Picking in the Pandemic

It’s been five years since the COVID-19 pandemic upended our lives and sent the world spiraling. I spent the pandemic in Spain, riding out a lockdown far from my family and most of my friends. This is the second thing I’ve written about that time. You can read my tribute to my favorite bar in A Coruña here.

It’s September 2020, and I’m picking grapes. Six months ago, Spain declared a national lockdown that would last from March until May. Those of us confined to city apartments spent our days trying to work out by climbing our buildings’ stairs and waving to our neighbors at the daily 8pm applause for healthcare workers. But outside the cities, unbothered by the global pandemic unfolding around them, vines budded and flowered, grapes kept growing, and now, in September, they need to be picked.

My friend Jorge lives on Galicia’s Atlantic coast, smack in the middle of Galicia’s most famous wine region, Rías Baixas. His family has a small piece of land with two long pergolas of vines, and he’s invited me here to help with the harvest. We don hats, gloves, and—complying with post-COVID regulations—surgical masks, and get to work. The whole family is here: Jorge’s father, uncles, and his grandmother, who finds a seat beneath one of the granite posts holding up the pergolas and begins to pick through the buckets of grapes we pass back to her, looking for berries that are rotten or affected by fungus.

The noon sun is beating down, but we’re relatively protected under the canopy of leaves. These are Albariño vines, Galicia’s best-known ambassador. There’s also a smattering of a hybrid grape Jorge’s family refers to as Catalan, probably named for vine cuttings that came from nurseries in Catalunya. His uncle tells me the hybrids have been here for a long time, and they don’t really know which is which. But since we’re just going to make wine for his family to drink, they don’t have to bother with testing them. Elsewhere in Rías Baixas, if you want to sell grapes, they can’t be hybrids. These particular ones are translucent yellow, perfectly ripe, and I can’t help but stop to taste them every once in a while. They burst open in my mouth with a rush of acid, making me salivate.

Moving in pairs, we hang buckets from hooks on the wires running between the posts and snip bunches of grapes. They go into the buckets which, once full, get dumped into large plastic tubs to be brought over for inspection by Jorge’s grandmother. I’m definitely the pair of hands with the least experience, but I like to think I’m getting the hang of things after a while. While we work, Jorge’s uncles converse in Galician, asking him about the local football team and how things are going at university. I chime in with the American perspective on current events from time to time, and we have the conversation everyone seems to have these days, running down the list of what we did these past three months and how glad we are that the lockdown is over.

It doesn’t take us long to finish both pergolas. By the time all the grapes are picked, we’ve probably worked for two hours. When we’re done, it’s into the house for a quick visit with Jorge’s other grandmother, who still lives on this property. I make small talk and she asks about Jorge’s girlfriend, who was the one who got me into this grape picking gang in the first place. As we’re leaving, in typical Galician fashion she gives us some lettuce from her garden, even though there’s plenty of lettuce growing back home at Jorge’s. Food is how Galicians show love.

We load the plastic tubs into the back of Jorge’s car. He folds the back seats down to make more room, and we end up squeezing eleven tubs of grapes in, making the car sag down onto its back wheels under the weight. We climb in and head home. Jorge lives in Portonovo, a small village next to the more glitzy Sanxenxo, a favorite vacation spot of Spain’s rich and famous. It’s also famous for being hard to pronounce for non-Galicians. The letter x in Galician makes a “shh” sound that doesn’t exist in castellano, so many Spanish-speakers say “Sanjenjo”, much to the annoyance of the locals.

We pull into the driveway in front of Jorge’s house where his grandparents are waiting for us. They’re both equally diminutive, standing maybe five feet tall. Jorge’s grandfather wears an old polo shirt tucked into his pants, and his grandmother is wearing a mandilón, the typical blue checkered garment somewhere between an apron or a work coat that’s standard issue for a generation of Galician women. She hurries us into the house to change our clothes—it’s time to stomp some grapes. I need to borrow a shirt from Jorge, and we end up wearing the same Portonovo Sociedad Deportiva t-shirt and blue shorts so we look like twins when we come out of the house. One American, one Galician, both grinning from ear to ear.

The garage is next to a couple of small outbuildings between Jorge’s house and his grandparents’ house. As we walk past the tall berzas, cabbage-like plants with skyscraper-tall stalks, two kittens dart past and weave through our legs, disappearing into a pile of straw. The doorway to the shed is small and narrow. Inside, a huge plastic tub almost as tall as I am has already been filled to the brim with crushed red grapes, covered by an equally large tea towel. Flies buzz around, but the fabric is an effective barrier. Jorge tells me they bought these grapes from a friend, and once they finish macerating they’ll go into the couple of old wooden barrels sitting in the corner. Another empty tub waits for our grapes, and we dump them in. Some of them are already broken open and leaking juice.

We strip off our shoes and socks and wash our feet in a small basin set atop a towel on the floor. “Ready?” asks Jorge’s father. I gingerly clamber into the tub, the grapes squishing beneath my feet. I flex my toes, feeling the grapes moving underneath. It’s not an unpleasant texture, but it’s definitely unfamiliar. I want to tell them that it feels like that scene from ‘I Love Lucy’, but I think the reference will be lost.

Jorge tells me that the technique is basically to keep stepping until our feet reach the bottom of the tub, so we start marching in place. The rhythmic stomping feels good—it’s almost therapeutic, although I still can’t get used to the texture of the grapes. It occurs to me that some people would probably pay money to do this as a spa treatment. We stomp for what feels like a long time, and at the end we’re stepping through mostly liquid, with all the seeds and skins at the bottom. We step out of the tub and clean ourselves off, and Jorge’s dad throws in a small crumbled-up tablet of sulphites that starts to break up and fizz like an Alka-Seltzer.

Now we turn our attention to an ancient-looking wooden basket press in the corner. This is homemade winemaking at its finest—they’ve rigged a white plastic colander at the bottom of the press where the juice flows out to catch any stray solids. We carefully move the crushed grapes bucket by bucket to the press and turn the metal handles, lowering a block of wood until a trickle of juice starts to come out. We turn some more and the juice starts running out of the bottom, passing through the colander and landing a waiting container. We take a break so Jorge and his grandparents can crowd around to get the first taste of the 2020 vintage. Taking a metal cooking pot in her hand, his grandmother fills it with some juice and raises it to her lips as we look on in anticipation.

“Está bo,” she declares. It’s good. We scoop up the juice in batches and pour it through a cheesecloth into the stainless steel tank in the opposite corner of the garage, where it will ferment into wine over the next few days. We manage to fill most of the 200-liter tank.

When we’re done, it’s time for the most important part of the day: lunch.

We troop into the big house, where Jorge’s mother has made an arroz—like paella, except you can’t call rice with stuff in it paella unless you’re making it the Valencian way. This particular one is rice with berberechos, steamed cockles that she tells me came directly from the nearby Atlantic. We’ve taken off our masks by this point—COVID be damned, we’re going to eat!—and as we sit down outside on the porch to tuck into the arroz, Jorge’s dad produces an unlabeled bottle: last year’s wine. He uncorks it and pours some for me to taste. It doesn’t smell like any Albariño I’ve ever had. It’s more rustic and saline, like he’s poured bottled seawater into my glass. It smells like mussel shells and lemon peel. It smells good.

Wine is made to be shared, and after months of isolation, being included in the process of making it together, by hand, feels like a turning point. Standing there in our matching outfits, grape juice dripping down our legs, taking turns cranking the press with Jorge’s dad, cracking jokes with his grandmother…

There’s something life-affirming about coming out of the other side of so much uncertainty and being part of this tradition that takes place year after year, global pandemic or not. After all that time spent masked-up and avoiding the rest of the world, standing side by side in a plastic tub and laughing with people I’ve just met makes me feel like everything’s going to be okay.

I saw Jorge months later on the other side of Galicia, in the middle of the Serra do Courel, the mountains that divide Galicia from Castilla y León. He brought two bottles of the wine we made, and we opened one right there. It brought me back to the memory of that meal on his back porch. There was the mussel shell and lemon peel, the salinity, and the acid. I could almost taste the berberechos. But mostly, it brought me back to the memory of the early September sun, a shared meal, the smell of the sea, and togetherness.

The wine would never pass muster with a Denominación de Origen. It was rustic and imperfect and even a bit cloudy. But that day wasn’t about perfection, or even about wine. In a year that was defined by distance and uncertainty, it reaffirmed my belief that wine has the ability to gather people together and anchor us to the things that really matter. Now, anytime I smell a particularly saline Albariño, I’m taken back to that day in the vineyard.

It’s September 2020, and I’m picking grapes. And as it turns out, we aren’t just making wine. We’re preserving this strange, suspended moment in time.