wine making in the Cinque Terre

The Cinque Terre, my "adopted home", is a Unesco-World heritage site. But most people (we have about 3 million tourists from all over the world every year) don't know that the reason for being included in the world heritage sites has been the wine growing culture of the Cinque Terre people. Infact, over the generations in the last 1.000 years, the inhabitants of this beautiful stretch of land at the Ligurian coast, people literally "created" a landscape - transforming the steep mountains by the coast in terraced vineyards held up by dry-stone walls. It is said that we have about 7.000 km of drystonwalls on a stretch of 14 km coast. Until today all the work in the vineyards need to be done manually - nearly no machines can be used, quite the contrary - often the wine growers must climb a long time before reaching their fields. The most impressive moment, of course, is the harvest. Done by hand, the women crawl underneath the pergolas to cut the grapes, the men transport them in big baskets of about 40 kg each to the village.