Happy Birthday Pop!!
…oh the tears when your team beat mine that day!
Bon Anniversaire
Category: home
allo allo – an update from the vines
Who would have thought, with this beautiful, serene morning…
That by evening we’d have a huge storm with some of the loudest ‘tonnerre’ (thunder) I’ve ever heard.
It was suddenly POURING with rain in the strangest directions, the rain lashing at the window before me while I was chopping at the kitchen bench and Lilas asked me if I thought we’d have an ‘inondation’ (flood).
‘Umm, I don’t think so sweetie!??!!!’ .Not necessarily such a big exaggeration either. We had a huge flood in the Minevois in 1999, and I’d only been explaining it to her a few days earlier.
Pretty strange weather, but hopefully not that strange.
It didn’t flood, but we had about 30mm of water. Not a great thing for the vines at this time of year. The grape bunches are now so big and beautiful – and almost there! It’s humid too, so not a great combination. The last thing the vineyards want is to rot.
Our friend at dinner last night mentioned the story of a vineyard in Burgandy, where she witnessed a helicopter hovering over a rain-drenched vineyard, fanning it dry! Those Burgundians.
Not quite the decadence of Burgandy here. Benji’s hoping for some good old fashioned wind and keeping the ‘soucis’ (worries) at bay with a little night poker!
I’ll be back later with the checklist of what they drank!…
so typically French!
Do you ever find yourself smiling at some of the things you pass by during your day?
I love those moments and have started to record them with my camera. I can’t help it. Everything in France seems so exotic to me, being a ‘non-Frenchie’!
Here’s some pics to share with you, but be warned! There’s a few of them, so I hope you don’t get bored!!
(& check out the brilliant photo of her!)
Still there? Hope you made it!
Out in the vines this morning
There was a beautiful orange glow lighting up our room early this morning and I couldn’t wait to get outside to see what the garden and it’s adjacent vines looked like in that light…
It’s nearing ‘les vendanges’ (harvest time for the grapes – or vintage, as we say in Australia) and it looks like it will be about a week early. The grapes are all looking pretty good (those night visits helped!) and Benji’s only 3/4 stressed. What you see above are bunches of ‘Syrah’. Some of our friends have already started on their whites here in the Minervois, but our red grapes here probably have another week to go before the chop! My days of picking are long gone I’m sorry to say. Darn that back. Everytime I see the pickers out in the heat with their broad smiles, sticky and dirty hands, having a laugh with each other, I get so nostalgic! I never realised how much fun and satsfaction I’d have from finishing a row – finishing a whole vineyard! – with a team. I was only beginning to learn French and so a lot of my time in the row was spent listening to mad, sun-induced conversations I had little or no chance of undersatnding, kind advice from a few of the pickers on how to learn French in Three Easy Steps, or being asked to rattle off sentences out loud to everyone, whose meaning I had no idea about, with hysterical laughter greeting them. They’d ask me to repeat these word for word to ‘the boss’ at home, and then I would know what they meant!… Sentences full of ‘gros mots’ (what the lttle ones call ‘swear words) apparently!
The only thing I couldn’t bring myself to doing was guzzling down the red at lunchtime. How did they do that? You stop for a very LONG 90 minutes (these traditions of meal times must be respected. Geez, in Australia it was a brisk 30 minutes), and then get going again in the full force of the afternoon heat, to finish at 5pm. Most people were very un-Anglo-Saxon and would have just the one glass, but some of the guys would go crazy! I’d look over at the red faces with red in their bellies and wonder how they kept standing, or kept from snipping their fingers. My lunch break was a much less festive affair: lunch with a spectacular view, a very petite conversation in the French that I had, and then a long nap in the vines. Not much else to do out there. But it was so much fun.
A lot of people are already proclaiming that it will be a good year, but it’s hard to know until everything is safe off the vines! Fingers crossed.
The garden looked pretty happy too this morning:
a Naked tasting… time for some wine
Thought you were going to see a cheeky image of naughty bits??
Sorry, no, it’s Summer and this is often what our table looks like the morning after…
Glasses are cleared but the bottles are waiting to be packed and emptied at the village recycling bin (and how the old mesdames and messieurs of the village, seated on their bench, must love counting how many wines that Aussie girl manages to consume).
It’s now past the middle of August and I can’t believe how quickly Lilas’ school holidays have passed, how many interesting people have stayed or called by, and how much wine and food we’ve consumed. It seems like a non-stop degustation here sometimes, with the Beroccas coming out first thing in the morning, but things will certainly slow down now that ‘les vendanges’ (harvest time) are approaching and Benji prepares the cellars for receiving grapes. Soon he’ll be working a seven-day week and mostly absent from our daily timetable. It’s an intense time until all grapes have been picked and are safe in the tanks or going through the press, so it’s good to make the most of it with family and friends time in this heat.
The bottles photographed above are the empties from an evening with some of the ‘Naked’ crew. Joe from Naked and is family came to visit, one warm and windy night and an informal tasting turned into a bottle fest (with Lilas and the kids meanwhile transforming the living room into a Playmobil playground) with everyone trying the whites and reds from Benji’s range together with local cheeses, bread and mountain lamb (big merci to our friends Vincent and Isabelle who were staying that week and gave us a huge help in the kitchen – the bbq’d lamb was a treat!). It’s always great to meet new people around a table of wine, glass in hand and every Naked tasting we’ve had has been full of laughs with interesting people from all parts.
You’re probably wondering what on earth Naked is. It’s a company in the UK called Naked Wines and Benji makes and sells wine with them. It’s been just over a year since the collaboration started and we’ve met so many great people – customers and other winemakers – and had lots of fun tasting the range over dinners, lunches and informal evenings like this one. I know it sounds like a plug – and it is! But seriuosly, all puns aside, it is an energetic company run by young people with enthusiasm and a love for wine, and fuelled by a community of customers – people buying and tasting wine from anywhere in the world and then sharing their experiences online. Benji’s range has done well and we’ve learnt a lot from the forums and the feedback people have offered. Thanks to everyone, Rowan, Joe, Amy, Sam, Fran, Simon, Frankie, Kevin, everyone, for the ride so far!
The Vigneron's Wife 