Swee' Nectar of the Kuntre'

God Bless my Dad. It’s turning out that he has become a pretty good source of material for my blog posts.

This latest post has to do with something my Dad has been known to say going back to the days of my childhood. Whenever we drove through an area of farming where the farm smells permeating our little kids’ noses, my Dad would revert into this old country farmboy and holler out, “AH, the swee’ nectar of the kuntre’!”

See, my Dad is only about one generation removed from “The Dukes of Hazard”. And even though he has spent the last ~43 years in the same house in the Suburbs of America, back in the day he still had his Ford pickup truck, Oak Ridge Boys 8-track, and all.

What’s interesting is that when that farm smell was especially ripe – you know, really RIPE! - he would have this wide toothy smile across his face like you couldn’t find a happier man on this Earth. To this day, I still don’t know whether that was just nostalgia for him, or even pride???

Well these days, the smells from the local Vicentine farming is as ripe as ripe can be! It’s curious too, because the intensity of the smells is like nothing I remember in the States. At home, you may drive through Southern Maryland or up into Pennsylvania, and you’ll smell farming as you drive along the roads. You may even get hit with the blast of manure smell if you walked into a horse barn, or the pig sties at the County Fair, or the cow stalls at the zoo, or something like that, but none of that compares with the intensity of smells they have here on the outskirts of Vicenza.

Now, admittedly, I have been spending more time up close and personal with these farms because lately I’ve been biking to and from work. My biking route takes me di-rectly through the heart of some of these farm fields, usually pretty early in the morning or later in the evening when the coolness and moisture of the air brings out the smells the most. When I’m biking, it’s not like I can hold my breath or roll up the car windows. So there’s that, but still. The pungency is so intense when you come up on it that you instinctively tend to cry, “OH!”, but then quickly shut your mouth and eyes, and turn your head away quickly to avoid such direct frontal assault. You wouldn’t even want to holler “swee’ nectar of the kuntre’” like my Dad because you wouldn’t want to breathe in that much of the kuntre’. It’s as if you opened the door to a real hot open and got blasted with the heat, but instead of heat, you get turbo-blasted with the hot poignancy of fertilizer and manure.

This, by the way, is all coming from a guy who actually enjoys getting waste-deep in a good, rich, steaming pile of compost, working it with a pitchfork and breathing in all that wonderful, musky perfume.

The stuff here is different though. What IS that smell anyway? The stench is so intense that instead of just dismissing it, you start to wonder what on God’s Earth could produce such a pungent odor. That can’t be just manure, can it? Chemicals? Chicken waste? Ground-up seafood waste? Maybe a potpourri of wastes? Because now that this has become a matter of routine, I have started to notice that there are actually different kinds of stench. It’s ALL really, really awful mind you, but there seem to be different flavors of awful.

I want to believe that the more awful the smell of fertilizer, the more nutrients and flavor end up in the local vegetables and wine grapes. I am going to choose to believe that. Because while I don’t know if I can say that it is the absolute worst-smelling smell I’ve ever smelled, I’d have to put it in the conversation. And the fact that I just wrote an entire blogpost about it should be some indication of its role in our current Italian experience. But at the same time, if that is how you go about producing such flavorful food and wine……well, ok then, bring on that swee’ nectar!