les vendanges – Page 2 – The Vigneron's Wife

Les Vendanges – La Rentree

September 14, 2012November 10, 2012The vigneron's wife

: Checking the grapes, the night before school goes back

lilas with a bunch — a bunch ready for the picking

It only seems like yesterday that Lilas broke up from school and started the Summer holidays at the beginning of July.

And then before I knew it, we’d been on the Naked tour, my family had come and gone, the Olympics and Paralympics ended with a bang, the Fetes de Villages had packed up for the year, our Summer friends had all been and gone…

…and suddenly the grapes got ripe for the picking! (‘Les Vendanges’):

VENDANGES EN LANGUEDOC, Societe des Cartes Postales APA-POUX, ALBI - 'AS DE COUER' — ‘Vendanges en Languedoc’ (AS DE COEUR)

– and the new school year (‘La Rentree’) 2012-2013 started.

Come September, a different kind of ambience sets in around here. The tourists (or most of them!) have left en masse, the weather softens and jumpers come out for nights on the terrace, the markets no longer have ‘bouchons’ (traffic jams):

…the local pools have shut their gates:

– and tanned bodies (just not ours) post ‘les vacances’:

…get ready for some WORK!

following a tractor during the harvest — You often get stuck behind these people during the harvest! Time to slow down and have some respect…

Les Vendanges a La Liviniere — ‘Les Vendanges’ in La Liviniere

Les Vendanges is one of the most important events on our local calendar (most people in our village own or have some family connection/ investment in grape vines) – and each year, come September, there is the most wonderful buzz in the air. The village hums with expectation and excitement over the ‘recolte’ (harvest) – it’s time to pick the ‘fruits’ of a long year’s labour.

And harvest always coincides with the kiddies going back to school after two months’ of holidays. I still can’t quite get my head around this school ‘year’ here. In Australia our school ‘year’ begins around the beginning of the calendar year, in February – after Xmas and at the end of Summer. Here, each school year ends in what I would call the middle of the year, July, and then recommences in September. And because of this schoolbooks, labels etc name the school ‘year’ as ‘2000-2001’ etc. This year for example, is ‘2012-2013’. I know I’m rambling. Maybe it’s because I’m from ‘down there’ that I’m confused.

picking an apple for school — Picking an apple for tomorrow’s ‘gouter’ (afternoon snack) on the first day back at school

Anyway, back to the grapes. The reds are just getting under way, but Benji has been picking for a couple weeks’ now as the whites here ripened earlier. As for how this year’s harvest will be? It’s looking good so far – relief! The weather has been almost perfect for the grapes these last few weeks – a lot of sun and no rain – and so it all needs to come in NOW!

It will be the biggest week yet – 4am starts, working through until 6pm, 7/7. Another couple of weeks of this, then it’s finished for the pickers and machine harvesters in the vines, but full-steam ahead in the wine cellar – managing the tanks and their juice. Benji will maintain this crazy routine for a few more weeks yet – until the end of October. And then it will be time to think about HIS holiday!…

the grapes are GO on Boulevard Napoleon

October 15, 2011June 5, 2012The vigneron's wife

the grapes have arrived at the cellar — grapes fresh from the vineyard, lined up waiting to be de-stemmed

Well that’s it for picking this year. All the grapes are in, busy fermenting, creating heat in the tanks and Benji can breathe a sigh of relief. We’ve had good amounts of sunshine and wind, no hail, no rot – now it’s time to leave the grapes to do their stuff in the winery and see what sort of juices evolve.

Benji and tractor at la cave (the wine cellar) on Boulevard Napoleon — Benji at ‘la cave’ (the wine cellar) on Boulevard Napoleon

These photos show the last of the grapes from the harvest – the Grenache – coming in. We hung around for a couple of hours to see the action. It might sound nerdy, just hanging around and watching grapes go into a machine for processing, but really, it was quite exciting! Really! There’s something about the odour, the colours, the satisfaction on the faces of the grape growers seeing their fruit finally picked and about to perform their transformation.

As I’ve already said, the harvest is a wonderful time to witness. And it was just great taking in the blokes’ excitement in the cellar.

Yves emptying the grenache grapes into the crusher — Yves emptying grenache grapes into the crusher

Benji and Pierre ready for the first delivery — Benji and Pierre waiting for the grapes to come through from the first delivery

Pierre photographing his fruit — Pierre (le viticulteur) photographing his babies

les filles in the 'sandpit' — les filles keeping busy in the ‘sandpit’

The grapes were carefully emptied from their ‘caisses’ (box/basket) one by one into the de-stemmer/crusher (yes, it does what it says, plucks the berries from their stems and sorts away the leaves) which then drops the glistening little purple ‘beads’ (they look like jewellery) onto the sorting tray. They are dropped down into another tray, with a huge turning ‘screw’ and then pumped up through the red hose, straight into the tank. Some of the grapes were collected into buckets and emptied directly into wine barrels (second-hand, so not full-blown wood influences on the juice). A small experiment to develop different flavours.

If the wine is as delicious as the berries tasted, everyone will be happy!…

Out in the vines this morning

August 26, 2011August 27, 2011The vigneron's wife

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:

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