“Mr. Story! Over here!”

Eliana quickly looked over. She smiled at him sweetly.

“Ciao, Ross,” she said. When he was near her, she kissed his cheeks. “I’m so glad you came.”

“I’m glad to be here.”

She handed Ross a pair of shears. “These are for you. Do you want gloves? It’s pretty sticky business; the nectar gets everywhere.”

Ross looked at the old men and their calloused bare hands. “No. I’ll be fine.” To Alessio he said, “Are you ready?”

“Yeah. I hope there’s not a lot of bees this time.”

“No one said anything about bees.”

“Lots of bees,” Eliana said. “We’re not the only ones attracted to the ripe grapes. No one told you about the birds and the bees?”

“Not recently.”

“We plant hedges of blackberry bushes around the perimeter of the vineyard because the blackberries ripen before the grapes and attract the birds and bees to them instead of the vines. Of course that doesn’t stop the boars.”

“Boars?”

“A pack of wild boars can decimate a vineyard.”

“Have you ever seen a wild boar?”

“No. Just their tracks. They’re nocturnal. One night, I think it was my second year here, I was lying in bed when I suddenly heard this terrible snorting and grunting. You wouldn’t believe how loud it was. It sounded like they were right outside my door. I was terrified. Maurizio was gone and I had no idea what to do. The next day there were hoofprints all over the vineyard. Big ones and baby ones, a whole pack. They ate almost a full acre of grapes.”

“So how do you stop them?”

“We put electric wires on the trellises. The boars touch that wire with their wet snouts and they lose their taste for grapes. Some of the large vineyards use sound cannons, but Luca says that they don’t work that well. At first the poor beasts are terrified out of their wits, but pigs are smart. They figure out pretty quickly that the sound doesn’t hurt them, so they just go on eating.”

Ross just looked at her as she spoke, listening less to what she was saying than to how she was saying it. She was showing off her knowledge of winemaking and he liked that she wanted to impress him.

“So where’s Anna?”

“Anna never comes to the harvest. She says she sweats too much.”

“And Maurizio?”

“He’s the capo. It’s beneath him.”

“And not the capo’s wife?”

She shrugged. “I’m American. I don’t know better.”

Just then a call went out from the foreman, and the pickers all moved toward the first section of vines to be harvested.

Ross, Eliana and Alessio took their place on a row that was about a hundred meters long, sloping gently down into a valley. The vines were full, drooping with the weight of the grapes, blushed, dark and plump against the green vines.

“So how does this work?”

“It’s easy.” Eliana took a bunch of grapes in her hand. “Hold the bunch out like this, snip the vine with your shears”—she cut the stem—“ and drop them in the basket. When the basket’s full, we shout pieno and the tractor driver brings us a new basket and dumps this one in his trailer.”