Faites vos jeux. Les jeux sont faits. Rien ne va plus !

Posted on | November 28, 2005

Faites vos jeux. Les jeux sont faits. Rien ne va plus !

"If you want ot make good wine, be the last to harvest". This adage which doesn’t date from yesterday (Virgile, that’s 50 years before Christ and I swore to read ‘Bucoliques’ this year), always seems to be current. It opens the first letter that I wrote to my firends in 1999, in an attempt to convince them to buy a little of my wine.
Everyone like me well enough, without any doubt but very few believed in my sudden reincarnation as a vigneron, nor really convinved of my cpactity to make ood wine. I feel no resentment towards them. In their place, what would I have done? To change one’s life, prove your worth in another area, succeed at a new job, these things are not that easy to accept in France in 2005.
OK, all that to say that in 2005 the harvest has finished at Clos des Fèes - October 7th, 2005. A magnificent day - sunsoaked, the Carignan magnificent at 400 metres.
The last week of harvests is perhaps the hardest, physically and psychologically. The weather is unstable, sometimes humid in the morning, the nights cold, the days shorter. All this means that the start of the day is often painful, in as much as the late parcels often don’t receive the sun until after 11 o’clock. let’s add that some vignerons camp out and for them it is even harder. The team is reduced and there is less rivalry. The physical fatigue, accumulated from 15 intense days, seems to be piled up, with successive layers, which seems little by little to numb the whole world into an invisible matrix. One is less lively, less quick, less gay. All that, accentuated by the fact that everyone in the village has finished and seem to regard us either with some pity, incomprehension or mockery… What’s more the weather has really changed, when one lives outside more than 10 hours a day one can’t help but be susceptible to the new season which has started and makes one want a wood fire more than a run across country. After three weeks of struggle against this little red devil full of life, crying out ‘harvest, harvest, quickly, it’s the right moment - you risk losing your year’s work.’ I prefer to listen to the little shining angel who talks to me in a reassuring and calm tone ‘with unripe grapes I will only make bad wine and to wait has always resulted in success.’ The musts ferment sweetly and even if a number of vinification options present themselves I have the impression that the bets are placed. The wheel is turning and I must wait to see what number comes up to see if I made the right choices. The great thing about tiredness is that without looking too closely one can take it for serenity.:)

Hervè Bizeul [from 10th October, 2005]

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