With all the issues surrounding wine—from prices to grapes to food pairing—there's one question people ask me more than all the others combined. Practically daily someone will say, “Remember that grape stomping episode from ‘I Love Lucy?’”
No, I don’t remember it. I never saw it. I can’t sit through five minutes of that show. Let me be frank: I hate Lucy. Oh, yes, she was a brilliant comedienne as well as business woman. Yet I find the sitcom irritating and screechy. Besides, my two marriages supplied all the raucous bickering I wanted without the annoying laugh track.
Yet the world loves Lucy. Especially the time she and Fatso put on their kerchiefs and stomped grapes, an event hilarious enough to have inspired commemorative items ranging from lithographs, puzzles and miniature stomping shoes to a ceramic-TV music-box and snow globe.
But Lucy no longer reigns as queen of slap-stomp. That honor belongs to a lady from Fox News. In a video making the rounds, she stomps grapes in a rubber tub set on a high wooden platform. Partway through she falls off and out of camera range, and for the rest of the video you just hear her horrific screams of pain. People can’t stop watching this, which maybe explains why they love Lucy.
But it doesn’t explain grape stomping. Or the fact that it’s still done in this age of hygiene and motors. It’s often just a harmless publicity stunt, quite effective when performed at ground level. But some wineries, in Portugal for instance, still press their best wine this way. Drunk men in dirty shirts with unclipped toenails and lit cigarettes dangling from their lips still climb into cement troughs, or lagars, filled with grapes. Then, whooped-up by a local band, they clasp arms and march back and forth in the muck, occasionally falling face down in it.
Fortunately, the alcohol level in Port is high enough to kill both toe jam and jock itch, though some feel those are part of the ineffable bouquet of Old World wine.
Why feet, anyway? Didn’t Europe replace them with centimeters or something? Did the EU pass a resolution protecting the stompers union? No, apparently the pitter-patter of sodden soles is just right for extracting rich color and flavor while avoiding overbearing tannins. So important, in fact, that when the venerable house of Symington upgraded equipment, instead of installing a modern grape press, they built a robotic lagar with adjustable “silicone toes.” It seems to be a matter of sensitivity.
Sensitivity is also the purported reason why, every autumn in Australia’s Yarra Valley, winemaker Pierre Naigeon dives naked into his fermenting glop. Not, however, to stomp, but to perform an operation known as pigeage.
Fermenting grapes give off CO2, which pushes the “cap,” consisting of skins and other grape matter, to the top of the vat. If it stays up there, it will dry out and stop yielding color and complexity. So winemakers periodically stir, spray-over or punch the thing down. In Burgundy, Naigeon’s home turf, they claim the best way to perform pigeage is to get right in and break up the cap with your body.
So as he swims around, Naigeon feels for hot and cold spots--and, being French, for female cellar workers--churning his arms and legs to even out the temperature. He claims it benefits not just the wine, but his skin, too. Many spas agree, including one in Thailand that offers a full day’s tasting followed by a bath in Syrah and another in Jaipur whose wine facial is especially effective due to ghostly spirits that help remove dead skin cells. Nice to know there’s employment in the afterlife.
I spent a few hours immersed in grape pressings once. It was southwest France and I wore mostly a pair of fireman’s boots. I was put through a small hole into a large tank and told to shovel it out. What I did was almost pass out from carbon dioxide fumes, known to suffocate the occasional winery worker. But at the time the whole thing felt dreamily pleasant. So I understand the lure, even the comedy, of stomping around in grapes. But I still don’t understand Lucy.
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