are not harvesting yet.

We are culling imperfect fruit from the vines in anticipation of harvest.

Since January, every decision we make, from dormant pruning to bud adjustment to shoot positioning to cane and cluster thinning, is aimed at reducing the size (and increasing the quality) of the eventual wine grape crop.

A bushel of Petite Pearl 

Right now we feel pretty good about the amount of fruit our vines bear. But from now to harvest, we will continue to pass through as time allows to cull under ripe, overripe, crowded, and damaged clusters.

Statistically, the amount of fruit we remove isn't huge based on the overall vineyard crop.

But with thousands of vines, even a few clusters pulled from each one, eventually adds up to TONS.

And so the work of the vineyard continues.

A productive vineyard day is a messy vineyard day.

In our wake, depending on the season, we leave piles of pruned canes, carpets of trimmed shoots, baskets of culled fruit.

The never ending attempt to contain the bounty of nature.

All of the extra tonnage, returned to the earth, composted and eventually feeding  another cycle of growth.

The second most common question we get from vineyard visitors: This vineyard is immaculate!

Well, perhaps not at the peak of our work day.

We always have to leave a little time at the end, to remove the tonnage of detritus produced.

If we do our job right, you'll never now we were here.

No one, except the swans, and the grapes.

And they usually keep all of our secrets.

La Vendemmia, Canton-style

Our Festa Gervasi harvest wagon is a transformation of the Italian La Vendemmia tradition, when the last grapes from the vineyard are ceremoniously hauled to the village in a decorated wagon, traditionally borne by oxen. Grape stomping and festivity ensue.

Our wagon celebrates not just the bounty of the harvest, but tells the story of this place, from virgin oak forest to dairy farm to tree farm to vineyard.

Instead of a team of oxen, our Canton harvest wagon is borne by our antique McCormick Farmall, refurbished and used to till our vineyard rows.

Baskets of apples and pears from our orchard, and walnuts from our fence rows (standing in place of Tuscan olives), speak to the rural heritage of this corner of Canton, Ohio.

Colorful sweet gum and maple boughs mark the years a tree farm stood on these grounds, and are joined by asters, goldenrod, and rose hips from our meadows, which are nearing their peak of fall color.

Wooden signs represent the six varieties we have chosen to nurture to fruitful maturity in our young vineyard: Marquette, Frontenac Gris, Aromella, Arandell, Vignoles, and Petite Pearl.

An oak wine barrel from the Canton Cooperage company commemorates the virgin oak forest that once stood on this site, remnants of which can be seen in the restored oak beams of our Bistro, a renovated 1823 Ohio bank barn.

Garlands of wild grape vines from our woodlands wrap the wagon, in homage to Ohio's vineyard heritage, and the American lineage of some of the French-American hybrids we grow.

The wagon itself is made of scraps of lumber from our new Crush House, and a few boards from the old barn which housed our initial wine cellar, in celebration of vintages past and future.

Baskets of summer flowers from our meticulous grounds, recently pulled to be replaced by fall plantings, are another marker of seasonal change.

The work of the vineyard goes on through all seasons and conditions. When harvest and its vibrant colors arrive, it is more than just a pretty scene, but a celebration of life and abundance.