“Simple enough. Even for a city boy.”

“Oh, if you come across a bad bunch of grapes, just leave them on the vine.”

Ross looked down at the vine. “How do I know if they’re bad?”

“Call their wives.”

He looked up.

“Sorry. Just watch for mold. You can ask me. Or if you’re not sure, just leave it; someone will come along behind us to check and they’ll take it if it’s still good. You won’t have to worry much about mold; we haven’t had much rain lately.”

Just then an old man, barely five feet tall, with thinning silver hair and dark eyebrows, walked up on the other side of the trellis. He was wearing boots and denim pants with a long-sleeved shirt. He was missing three of his front teeth, which was apparent because he was smiling widely, happy to be working alongside the capo’s beautiful wife and son.

He greeted Eliana. “Buon giorno, bella signora.”

“Buon giorno, Massimo.”

Ross liked the old Italian men. They had no pretense, no inhibition. He envied their freedom.

Eliana introduced Massimo to Ross, though the old man had little interest in him and stooped instead to run his sausagelike fingers through Alessio’s hair. A child was a novelty among the workers, and they were all happy to see Alessio in the fields.

“Massimo is great,” Eliana said. “He’s been here forever. Long before I came. We don’t even know where he lives; he just shows up here the first day of harvest, ready to go. All the old guys who work black are that way.”

“Work black?”

“Working a nero. It means we pay them under the table. They have to work that way, otherwise they’d lose their pensions. These old men are our most valuable workers. They know the land here better than their own bodies.

“I don’t think the grapes would grow without them. I know they’d never get picked without them. They keep the younger workers moving. If you get just young people together, they talk too much and pick too slowly. The old guys don’t let them. They keep the pace. So we put one of them with every two or three of the young ones.”

“How long does the whole harvest take?”

“About two weeks. Ten days to two weeks. We have seventeen hectares. Just a little over forty acres.”

“Aren’t there machines that pick the grapes?”

“There are, but for a premium wine, grapes should be handpicked. The machines tend to suck up things you don’t really want in wine.”

“Such as?”

“Mildewed grapes, green grapes, bees, spiders, lizards.”

“You mean my table wine has lizard in it?”

“It could. It’s not a big deal.” She pulled her hair back behind her ears. “It adds to the aroma.”

“Cominciamo,” Massimo said, lifting his shears to the vine.

“All right, let’s go, gentlemen,” Eliana said.

The group began cutting the grapes. Eliana was quicker than Ross, her slender fingers more experienced and nimble. For a while Ross tried just pulling the bunches from the vine, but he found that the stems were stronger than he’d expected and it actually slowed the work. He felt foolish for having challenged the wisdom of the ages. Before the end of the first two trellises, his hands were stained dark purple with juice. It was clear to Ross that Eliana was there only for Alessio’s sake, laughing and playing with him, shooing away bees and eating the grapes. They stayed close together, working steadily throughout the morning as the laughter and talk of the workers slowed with the heat and fatigue of the day. Around noon some of the workers began gathering empty baskets and walking back toward the cantina.