Wine Makes Good Blood: Wine Culture among Toronto Italians
2000; Volume: 22; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1708-0401
Autores Tópico(s)Culinary Culture and Tourism
ResumoIntroduction Two of the many wine-related idioms with common conversational currency in our Toronto Italian household, were: lu vine fa bon sangue [wine makes good blood],(1) and l'acqua fa male e lu vine fa canta [water is bad for you [but] wine makes you sing]. Both equate wine consumption with good health. Because Italian immigrants to Toronto largely emerged from regional peasant cultures, it is not surprising that wine continued to be central to health beliefs, foodways, expressive and material culture, and a food-centered cosmology, and that it ultimately embodied sacred truths. Past research on Toronto Italians variously explored food's place in the domestic and mythic landscapes of immigrants: from the kitchen, garden, and winecellar of home (Del Giudice 1993), to the mythic Paese di Cuccagna (Land of Cockaigne), a gastronomic utopia, still embedded in immigrant consciousness (Del Giudice 1998, 2001). While these previous writings touched only briefly on wine and winecellars, the present paper elaborates the wine nexus and explores the meanings of wine -- material and symbolic, historic and contemporary -- in the culture of predominately first-generation Toronto Italians. The larger picture (cf. unnumbered note) delineates how wine figures in several primary binary oppositions in Italian folk culture, which oppose wine to water; wine to bread (in gendered terms, embodied in mythic Bacchus/ Ceres); to body (in Christian terms); and the semantics of red vis a vis white wine. But here I focus on Italian life in Canada, and how Italian historic and symbolic contexts intersect the culture of Toronto Italians, through family history, through personal experience and anecdote, and to a lesser extent through direct historic sources. I intend thereby to provide snapshots of how cultural history and personal experience constantly intertwine in the praxis of folk culture. As is true for many Toronto immigrants, viticulture formed an integral part of my own family history. My father's was a grape-producing peasant family in Terracina (southern Lazio), on the maternal and paternal sides.(2) My father's parents, Giovanni and Luisa (Palmacci) Del Giudice owned approximately 10,000 square metres of vineyards. They were primarily grape growers, not vintners, and whereas quality was a prime concern with regard to table grapes prepared for markets in Rome, only discards went into home winemaking. My father did not particularly like nor drink wine as a young man in Terracina. His own winemaking and consuming days largely began when he immigrated to Toronto in the mid-1950s. Terracina vineyards were the locus of many family narratives (e.g., my grandmother's buried treasure story), of communal life (e.g., choral singing), as well as the source of many sad memories (e.g., family feuds over inheritance). The vine had been the blessing and the curse of their peasant life. My father developed a hatred for the land and from a young age vowed never to remain a contadino (peasant). Ironically, had they not sold off the vineyards (particularly in the now fashionable San Felice seaside area), to earn passage on trans-Atlantic ships, they too might have enjoyed the payoffs from rampant post-WWII land development. The thought of what might have been haunts my father still. He had spent most of his childhood and adult life in Italy working the fields and although he has not practiced viticulture in over 40 years, has retained a technical dialect lexicon which is impressive and still called forth with ease -- so engrained had those movements, those judgements, their words, become. The vine was life. In Terracinese dialect, at least, they are one and the same: la vita. Wine therefore was indeed, life's blood -- through genealogy (literally in the bloodline), as much as providing the family's livelihood. Wine made good in more ways than one. Wine/Blood and Notions of Health The majority of Italian immigrants to Toronto came directly from the land, by-passing modernization and the industrialization of Italy's Post-War Boom in the 1960s altogether. …
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