Confounded butterfly!

Posted on | September 29, 2005

 

I know very well that «when it is too easy, it’s not entertaining», but I must acknowledge that it will be well past 80 to 100mm of water which have fallen on us this week.

Well, the advantage, when one has hills, is that the water moves around. And then a great terroir is perhaps one of these soils where, 24 hours after a big downpour, one can walk calmly between the vines, with a basket,  without sinking in at all…

This being so, I had used this week of holiday to cogitate intensely on my strategy for the harvest and I was beginning to have quite a good idea of how I was going to get there this year.

Alas, after this stormy period, I have had to re-examine everything…

A good exercise for the «semi-intellectual» that I am. For all this made me think that with my friend Mike (Mike if you are reading this…) I remember a well lubricated evening where we envisaged creating an association of «semi-intellectuals». Not that we thought of ourselves as complete idiots, but we had to admit that certain things, the reading of some literary, artistic or philosophical journals, for example, simply and completely went over our heads.

In front of my vines, again, I found myself in front of a jigsaw puzzle which had been carefully jumbled up, without knowing too much what shape, once finished, it would reveal: which parcel should one harvest before any other? What sort of sorting to try? How many harvesters too recruit? Is the cellar capable of handling a quantity x or y of the grapes? Which variety would ripen before the other? Which parcel should one blend with another? What parcel would one sacrifice, in a hopeless case, in the case of extreme weather? All these questions, and lots of others, occupy my mind this morning in a kind of sympathetic confusion in the middle of which one must find a sense of order.

All this made me think of this famous «Chaos theory», immortalised (too much?) in the celebrated image of the «beating wing of the butterfly in Japan or elsewhere, anyway far away, which provokes a catastrophic climate in Europe through ricochet ».

I don’t know which devilish butterfly is too excited in summer onwards in Hokkaido or elsewhere, but if I catch it, I will welcome it!

I admit that this story of «Chaos» and others «Catastrophe Theory» always seemed to me to be the perfect illustration of the life of a ‘vigneron’ in his pursuit of excellence: viticulture really lives, some say, in a permament chaos. One doesn’t accomplish much all year, one is happy to live in this urgency guarding against being hurried. Nevertheless, from many of these hazardous parameters is born a wine which, sometimes, touches the souls of those that drink it. Miracle!

What’s more, sometimes the notion of the «sensitivity to incipient conditions» seems to me to be the only explanation possible, in order to undersand, retrospectively, why a wine is so good. One did something, at a given moment, sometimes at the beginning of the year, in trimming for example, perhaps even the year before, to the plant and it is this mysterious and miniscule action which without doubt, months or years later, gives rise to a magical wine…

One must read the works of Renè Thom, a master of popularisation, although  I have never succeeeded in understanding all the concepts. It is hard, sometimes, to be anything other than a «semi-intellectual» 

Hervè Bizeul

PS in order to know a little more on the chaos theory and to know if you are yourself a a «semi-intellectual», it suffices to look here to try to understand everything 
 

 

Comments