A bitter-sweet week.

Posted on | October 28, 2005

From Tuesday 27 September, 2005

Good, I can see that a week has passed without my writing anything on this blog. Several reasons for that…

Firstly and above all, the main reason, is that to stir for 6 or 7 hours 70 litre tubs and to write at the same time are two completely incompatible tasks… in the evening, one swallows one’s pasta, one showers oneself, one stretches on one’s back for 5 minutes and then ‘pouf’, the sandman takes you in a 1/4 of a second into a refreshing sleep, often punctuated by demented dreams. This night, for example, I dreamt I visited Château Cheval Blanc and that I was made to taste a bottle of the 1961. Where do I find all that…?

The second is that this week is definitely our heaviest week of the harvest. To make it simple, let us say that on Friday, we brought in around 20% of the harvest whereas the following Friday, if everything goes well, we will put 80% into the tanks. Thus, we are not unemployed at this moment at Clos du Fèes. Jangled nerves, stress, anxiety, the cellar is a sort of enormous mad ant’s nest, where the whole world moves, two teams of «ants» regularly bringing their booty from the refrigerated lorry to the Queen (I’m the Queen)

The third is that this blog is not a blog of the harvest. I find that completely great, these domains which, day by day, show you photos of tractors and grapes being crushed, «we brought in such-and-such a grape» or «this parcel was magnificent»… don’t count on me to write this kind of daily journal. Who knows, one day or another I will take on a journalist to write this kind of stuff! Hoisted with my own petard!

The fourth is that… let’s just say with Saturday, the weather, the world, things go around, everything collapsed a little due to personal problems. OK, no death in the family, I assure you, and the earth is going to continue to turn, and as this blog isn’t exactly an intimate journal, what I might have written between Saturday and today would have no doubt been stamped with a pessimism and sadness which has no place here, above all since we are in the process of bringing in magnificent grapes.

Work permits one to forget all sorts of pains ( or, at least, to learn to live with them).

So, to work.

Hervè Bizeul

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