Notwithstanding this "terrific" personage, it is not very difficult with the expenditure of a few kreutzers to obtain permission to enter a vineyard in process of harvesting. The labour employed is chiefly that of women and girls, who, armed with sharp sickles or large knives with heavy and curved blades, stand beneath the trellises and hold a wooden tray in one hand beneath the bunch to be severed. One skilled sweep of the sickle and the latter falls into the tray with a minimum of damage to the luscious fruit.
Here and there along the paths are wooden tubs into which the trays are emptied from time to time. And these tubs again are borne away by men to the huge vats or tubs bound with iron, which are slung to a framework or trolley on wheels to which oxen are harnessed, and by them brought to the nearest convenient point in the vineyard. Then when the vats are full almost to the brim, two men take up their positions beside them, and proceed to crush and pound the grapes, stems and all, into a dark-red, uninviting-looking mess with long-handled, heavy wooden hammers. In many Italian vineyards it is still the custom to "tread" the juice out, a practice which is far less cleanly and hygienic (though it is said more thorough and economical) than the Meran method. After the juice is all expressed it is set aside to ferment, and the other processes of wine making are afterwards gone through.
The famous grape cure consists apparently of eating as much of the fruit as one possibly can. Many doctors affirm that no particular benefit is derived or can be hoped for unless upwards of two pounds of fruit is consumed daily, the maximum quantity desirable being nine pounds! Immense as this may seem, we have been assured that some "patients" have considerably exceeded this amount.
Perhaps the grape cure is so popular because, for one thing, to eat a reasonable quantity of fully ripe and freshly gathered fruit is by no means a disagreeable task for most people, and because it can be taken anywhere.
In the cafés one sees crowds undergoing the cure; on the numerous and shady seats of the Gisela Promenade one sees folks eating grapes. And practically in every street and alley, and along the mountain paths in the vicinity of Meran one meets people with brown-paper bags, or if taking the cure very seriously with little baskets, all eating grapes as though their future well-being depended upon the quantity they could consume in a given time. The "old stagers" generally divide their daily quantity into two or three portions; taking one early in the morning before "Halbmittag," the second about mid-day, and the third at sundown.