The True Meaning of Harvest

Nature moves with an elegant rhythm.  The earth turns melodically fusing days to nights through dusk and dawn.  The moon waxes and wanes as the tides flow and ebb.  While the earth journeys on its celestial path, the seasons gradually turn into and out of each other.  The temperatures rise and fall, ice grows and recedes, rains come and go, the migrators migrate, the hibernators hibernate then wake.  Through all of this change there is an obvious continuity. Year after year, decade after decade—through millennia.  That is the rhythm, the melody of the natural world.   

Human awareness of this process is nothing short of miraculous.  The awareness of our-selves within it is even greater, offering a profound understanding of the similitude between the external and internal cosmos.  For our brains to have evolved a consciousness with the ability to perceive the world and our place in it, in the ideas of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, is ‘the universe looking back into herself’. 

Each of us has our own ways or moments of this realization.  They may be fleeting or long lasting.  The knowledge that what is without is within, that what is good for one is equally good for the other.  Knowing our part within the whole is humbling and I believe it is a crucial perspective to truly living sustainably. 

This is what the grape harvest represents for me.  It is the climax in a multi-seasonal dialog with the earth.  A dialog between us, human and nature, which reminds me daily of my place in the greater whole.  It also marks a change in the rhythm, the end of the growing season, and the beginning of the return to dormancy.  Paradoxically, it is my favorite and saddest time of the year. 

The annual rhythms of the grape vine begin in late winter when the sap begins to rise with the warming sun.  The first buds slowly fill out and eventually pop, darting quickly thereafter to the sky.  Flowers open, short-lived then wilt and fall to the earth, leaves spread out wide as the shoot continues its quest to touch the sky.  The hard-green clusters fatten until they are soft and purple, then black.  All of this happens through winter, spring, summer and fall, year after year.

Right there in the process, through it all, there we are, pruning, hedging, trellising, leaf thinning and, of course, harvesting.  Each of these activities does not come pain free, nor in a climate-controlled room.  We experience nature in all of its daily fancies.  From early winter dew-laden mornings that can chill your finger-tips to the bone to the late summer afternoons with their oppressive heat, that sears the vintage into your skin.  They all come at a price.  Paid in the currency of aching muscles, tired joints and a stiff back, at best. 

This is the human face of terroir.  It’s one of discomfort and pain but of massive reward.  It rewards us daily by granting rhythmic moments for reflection and peace, it rewards us daily when we look back satisfied with the work that we accomplished.  And it rewards us annually with beautiful balanced dark ripened fruit.  

We know as well as nature that each one of those ripened bunches of grapes could never attain that much sugar without us.  For it is the human hand that crafts wine. For sure, alone, we would have nothing without the sun, soil, and local conditions.  And these without us would surely have the grapevine and grapes, but too tart to eat and certainly too austere to drink.  It is humanity in conjunction with nature that makes sweetness. 

 This is the true meaning of harvest, and the ultimate reward for each of us who have spent countless rotations of the earth in the vineyard, on the farm, garden or even sitting motionless for hours under a forest canopy awaiting a deer.  It is the sense of oneness we attain through participating and engaging with nature as equals, working our bodies with nature’s in unison, as one whole, coalescing for an equally compromised goal.  These are the fruits harvested along with the grapes that we get through deep sustained participation in the rhythmic cycles of nature.

This is what’s represented in harvest and eventually goes into every bottle of thoughtfully crafted wine.  It is no doubt one of the reasons why our ancestors made a specific point to celebrate this moment.  Not just for what it meant to the future, but for what it means of the present and our place in it.  Harvest is as much about hope as it is about the realization that together with nature, we create masterfully.  

– Anthony Triolo