Passage I

Picking the Tamed Wild Grape

The farmer, my new boss, handed me a bucket pointing down a long row. "Scuppernongs are this way," he said. "Muscadines start two rows over."

From a distance, the field had looked contained and orderly with its grapevines in row upon tidy row, they were all the same breadth and height and spaced the same distance apart. For instance, the scene was more chaos, enchanting so. Vines tangled around each other, heart-shaped leaves reaching in all directions. Clusters of grapes drooped haphazardly. The outer portions of the vines had already been picked clean. I could see other workers nearby.

Scuppernongs and muscadines—the words themselves so flavorful—growing wild in the southeastern United States for centuries. Few farms cultivate it commercially. The grapes have a faintly musky flavor. They can be twice as big as the grapes more commonly sold in grocery stores. Instead of being oblong or egg-shaped, they are almost perfectly spherical, something like marbles, only soft, and full of summer.

Typically, commercial grapes can be cut from the vine a cluster at a time, because all the fruit in a cluster ripens at the same time. A single cluster of scuppernongs or muscadines, however, may have two grapes ready to be picked immediately, four that will be ready the following day, and a half dozen that won’t ripen until the following week. Harvesting is, therefore, labor-intensive.

Scuppernongs make a transition color-wise from light green to translucent yellow as they mature. But when the fruit, which grows in vineyards, is deep in the vine, so a vineyard worker can have a hard time seeing the color of the grapes. Following instructions from the farmer, I picked by feel instead, testing the skin for the rubbery texture that would indicate ripeness. After filling my bucket to the brim, I walked back to the shelter, the harvest accumulating there on long wooden tables. Resting a moment, I slipped a grape in my mouth, spat out the bitter seeds and skin, and let the sweet fruit settle on my tongue.