May 2007
Pedaling Wine:
Three Little Wishes - Puglia

Before I left home I had had three daydreams about my impending bicycle trip. The first was the ultimate cliché, that scene in every Sicilian, Irish and Kiwi film, when traffic is stopped by a flock of sheep, the sheppard nonplussed over the delay to the big city drivers. I wanted to round a bend and find myself in the middle of a flock of sheep, their clanking bells in sync with their leisurely gate.

The second was that I had wanted to have long conversions with farmers on tractors, asking about the local vines, how they were trained and how any potential problems were treated. I think I must have figured that they were the only ones moving slow enough for me actually to keep pace. Plus, I really loved the film ‘Breaking Away’ as a teenager, which probably explains why I tend to try to sing favourite arias whenever I’m riding alone in the countryside. It’s never pretty.

The third was that I wanted to train my nose to really stop and smell the flowers. I knew that I would be traveling in the spring and that the smells would be unlike any I had ever experienced before. I didn’t want them to pass me by, unrelished.

2) You can’t hear over the noise of tractors, which didn’t stop me much until the farmers on them grew frustrated with my questions each time and just pointed to their ears. Giving up the fantasy I just started to stop and talk with the farmers while they worked in their fields. I found that every single one of them actually seemed to enjoy taking a break from their tasks to answer my questions.

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