Brandino Giannonitakes his cues from the robins.
Late in the winter, the fallow months, you’ll find him sitting at the kitchen window, arms crossed, keeping watch on the sky, the telephone lines, the apple and the pear trees, wherever a red-breasted robin might come in for landing.
Then, at the first flutter of wings, he has the coat on and he’s back at it. Back in the yard where he works the soil just the way he did when he was a boy in Tuscany, a long, long time ago. He turns the soil, puts in row after row of lettuce and tomato and chard and turnip, and plenty of string beans and herbs.
But all that is sideshow.
The main event is what wends and wraps its tendrils around the frame of the arbor, puts forth orbs that come in clumps, grow from green to purple to black: Giannoni’s grape vines, vines he has tended in Chicago’s Lake View neighborhood for 40-some years. He can’t remember exactly the year he put in the first one, but he knows it’s older than Johnny and Angelo and Nancy, the three youngest of his eight now-grown children.
Come September, at the far side of the growing season, he takes his cues, once again, from the robins.
As soon as he sees the greedy old flock start to zero in on his most precious crop, the crop that has kept him sipping wine for all but the first six of his 82 years, he knows it’s time.
Time to scurry off to the cellar of the two-flat he owns across the alley from the double lot where he and his wife, Caterina, have lived since 1970, when they moved from a coach house next door. Time to unearth the 5-gallon white plastic buckets his sons Robert and Rick, both housepainters, donate to their vintner papa’s cause.
Then, as if trekking a vast Tuscan vineyard instead of a pot-holed Lake View alley, he takes off on his annual roundup of any grape that dares to grow within range of Giannoni and the clippers that once belonged to his father, shears so hefty they put to shame those yuppie pruners.
Giannoni goes at it with gusto. There are, of course, the vines that stretch across the hand-built arbor in his own back yard, and the vines that grow in the yard across the alley, but then, too, there are the vines that grow behind an abandoned house farther down the alley and vines in two or three back yards where the souls who started those sprouts had long ago moved on.
Giannoni knows no boundaries when it comes to harvesting what he considers his grapes. The way he sees it, it’s either him or the robins.
Deborah Lader, who used to live in one of the houses where vines grew with abandon, remembers well the day, shortly after moving in, that she looked out the window and spotted “a guy straight from central casting” hacking away at her vines with what she thought looked like a tool of death. Nearly nine months pregnant at the time, she chose to stay safely behind glass, while gesturing back and forth with the man who clearly spoke little or no English.
Once he’d plucked the vines clean, she recalls, he hoisted up his buckets, “like in some van Gogh painting,” and disappeared down the alley.
She thought little more of the odd harvest until she opened her front door one day the next spring and there awaited an unmarked bottle of deep red wine. Puzzled at first, she put two and two together and realized the Italian pruner with whom she’d played some form of charades had been back with a fermented note of gratitude.
Giannoni is little deterred by the change that has threatened to bulldoze his ways. Never mind that some of his grapes have given way to million-dollar mini-mansions. Or that real estate developers openly drool over his vast plot of open space. He carries on just as though this were the old country, says his son Robert, who translates for Giannoni.
In the cellar across the alley, Giannoni grinds the grapes into six oak barrels long stained crimson and given to him when he came to America in 1954. This year, he poured 60 cases of grapes through that grinder, 15 from his alley pickings, the rest shipped in from California. Then he lets them sit for a week, twice plunging the depths to eke the richest red from the skins. At week’s end, he siphons off the juice, puts the rinds in a press and wrings out every last drop.
“God forbid you spill,” says Robert. “Boy, he gives you a dirty look if you spill. In the old country, that was their gold. You couldn’t afford to spill one drop.”
And then, strained into 40 5-gallon glass jugs that line the cellar like so many stout soldiers at attention, the fruits of his labor settle and ferment until near Christmastime.
“He’ll go by the moon,” says Robert, explaining that as soon as his father spots a luna calente, or waning moon, he’ll pour each of the full jugs into a clean, empty jug, straining off the sediment, leaving behind the wine-in-the-works. By February, it’s ready to drink.
There is a huge jug of red wine sitting on the counter in Giannoni’s kitchen. A hand-scrawled sign taped to the bottle reads: “If you drink wine, you never die.”
Brandino Giannoni pours from it at least twice a day. Whenever he eats, he says, he drinks. And, at 82, he still climbs trees like a squirrel, say his sons.
Those robins, they’re on to something. Good thing Giannoni beats them to the grapes.
