Cinque Terre Harvest 2025
A documentary tells the beauty and hard work of heroic vineyards
This year’s grape harvest in the Cinque Terre tastes sweeter than usual. Not only because of the quality of the grapes — healthy and balanced — or the quantity, which is average, but because of the story it tells. A vertical story, shaped by terraced vineyards clinging to the rock, endless stairways, and rough hands that keep an ancient tradition alive.
A free documentary on YouTube, created by Emplacing Food, takes us deep into these heroic vineyards of the Cinque Terre, between the scent of the sea and the aroma of wine. The narrator is Dario Vergassola, who opens the film with a line that sums it all up:
“The word fatigue is the one that best represents the Cinque Terre. When you give a visitor a little glass of wine… they drink it and make a face, but they don’t know that in that sip there are five thousand steps.”
The 40-minute documentary follows Margherita, Valentina, Lucio, and Francesco, people who chose to stay, to cultivate the same slopes their grandparents once did. Here, the harvest is not just a season — it’s resistance, vision, and identity. It’s both a political act and a poetic gesture, a liquid cultural geography that connects past and future.
There’s no rhetoric, no talk of “excellence.” Only authenticity: wine as a daily ritual, as a form of stubborn beauty.
This documentary doesn’t try to give answers. Instead, it leaves us with sharper questions — and a deep desire to protect, support, and savor this extraordinary landscape.
📍 Watch the full documentary here:
👉 Cinque Terre Harvest 2025
And if you visit the Cinque Terre during harvest time, look up: you might see someone still carrying a basket of grapes on their shoulders, working under the sun, with the sea in their eyes.
