To understand if the grapes are ready for harvesting, and above all as soon as the harvest is finished, a strange ritual begins which sees as its protagonist a kind of large thermometer that uses the so-called Babo degrees. I had honestly never heard this word, and due to the physical and emotional destruction of the first collection, my brain began to try to understand who this Babo could be, what he looked like and in general, how on earth could he have come up with this come up with something so strange. Then taken by the delirium of always contextualizing people and situations, I stopped following the serious looks of Roberto who meanwhile was cursing against "the Tramontano", the too hot season and in general for how we keep the vineyards, and a little man materialized in my 50 years old, of medium height, with a bit of a belly, but ultimately always with reassuring cholesterol values. Suffering from baldness, his difficulties with the opposite sex stemmed more from the dandruff spread abundantly in the few remaining hairs. But yes, I think he lived with his elderly mother, who had been ill for some time and who looked after her lovingly. An employee of the municipality of Rüsselsheim in Hesse, he had a passion for wine, and in the evening, having put the old woman to bed, he dedicated himself to his project of inventing something important and making his beloved mother happy. Which after several attempts and several years he succeeded, naming the Babo degrees in honor of him and thus obtaining the Immortality which had become his true obsession after reading Milan Kundera, albeit with great difficulty. It's a shame, however, that in the meantime the beloved mother was no longer in a position to understand the success of her son. Yes, come this time, it could be like this.
But things clearly went differently, as in reality, after a brief search, I discovered that he was a certain August Wilhelm von Babo, son of an Austrian imperial baron (a true nobleman, not in the sense of a great scoundrel) who lived in end of the nineteenth century and which boasted illustrious chemists, oenologists and more in the family. In short, let's say a son of art, and with a face, judging from his portrait, that inspired the same empathy as a knee in the lower parts. In practice he perfected previous tools and developed a procedure to define the sugar content contained in the must, of which the Babo degree is the unit of measurement.
And what's the point? If I understand correctly, which after 7 years would be rather worrying, knowing the sugar content of the must and therefore their maturation, we have an approximate estimate of the alcohol content that will be obtained and which allows us to monitor the fermentation process and know the residual sugar not transformed into alcohol. In short, a rather serious and not exactly negligible thing.
Ok, but what does the almost-friend Bubu have to do with it?
Taken by hallucinations of carbon dioxide in the cellar, at every harvest, I am reminded of the immense company in Versilia of our twenties, and among these, a friend or boyfriend of a friend of ours, I don't remember, we met a boy from Milan nicknamed Boo. So what? Nothing, just that in this period it comes back to me and I think that ultimately, if it hadn't been for the distance, we could have become good friends!
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