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They Were Eating Weeds

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They Were Eating Weeds

by Sarah May Grunwald

When I first moved to the Castelli Romani with my husband Ettore, I knew nothing about wine. We would go to local trattorias and osterias with no menus where you were served whatever they’d made that day. The carafes were cheap and seemingly ever-flowing. In my new town, with Ettore’s lifelong friends and his family, I saw that wine was as much a part of the table as the bread. We drank it out of Pyrex glasses and enjoyed ourselves, but it always left me with a nagging distaste. The wine always burned my throat or smelled like nail polish. It was cheap and abundant. But that was the wine culture in Lazio.