I’ve never been much of a drinker. I’ve never cared for beer’s taste or fizziness, and American wine has always been too strong for me to enjoy. I tried vodka once and promptly spit it out. With my lack of experience, drinking still had that “off-limits” feeling to me.

Then I tried Italian wine, and all of the above feelings changed.

My host family always has a glass of red wine with dinner. The first night, it was still fairly strong, but the flavor was amazingly sweet, so I kept drinking it. I’d take a sip and let it rest on my tongue for about 15 seconds, letting my taste buds adjust to the alcohol. Less than a week later, drinking red wine was as natural as drinking water — although now I prefer white.

Even as I grew to love it, I was confused about why wine was so important in this country. It has a sentimental value here. Where does that come from? Is it the taste, the relaxing effect, the texture, the elegance or something else? The more I learned about what goes into making wine, the more I understood what it means to the Italian culture.

I saw where the wine making process starts on a volunteering trip to Cinque Terre, when we walked up hills lined with thousands of growing wine grapes. We spent an afternoon picking them, tossing out the bad grapes and shipping the good ones to the bottom of the hill. We had only worked on a small part of the vineyard, but had gathered enough grapes for almost 100 medium-sized crates.

After that, the crates were individually dumped into a straining machine that separated the grapes from the stem. Each crate was weighed while dry ice was added to keep the grapes from oxidizing. Then, they went through a tube into a giant tank where they began fermenting. This all took more than seven hours, and it turns out these were only the first few steps of a thousand toward the final result.

On another trip, I visited Montepulciano and Montalcino in Tuscany to visit two wineries. Both had giant cellars of huge, specially made barrels filled with wine, sealed tightly for years, allowing the flavors develop naturally. Some wines waited as few as nine months, while others sat for decades before finally being bottled.

We tasted several wines in small quantities — just enough to really understand them. One I remember vividly was the Vino Nobile, which began fermenting in 2007. It tasted sweet, like candy, with a small firework of intensity that settled into your taste buds. It was as though, in those six years, the wine’s flavor kept building until finally coming together, drunk in a single, fleeting moment that felt longer than it really was.

In that brief moment of tasting the wine, I may finally have understood why Italians put so much passion and effort into a drink that is finished so quickly.

It’s because that process has everything that makes Italian culture so remarkable: passion, dedication, love and a vibrant flavor that brings people together. It’s all of the ingredients of their culture, carefully gathered and distilled into its pure essence. It’s left alone to ferment for so long because they know it doesn’t need anything else added to it. It’s perfect as it is.

Max Antonucci is a junior newspaper and online journalism major. His column appears every Tuesday in Pulp. Visit his website at www.MaxwellAntonucci.com, find him on Twitter at @DigitalMaxToday or email him at [email protected].

Published on October 7, 2013 at 11:07 pm