Walking the Land Before Harvest
One month before harvest, a hot, dry morning after a cool night. Perfect August day. We’re hanging around the Merlots waiting for the oenologue to arrive. She’s like an old fashioned traveling doctor or midwife making rounds, which means she’s sometimes late. That’s ok. It gives us time – John, two of our children, the farmer and me – to talk about the weather. What a strange year it’s been: droughtish May, wettish July. Bodes ill, but August so far is noble and we cross our fingers we’ll be spared the rot many others are suffering. Here she comes, a willowy woman carrying a notepad, a figure from La Fontaine’s fable about the power of the willow tree against an oak in a storm. I am meeting her for the first time and her slender hand crushes mine in a handshake. Willow power concentrated. She talks a mile a minute as the man and the farmer take her flanks and we bring up the rear, desperately trying to make out her commentary as we file through the rows to the far side of the vineyard.
Today’s inspection is about choosing the parcels for our first year, prime, artisanal wine. We need about two hectares and must estimate which parcels will be in the best of health and ripe at the same time, at optimal time. The farmer has his favorites: standing in the parcel he calls “cabane” which means absolutely nothing except its proximity to an old stone shed, that’s his nomenclature and no one but he understands it, the oenologue questions him about porte greffes and age. (Everyone knows the phylloxera plague almost wiped out the French vineyards in the 1860’s and that most of the vines today must be grafted onto American rootstock (porte greffe) to resist the pest. But this morning I learn that the devastating creature came from America in the first place…)
He fills her in on the horticulture specs and back they go to the weather. Never has weather-talk been less of a pleasantry. She tots up the number of vineyards already suffering from botrytis, always a threat, magnified this year by summer rains. But she nods affirmatively now as she notes the elevation, drainage and orientation of the vineyard. And the lack of rot. So far. I get the sense she’s like the farmer – not one to say something positive until the wine’s been in a bottle for at least a decade.
Moving down a row for the inspection, she grabs a bunch here, a bunch there, crossing frequently for random sampling. She turns each bunch over in her palm with the confidence of a doctor palpating an organ, squeezing oh so gently in her velvet iron hand.
Every once in a while she stops and chooses a grape. Pops it into her mouth with her entire attention. We fall silent as she bites. We can see she is slicing carefully with her front teeth, she is trying to taste just the skin first and push the pulp and seeds to another side of her mouth. (Oenologues aren’t like ordinary humans. They have extra, secret chambers to their mouths, their primary work instrument; I won’t say they’re genetic mutants but I am dumbstruck by the amount of information one orifice can elicit.) More silence as we wait for some pronouncement. Instead, she spits gracefully into the palm of her hand and gazes at the contents. She pushes away the pulp and examines the seeds. She holds them up to the sun, she is the Oracle of Delphi, we dare not breathe.
Then the flicker of a smile. “Ce n’est pas tres vegetal,” murmurs our midwife of the vineyard. The farmer nods back, pleased. This is good news? They continue to speak in code. What does “pas de bonbon anglais” have to do with winemaking? Visions of the local candy store and kids buying the red dye #5 stuff that causes Attention Deficit… I’m too embarrassed to ask them to decipher so I just slunk along gathering and eating berries.
After further examination of the patient we trot back to the chai. She scribbles official remarks on her carbon copy tablet and gives us marching orders: watch for rot, watch for scorching, watch for mildou, buy zillion gallon jugs of hydrogen peroxide to disinfect the tanks, rinse rinse rinse, get your water canal better organized, where is the cooling tank…
She writes up a prescription for products for Harvest Day with dosage ratios scribbled all over it. I’m daunted to my bones but John is shining with anticipation. He’s grown two inches of energy and I move closer to absorb his glow. Somehow he seems sure that authentic wine will flow from these tanks, and not some deep purple fiasco.
Packing up her satchel, the oenologue is reading my mind; of course she’s a mind reader, she’s a reader of pulp and seeds, and entrails too I suppose. She’s shaking everyone’s hands. When she shakes mine her competent, professional, intelligent eyes twinkle for a second: “Allez, courage! Is it not written, good parents, good children? Eh bien voila. Good grapes, good wine!”
