It's Nice to Chat

by: Erin Lott

It isn’t late when Michael, Diane, Josh and I turn left up the drive of Tenuta Villa Floritta, lined with geraniums and row upon row of Prosecco, pinot bianco, and verdiso grapes. It is hot; we have been in Italy for a week now, and we are getting ready to leave San Michelle di Floretto and head to Roma. But before we leave the north of Italy for the capital city, we want bubbly wine and many bottles of it.

The proprietor, whose name we will never know, is limping, and as Michael opens the car door, he asks us, in English because we are so obviously American, if we want a tour. “I can only give you a quick tour because I am in a hurry,” and he grabs his crutches and hobbles to the wine warehouse. We hurry behind him.

Michael doesn’t want to impose and says, “Well, we’ll take six bottles and let you be on your way.” We don’t mind how the wine tastes. It has been so hot. And we are becoming Italian about our Prosecco—an easy sinking into the hedonism of a wine light and fruity enough to be poured at 8 a.m., drunk throughout the day and then served with dinner. Not that we are drinking it that much, but we understand that there are people who do.

The proprietor says, “No, no, it’s nice to chat. I haven’t been able to see many people.” He nods to his leg. “The tibia and the femur don’t line up. I now have two holes in my knee. They had to put in new cartilage.” We nod as if we have a full medical understanding of what he is saying. “Well, I’m 50, and I played a lot of sport, so it had to go.” We want to talk about wine. We nod some more. We do a lot of nodding.

Michael asks, “What is the percentage of Prosecco grapes to pinot bianco?” We know Prosecco is a wine that’s not up to such scrutiny, and the phone rings: for a moment we’re free to wander among the wine in the warehouse.

Josh lifts the flap of an open box and peers in to discover filled bottles of wine. He motions me over, and we look around, noticing stacks that run six deep and six wide of these boxes. They are piled from the floor almost to the ceiling, with wooden crates separating every six boxes high. It feels decadent and abundant, sentiments we have always liked since we started dating three years ago.

Michael and Diane wander in front of the warehouse, looking at the symmetrical rows of grapes, their pattern repeating and almost waving in the heat. Michael is Josh’s step-father and Diane is his wife, who is not Josh’s mother through a complicated development of ex-hippies living on a commune in Kansas and not marrying—a process as foreign to my Catholic Midwestern upbringing as the wines of Italy or as the countryside we find ourselves in. We amble through a high-tech labyrinth of steel drums, the stacks of boxes, and tubes and wires, both amazed by the complicated doings of any winery and delighted that we will be taking some of this fruity, bubbly wine with us to Roma. We feel like travelers who know where to get the local produce. We’re almost giddy with satisfaction.

“My GPS system,” our proprietor tells us, snapping his cell phone shut and corralling Michael and Diane back into the warehouse. “They say someone stole my Jaguar, which as you can see is not true,” and he points to his black Jaguar behind which our rental car sits. He sees us eying the car, calculating the cost of the six bottles of Prosecco we have agreed to buy, and he says, “Don’t worry. We Italians have our blight. We have our problems. Don’t think I’m racist, but it’s those blacks from Africa, those Indians, those Moroccans—it’s like your country in the 1940s.” We don’t understand what he is saying, and he must be able to read that on one of our faces—it doesn’t matter which one of us, for I am sure we are all sharing the same gracious, silent, wary expression. “Ten years ago they weren’t here. Ten years ago we didn’t have problems. In the North we like the good life: good food, good wine, good cars, good clothing.” We step back. We just want to taste wine. “Come, come,” he motions with one of his crutches, “into the tasting room. You’ll see. Let me show you, let me show you.”

Michael—who likes adventures, to be in charge, who is in Europe for the first time in his 50 some years—goes first. Josh and I are somewhere in the middle, and Diane—who often lags behind a little because she is looking at For Rent signs in front of poets’ flats or at ferns that grow on medieval city walls or at doorknockers in the shapes of rabbits so she can photograph them—notices a cage atop a scooter. “Are those mice?” Josh and I both freeze. Had she said nothing, just walked past the mice, we could be inside the tasting room with the Prosecco.

“For the two snakes in the house.” Our director stops, takes one look at the cage, one look at Diane. “One snake, the bull snake, is American—the last time my sons and I visited New York, I asked my son, ‘Do you want a Play Station? Do you want a computer? What do you want?’ and I would smuggle it back into Italy. But my son said that he wanted the bull snake. And so I said ‘put the snake in your pants and shut up.’ Ten hours later the snake was Italian.” He nimbly maneuvers the crutches and we have to trot to keep up. Diane does not photograph the mice.

Inside the tasting room, Josh and I settle behind the bar, ready to drink. Prosecco itself is not a serious bottle of wine—it is not as intricate as Champagne, and Prosecco doesn’t really care. Champagne is comfortable at weddings and in heady toasts. Champagne bubbles from fountains. But Prosecco loves to watch motocross races, throw darts in pool halls, and stay out too late. Prosecco is lighthearted right from the start. All we need is Prosecco.

The tasting room itself is an almost all-wooden room—hardwood floors, wood paneling, and a beautiful oak bar—all in contrast to the lustrous modern warehouse. There are dents and ridges and bowls in the wood of the bar and the floor is worn. Far from making the room look ragged, the damage makes the room compelling like the backroom of a favorite restaurant.

“This is lovely,” Diane says. Our proprietor hobbles behind the bar:
“My son and I, we distressed the wood ourselves. We took our guns out to the back and we shot up the wood.” He reaches below to get a chilled bottle.
“Do you like to hunt?” Diane asks.
“No. I just like to shoot,” he says, placing the unopened bottle on the bar. “Every night I keep my Colt beneath my pillow. Just like Americans.”
We pause.
I shift; I think of the deliberate emptiness beneath my own pillow. For a moment I think to correct him about the propensity for Americans to tuck their guns in at night, but I know the rules of being a good guest. As an adult I want to challenge his misconception, but as a child, I learned that we listen to the hosts, that we keep our own prejudices concealed even if they share theirs.
“Is there a lot of crime in this area?” Michael asks.
“Oh yes.” Our proprietor makes no move to uncork a bottle. He leans on his crutches toward us. He is willing to reveal his secrets. “Those people from Albania or from Romania will come into your house at night and use sleeping gas or hold you at gunpoint until you give them money.”
Josh and I look at each other. We are listening to him and getting up from our perches behind the bar. We are weak.

We funnel him into the office in an attempt to pay for our wine—six bottles comes to only 16.70 euros, a price even today we still cannot believe—where he proceeds to discuss ways to get around taxes in Italy. He laughs and says, “Oh, I have said too much already. Everyone in Northern Italy, however, is honest compared to those in the south. In fact, if we go to Naples we would see, and pardon the phrase here,” he begs of us, “those wops that go to America, those short, black Italians. In fact, my wife, well, she is tall and blonde. The glory of the north is that there are all kinds of people up here, but in the south all you get are those short, black delinquents.” Michael, Diane, Josh, and I stand silently.

Somehow we pay. I think it is Michael who pulls the colorful euros from his wallet. We’re turning to go, and our proprietor gets to talking about George Bush and the courage of the Americans and the English. He wants to ensure we know that the Italians are not against the Iraq war—a stance that officially the country seems to share, but the unofficial position has been quite different at least according to the abundance of Pace banners and flags. We want to back away. Instead, we just nod.

Outside, he wants to know our heritage. We laugh and eye each other, trying to determine who will speak first. Michael says his family is originally from Mexico.

Our director then turns to Diane and says, “You’re German,” and then to Josh “English but also German” and then to me “Irish.”
I say, “Dutch and German mostly.”
He says, “No, Irish.”
No one says a word.
He then says, “You see, we are the parents of your country.”

Still we say nothing. We are calculating the cost of our wine. Has it been too much to pay for each of us, especially Michael who has nothing of Europe to inherit save exactly this moment? So much time has passed. We have purchased this wine.