The Pied Piper of Hamelin

Posted on | August 31, 2005

 The bets are placed. The treatments finished 2 weeks ago, the grapes are delivering their true colours even in the most retarded terroir. As every year, it thus becomes urgent….to wait.

Before becoming a ‘vigneron’, I was always making fun of these hurried ‘vignerons’ who thought, once September arrived, to bring in their grapes as quickly as possible, as if drawn by an air from a mysterious flute which only they heard and which made them lose their good sense. Today, I smile no more, because I have taken on board the difficulty of resisting this collective zeal, this practically palpable tension, to this physical desire which unfurls on the vineyard like an epidemic: the devouring desire to harvest as soon as possible.

« So-and-so has started! » « The samples confirm they are ripe »! « We have clawed back the delay, one mustn’t hang around this year ». And as human beings have in their genes a profound attraction for imitation, to hear and to see all of that, a furious desire to start cutting the grapes seizes you, at the point sometimes where it completely falsifies your judgement, the word is not too strong, even to disabuse you in the perception of what is ‘maturity’.

The weather, of course, plays its part in this gigantic game of rôles worthy of some tele-documentary and gradually the theme of the harvest takes its top place amongst all conversation. The old people in the village, who one finds in the main square, every afternoon, towards six o’clock, to discuss and criticise the ‘boule’ players, happily recount some of their memories: « In 1967, it started to rain in August and it didn’t stop for six weeks! Buckets were floating in the vineyards. Fortunately at that time, one still had horses, because, well tractors, one couldn’t count on them»

No longer believing in the bogey-man, the ‘vigneron’ likes to make himself frightened and enumerates in his head all the catastrophes that might happen before the harvest. To his credit, it is true that « it is not yet a done deal » and inasmuch as the grape is not in the cellar, all the work of a year might be lost.

One repeats without cease that « the ripe grape is the key to a great wine », that is my programme in the next two weeks.

Hervè Bizeul

Comments