I made my way to the cellar. Cool stone underfoot, a single light carving shadows from the darkness. My cousins were already there, not doing much of anything. Just present. Just attending. We didn't talk much. Didn't need to. The wine was holding court - that gentle gurgle and hiss of wild yeast doing ancient work in wicker-wrapped demijohns that might have held our great-grandparents' wine.
Outside, the stream. Wind whistling through the clay tiles. A light breeze carrying the scent of September hills. Outside, a waft of bergamot. Inside, just the slow burn of transformation.
This was the wakeful hour between sleeps - that pause where nothing productive happens but everything important does. We weren't checking temperatures or consulting charts. We were simply there, breathing the same air as the working wine, letting time notice itself.
Years later, I would learn that humans used to sleep this way: two sleeps with a conscious interval between. That our bodies still want to wake at 3am not because something's wrong, but because something's deeply right - something's remembering. In that Bucita cellar, I was living in that remembered rhythm without knowing its name.
For most of human history, no one slept through the night. At least not the way we think of it now - that continuous eight-hour block we're told is "normal" and worry we're broken when we can't achieve it.
Our ancestors slept in shifts. First sleep, then a wakeful hour or two around midnight, then second sleep until dawn. Historical records from Europe, Africa, Asia describe this pattern as unremarkably as we might describe breakfast. People woke around midnight, tended fires, prayed, made love, visited neighbors, contemplated their dreams. Then returned to sleep.
It wasn't insomnia. It was the rhythm.
The interval between sleeps had a quality. Not dead time but noticed time - the kind of attention that shapes how we experience duration. Without artificial light, those midnight hours felt different. Slower, richer, more permeable. Time you could actually feel passing through you rather than rushing past you.
We lost this rhythm through the steady creep of efficiency. First oil lamps, then gas lighting, then electricity turning night into usable waking time. Factory schedules demanding continuous blocks of rest to maximize continuous blocks of labor. By the early 20th century, eight uninterrupted hours had become the ideal, and anyone who woke in between was failing at sleep.
But the body remembers. That 3am waking isn't malfunction - it's your biology looking for the pause that used to be there.
In that Bucita cellar, time felt slow not because it was boring but because it was full. Rich with sensory detail, emotional presence, the kind of attention that creates memory. That's why I can still smell that cellar 48 years later, still feel the cool stone, still hear the gurgle of fermentation and the stream outside.
This is what the slow burn creates: noticed time. Time you're actually present for.
Traditional winemaking built this into its structure. You couldn't rush fermentation, couldn't force aging, couldn't engineer away the waiting. You had to attend. Check on things not because a timer went off but because the smell called you, because you were in relationship with the working wine. The worry, the satisfaction, the anticipation building over months or years - that was the emotional texture that made the wine, and the winemaker, who they were.But like sleep, wine got efficient.
Temperature-controlled stainless steel eliminated the need for midnight visits. Cultured yeasts made fermentation predictable. Micro-oxygenation accelerated aging that used to take years. We learned to make technically perfect wine faster, more consistently, with less risk and less attention.
We compressed the intervals out.
And something strange happened: the faster wine got, the more anxious the wine business became. Will it score well? Will it sell? Is it ready yet? What's the trend? The constant low-grade stress of quarterly thinking, of wines engineered for immediate pleasure because no one wants to wait, of measuring everything in 90-day cycles and shareholder value.
We traded the slow burn of deep engagement for the constant simmer of low-grade stress.
The irony is brutal: efficiency was supposed to free us from the tyranny of time, but instead it just changed the quality of our captivity. The old way was slow but emotionally rich. The new way is fast but feels endless. We're always working, always optimizing, always behind. Time drags even though everything's supposedly faster.
We compressed sleep into one efficient block and wonder why we wake anxious.
We compressed winemaking into predictable timelines and wonder why wine has lost its story.
Same problem. Same loss.
Some winemakers still work the old way. Still visit the cellar when the smell calls them. Still wait for fermentation to finish on its own terms. Still let wine sleep through winters in barrel, waking and resting in its own rhythm. They're not behind the times. They're remembering a different relationship to time itself.
This isn't about rejecting technology or romanticizing poverty. That Bucita cellar was hard work, make no mistake. But it was work done in human time, emotional time, noticed time.
I've spent forty years in the wine business translating the Italian wine message to a country that mostly wanted Chardonnay and Cabernet. I've seen wines score 95 points and disappear in a year. I've seen wines with no scores at all become someone's epiphany, their own golden bottle in the cabinet, their own jasmine and honey moment they'll remember decades later.
What survives isn't the efficient wines. It's the ones that held their time.
When researchers remove artificial light and clocks from people's lives - put them in conditions like our ancestors knew - they naturally return to the old rhythm. Two sleeps. The wakeful interval between. The body remembers what the culture has forgotten.
I think about that Bucita cellar often now. How the smell called me. How we just stood there, cousins in the half-dark, breathing with the working wine. How time felt - not fast or slow but present.
The slow burn isn't a technique. It's a relationship with time itself - the kind our ancestors knew in their bones, in their two sleeps and wakeful intervals, in their patient attendance to things that cannot be rushed.
We're not behind the times when we wake at 3am or make wine the long way or wait for figs to ripen in their own season.
We're remembering what time is for.
