Tramping Out the Vintage : In Los Alamos Valley, Harvesting Grapes Is Filled With Simple Pleasures and Financial Perils

She caressed the bulging clump of grapes and said that it was almost a crime. “See these?” she said, moving close to the sprawling vines. “These are Rieslings. They are just about perfect now.” She snapped off a powdery green grape and popped it into her mouth. Genuine concern crossed her face. “It’s almost a crime,” she said again.

“Why?” I asked. “How much longer will they last?”

“A week.”

I dove into the garlands of grapes and scooped up a handful. They were a little sweet, a little tart. Some growers say that you can almost taste the future wine inside the grape. That may even be so. The piercing freshness, anyway, was surely intoxicating.

Mary Vigoroso was at home among the bountiful rows that rolled on and on in green lines up to the bare brown hills. The vines stood about six feet tall, and the first chills of autumn had given a reddish tinge to the leaves. The domain of this sharp Italian woman ran to more than 350 acres. Earlier in the tasting room, when she poured a sample of her distinguished Cabernet Sauvignon, she put a warm intensity into her eyes and said, “The wine follows my name. Do you know what it means? Vigorous !”

I would never have guessed. This short woman in the white sweater and orange-net bandanna had real sparkle. Her gestures were not operatic, but still there was that dramatic, love-of-life flair beloved of all Italians. Too, her land in the Los Alamos Valley, a hilly grazing and growing area halfway between Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo, was precisely the kind that an Italian would immediately take to heart. “When I first came here,” she said, “I said that this is just like Italy.” She pronounced it It-lee.

“Our family lived about 20 miles south of Rome,” she said. “And I remember, when I was about 3, going between the rows of grapes on a mule with the big straw barrels hanging on the sides. And taking the grapes back to the crusher.”

“You didn’t really stamp on them with your feet, did you?”

“Oh, sure! All the kids used to get in the vat and crush them.”

Her family migrated to America, and she spent the next 50 years in Boston. After her husband died, she moved to California in 1972. Her son-in-law got together with some investors and bought up the ranch, located in an area that was then mostly cattle country. It was supposed to have been a tax write-off. The soil was perfect for grapes, but the winds--cooled by an ocean just a few miles over the hills--could sometimes run a bit brisk for the grapes. The sun brings out the sugar level that wine-making companies prefer. “I wasn’t going to stay long, but I fell in love with the wine, the grapes,” Vigoroso said. “I didn’t know anything about making wine, but it was in my family all that time--for centuries.”

We walked back to the wine shed. Just then her pickers were coming in, covered with dust. The tractors discharged the large wooden crates, each one holding about 1,000 pounds of small, purple grapes. The foreman wheeled the forklift around and stacked the crates for pickup by a wine-making company. Mary Vigoroso’s wine-making business is a casual affair. “I made 7,000 cases one year, 3,000 another and 500 the next. That’s the kind of wine I make.”

It is also an old-fashioned, full-bodied, old-country wine with sediment in the bottom of the bottle. “And no chemicals!” she boasted. Wooden boxes were stacked along one wall, and in the back, the oaken barrels were piled to the ceiling. “It’s not heard of, the way I do it. I’m not an enologist, and I don’t know how to do it. If I knew, I’d use chemicals. But I make it to my palate, my tastes.”

Her tastes are pretty exceptional. The Cabernet she offered, made in 1975, her third year on the ranch, was a beauty, and I bought four bottles. The next night in Los Angeles, I put the wine before some knowledgeable domestic critics with a great deal of breeding. They agreed that it was pretty high-toned stuff. “Indeed,” one taster deemed, “the peacock spreads its fan.”

Vigoroso’s livelihood is dependent not on selling bottled wine but on selling her grapes to other wineries. Although one of California’s larger wine-making concerns sometimes pays growers only $50 a ton for grapes, and Vigoroso spends $60 a ton just on wages, she doesn’t seem too concerned. The better companies have paid her up to $700 a ton for her finer grapes. She could only hope that the wineries would come soon to buy, or else the grapes would dry on the vine, unfit to be sold even as raisins.

“There are too many grapes coming out of the valley now,” she sighed. “And the wine business has leveled off during the last couple years.” She arched her eyebrows and looked cautious, as though we were now dealing with spooky truths. “I’ll bet that by next year some of the vineyards will be going out of business.”

We walked outdoors and watched the men finish off their day. They put on their jackets and loaded up in big, old American sedans and eased off down the dirt road. A stiff wind blew up for a moment. It had the clear taste of a sea breeze.

“Isn’t it a beautiful day?” she asked.

On my way down the lane that led to California 135, I saw that one of the cars had stopped and that a picker had gone back into the vineyards. After a long day of chopping grapes, he was cutting off another bunch to take home to his family.

Another grower not cheered by the prospect of too many grapes in the Los Alamos Valley is Neil Roberts, manager of Rancho San Antonio. Twenty-seven years old, the son of a farmer and possessed of a degree in agriculture from Fresno State, he watches over 3,000 acres of grapes--a vineyard almost 10 times the size of Mary Vigoroso’s. And he loves it all.

“This is what the land looked like before the vines were planted in ‘81,” he said, parking his truck at the top of a rise. He pointed to a ravine where old, twisted live oaks grew thick and the soil was an unfruitful-looking gray sand. “There used to be quite a bit of deer and quail everywhere here.” But on the other side of the road down the hill, marching in neat rows along an undulating earth as far as I could see, were the grape vines. They were all sustained by drip-system irrigation. “If it wasn’t for drip watering, we wouldn’t have the vines,” Roberts admitted.

“How’s the water supply?” I asked.

He made a face. “OK at the moment. But three wells have already sanded out this year.”

Roberts presides over a necessarily mechanized farm. While some grapes are cut by hand, the bulk of the cutting is done by 20-foot-high harvesting machines. But the grapes have to be sold first. So early one morning, Roberts visited the fields to make sample cuts of the Chardonnay grapes, the Chenin blanc, the white Riesling and others, and put them in white, plastic pails. With luck, some wine-making outfit would find them suitable to company taste. The morning fog that hung over the valley was doing his crop no good.

As we walked down the rows, both of us stealing an occasional grape, I felt dwarfed by the enormousness of the crop. How, I wondered, do grape profits compare to soybean profits?

“They don’t,” Roberts said. “The wine industry’s in a big slump. MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Drivers) made its point about drinking, and the business has leveled off.” He hoisted the pails into the truck bed. “And the European Economic Community has the Common Market, and they subsidize their growers. They can come to America and undercut us on price. It’s not fair. It’s killing us.”

He took a last look at the view. “So it’s rocky times. But you can’t just rip out all the vines.”

We got into the truck and drove 30 miles up the coast to Arroyo Grande, then east a few miles to a winery called Corbett Canyon. It’s a prosperous setup. Whereas Mary Vigoroso crushes her grapes in a machine the size of a Volkswagen, the liquid’s first stop at Corbett Canyon is a 30-foot trough, a mighty augur rolling along the bottom. After passing through the centrifuge and this chamber and that, the juice comes to rest in 14,000-gallon tanks that stand like silos in a cool warehouse. The wine is then aged in wooden barrels before getting bottled.

After dropping off the samples with the lab technicians, Roberts decided to visit the tasting room. “This is the best part,” he smiled. “The grapes we were growing a year ago are ready to go.”

A bus had parked at the curb and disgorged its group of visitors, who were canvassing the wineries of San Luis Obispo County. In a cheery room stocked with crackers and jams and bottles, the amateur enologists lined up at a table.

“I don’t know any of the terms,” Roberts confided, “like, ‘It tastes grassy.’ I just know what I like.”

I went along with that and joined the group. An easy conviviality reigned among them, although they knew how to put on the proper grave expression when they swirled the wine around the glass. One woman groped for the right words as she stared into her white wine. “Flowery,” she said. “Something just smells. . . .”

“Aw,” her husband cut in, “that’s just you , honey.”

When Neil Roberts went home that afternoon, he had a bottle of Chardonnay under his arm. Perhaps--you never know--he’d be able to taste in the wine the grapes of a past harvest.