Through the back door

I want to take you back to seven am on a cool September morning. Leaves are crunching underfoot; hues of orange, red, and yellow pass you by. The air is distinctly colder than the summer months you just emerged from. You pull up the collar on your jacket and walk a little faster, trying to generate heat in the slowly creeping daylight. 3500 miles away, in a wine cellar in southern France, it’s one in the morning and I’m hungry. I found a half an hour for lunch earlier, but that was 11 hours and counting before. Then I hear what has recently become my favorite sound. It invokes in me almost the same happiness as the smell of a warm, cheesy, steaming, bowl of homemade macaroni and cheese. It’s the tractor coming in from the vineyard with the last load of grapes for the day. It’s working a little, sounds like second gear coming up the small rise before the cellar. Definitely hauling a full load, a few hundred tons, but that’s nothing compared to the volume we’ve seen this week. A half hour more at the sorting table, tops. And then I can go home and make dinner. Or is it breakfast now?

September in a vineyard is harvest season. We have 58 hectares of red grapes at Chateau La Garde, about 145 acres. We harvest three quarters of that by machine and the rest, the most expensive parcels with the highest quality grapes, by hand. The amount of time it takes to harvest depends largely on the weather. Last year it was four weeks for the red, this year we were cleaning equipment and putting things away by the end of two.

Working during the harvest was an amazing experience. It was an unprecedented number of hours, weekends included. Some nights we finished at two in the morning only to start again four hours later. During the white harvest, because we have only two hectares, all the full time employees help cut the grapes and we only hire about ten temporaries. The white harvest this year took us jut three days and for that I was in the vineyard cutting grapes and checking for botrytis (rot).

The red harvest was two weeks long and we worked both weekends in order to get the grapes in before the rain and keep the grapes from developing a vinegar smelling rot. For the red harvest I worked in the vineyard and in the cellar. In the vineyard I was cutting grapes with the manual harvesters when we were short on people or following behind the harvesting machine and picking the grapes that did not fall off the vine. However, the majority of my time during the red harvest was spent in the cellar. For the first few days, I worked at the sorting table. Here, I looked for any flaws in the grapes, like botrytis or stems and leaves. From the sorting table, the grapes go directly into the cuvee so you have to be sure only the best quality product is reaching the end.

The rest of my time in the cellar was spent working with the cuvees. I took the density and temperature of every cuvee twice a day and also did the pump overs, remontages, and added yeast and sugar when necessary. This was a great learning experience for me. I learned the chemical processes behind the winemaking and why each parcel is fermented separately. I also saw the many different ways of harvesting and fermenting. When the grapes are harvested by machine, we must be much more careful with sorting because the machine does not differentiate between good and bad grapes as well as a person might. We harvest by hand when we put the grapes into the cuvee whole (not de-stemmed), instead of crushing them first and pumping them by tube into the cuvee. This helps achieve better colors and minimizes oxidation.

My favorite part of the harvest was not the winemaking processes I learned and certainly not the lack of sleep or crazy eating habits I developed. But it was rather how close the team was during the two weeks. The people I work with full time at Chateau La Garde don’t just think of the vineyard as their day job, it’s their passion and creative outlet. They put so much energy into every day and have given me such inspiration to enjoy any job I might hold in the future.

So, when I leave the cellar at two am after finishing sorting the last load of grapes, we all check our watches, smile tiredly and say, “See you in a few”. And it’s ok. I’m too tired to make dinner, but I’m excited to throw myself back into work again tomorrow.

Now that two months have passed since my last update, I think it’s safe to say I have more than could ever be written to tell you all about. In order to break it down manageably, I’ll give you updates in pieces. I always liked suspense.

For all of August and September I was living at Chateau La Garde and interning there in the vineyard and cellar. I survived the four-day harvest for white grapes and the two-week harvest for reds (and I mean two full weeks, weekends included). Maybe without my sanity or any sleep, but harvest makes one big family out of people who normally just work nine to five hours. More on harvest later, it takes a lot of concentration to dig that far back in my memory and at the moment I’m distracted by the smell of my homemade, simmering spaghetti sauce on the stove.

The homemade spaghetti sauce is key to where I am currently. In my little apartment on the fourth floor of a building in the big city; Lyon, France. Every Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday mornings there is a fresh produce market on my street where farmers from the countryside around Lyon bring their veggies and fruits at pretty good prices. One of my favorite farmers (who I always buy my apples from for my apple pies) gave me a discount on tomatoes yesterday morning and I couldn’t say no. Hence, the homemade spaghetti sauce currently simmering on my stove. And then, of course, I had to get some fresh parsley, cinnamon, potatoes, yesterday’s bread from the baker, and ground beef for the meatballs. My French roommates are never sure what I am making, or what they are eating for that matter, but I think they are just happy that they won’t have to cook again for the foreseeable future with me around.

I have been in Lyon for almost two weeks now, taking classes about viticulture and marketing in the wine industry and touring some of the wine regions of eastern France. Burgundy is hilly with more dairy farms than I expected to see, Beaujolais has vast, sweeping valleys of vineyards, and Cotes-du-Rhone has some of the steepest, most interesting terrace work I have seen. All of the wines are as different as night and day. The Beaujolais Nouveau is young, fresh, and exotic but they also have some outstanding Crus that I was not expecting. Burgundy never disappoints in the variety and uniqueness of reds or whites and Cotes-du-Rhone remains my favorite for an aged, toasted, oaky red. The city of Lyon is an adventure in itself. It is the third largest city in France after Paris and Marseille and has a beautiful old section with a network of pedestrian streets and small shops that I don’t mind losing myself in. The city is split into three sections because of two rivers, the Saone and the Rhone, running through it. There is a large park in the northern end of my side of the city called the Parc de la Tete d’Or. This has quickly become my favorite spot in the city, possibly because of the existence of a small zoo within its borders. On chilly October afternoons the park is quiet and I enjoy sitting on a bench next to the reindeer field and reading a book. I have yet to explore all of it so a full description will have to wait.

Paris is only two hours away by train and last weekend I met up with my good friend Kristen, from Cornell, for a whirlwind twenty-four hours of site seeing. She is currently studying in Rome and will be my travel partner for our three week European adventure after we both finish our programs in the middle of December. We stopped in at the Luxembourg Gardens, Versailles, and the Eiffel Tower. And, of course, tasted a bit of French cuisine throughout the day, finishing with crepes after the 700 stair climb at the Tower.

Kristen and I in the beautiful Luxembourg Garden

Fall bliss

Hall of Mirrors in Versailles

Probably the most photographed monument in the world

Going back to the end of August, I had another reunion with two very special people. Mom and Grandpa Dave came to visit for one week in between harvests and got an idea of life in France. We spent the last weekend in Normandy visiting the D-Day beaches and stayed in a lovely old stone house with an English couple who have a never-ending supply of hilarious stories about the British military. We spent our last day in the Loire Valley visiting Chateau de Cheverny and picnicking French style with goat cheese, duck pate, and baguettes.

Mom and Grandpa at Utah Beach

The view from a gun station at Pointe du Hoc

The Normandy American Cemetary sits on a cliff overlooking Omaha Beach

Chateau de Cheverny

The sleepy hunting hounds of the Chateau

My spaghetti sauce is almost done and the meatballs are practically jumping out of the pan so I’ll save all of the details from harvest, Lyon explorations, quiet days in the park, and visits with friends and family for another time. Oh and just so you all know, I chopped my hair off yesterday. A good eight inches. Why? The window of the hairdresser looked inviting and it said no reservations required.

Another long overdue update; this is becoming a trend that I will try to fix… but France keeps getting in the way so I can’t make any promises.

Every morning my alarm blares in my ear at 5:45 am. And every morning I am excited to start the day. I make my coffee, black, and toast a piece of fresh baguette from the night before. I touch up on some survival French sentences, make a quick sandwich for lunch, and head for the door. Walking out of my front door in the morning might be my favorite part of the day. At six thirty the sun is just breaking the horizon and I have a half-mile walk to the garage of the vineyard where I get my assignments for the day. It’s rarely rainy here so I can always see the last traces of stars in the dusty blue sky and watch as it blends with sherbet shades of pink and orange where the sun meets the rise of vineyards. The air is cool and crisp and the dew on the grass splashes my legs as I jog lightly across the lawn to the dirt road ahead. I cross over it in favor of the grassy lanes between rows of grapes and take the back way to work, winding through vines. It’s a glorious start to the day.

The view out of my bedroom window on a Sunday evening

Work at Chateau La Garde, located in the Pessac-Leognon region of Bordeaux, is halfway through the third week. I can now drive a tractor and mower successfully through rows of vineyard with merely inches to spare. I can hoe weeds underneath the vines until the clay and stone see the sun again. I am well on my way to speaking a full sentence in French with the other workers. And I can whip up a homemade apple pie with Roquefort cheese in my mini toaster oven in under an hour after finishing work.

I am living in a three-bedroom apartment off the southeastern end of the Chateau with a French intern. We have a small kitchen where I enjoy being creative with our minimal cooking appliances. Having a washer and dryer also makes up for learning to cook gourmet with a hot plate and a microwave. We have a living room with a television that doesn’t work, but with the huge window that opens up to a view of sunny vineyards, you don’t need the channels. Internet only works in the kitchen and because my life revolves around doing laundry, cooking, and washing dishes, it works out quite well. Currently, I am trying to make an egg and wine sauce on the hot plate and bake a duck with mushrooms in the mini toaster oven. If it works, you will be the first to know.

Chateau La Garde, with my apartment on the left hand side. The rest of the building is now used for tastings and the office

The chateau is located about a ten-minute walk and two-minute car ride away from the nearest town, Martillac. It’s a walk I make frequently, down the crumbling paved road that will soon be reclaimed by dirt, past vineyards, and through one last shady lane in front of an old castle before reaching the town center. Martillac is a sleepy village with about 200 inhabitants, a pizza place, a boulangerie, a post office and, of course, an old gothic church in the center. On Saturdays there is a bus to Bordeaux at 12:42 in the afternoon. It stops at the stone bench in front of the church but you have to stand up and wave if you want the bus driver to stop. The past two Saturdays, I’ve been the only person on the bus.

So many picturesque walks that I appreciate getting lost every now and then

In the heart of wine country

My weekends have also been busy with trips to Bordeaux city, visiting friends, exploring the coastline in the seaside town of Arcachon, and experiencing the summer “ferias” held in the southwestern towns like Dax. The people I keep meeting in France exceed all expectations of friendliness. They love hearing about American culture, exchanging opinions on music and politics, and arguing about the price of a decent red wine.

The insanity of the Dax feria