A long silence

Posted on | August 7, 2005

«Not to speak unless one has something to say» is a wise rule that I have trouble imposing on my mouth:) but which I swore to respect on this blog. Two weeks of silence, it was maybe two weeks of holiday, maybe two weeks of too much work to be able to write anything. The latter is surely the right answer.

Since I started to make wine, eight years ago, I was moved by what one can might call a romantic feeling. I was cultivating then, with a lot of naivety, a little more than 50 “ares’ and was thinking of making a little wine for my family and friends. Weary of big towns, I had imagined the « dream » life of a “vigneron’, I admit that it was far from the reality: get up before the sun, quick gulp of coffee, depart for the vineyard in my valliant Renault 6, hard physical labour, but joyful, snack with some friends, return before the big heat, frugal lunch, quick siesta then read, study or write. A kind of «monastic» thing, what. Very soon, I understood the difficulty of the eternal peasant adage which asserts with reason that « la terre est basse ». In the afternoon, I was prowling around like a zombie dazed by fatigue, incapable of stringing together two coherent thoughts-

These two intense weeks which saw the end of the works in the countryside have put me into the same state, all the same, experience or rather training allowed me in the afternoon to conquer the pile of papers which then drained me of any energy which remained.

If there is a vision which has changed since I started to make wine, it is the apprehension of the dimension of this «physical fatigue». Today, when I open a bottle of wine, whether it is mediocre, good or extraordinary, I think of the trouble of the “vigneron’ (or that of his worker-) who produced it with his hands, his sweat, his fatigue, his determination.

At last, it’s finished for this year. The vines are magnificent, practically all worked liked «Grand Cru». The plantations were each sprayed four times whilst each time the earth was dug out around the foot as in the «Vingraunaise» tradition, restoring the fashion of the day under the hallucagenic gaze of the young and the mocking of the aged, who, in their time, «were working as one should». The seasonal workers, even more exhausted than me, leave one by one for their holidays to return in September. We have a bottling left, Monday and Tuesday, the launch of a new cooling system Wednesday (well, cold and hot as one wants) then the passage of the cellar into the configuration «harvests». In reality the garage is so small that the de-stemmer, press and conveyor were «hibernated» for the last six months in the hangar of a friend.

At the dawn of our eighth harvest (thanks to two new loans-) this year, the cellar will not be far from the dream of any vinificator in terms of equipment. Will we make better wine as a result? Rendez-vous at Christmas-..

Hervè Bizeul

Comments