One of the requirements of my oenology studies in France is a three-month winemaking internship. I chose to do mine with Didier Barral, a Languedoc winemaker who I’ve written about several times before on this blog. With his cows roaming freely in the vineyard, close to 50 pigs free-ranging nearby, and a beyond-biodynamic biodiversity philosophy, Barral makes a vin de terroir that is alive with the spiciness of the garrigue scrub-brush and minerality of the shale that characterize Faugères region wines. This segment of my winemaking report is about the grape harvest, or vendange in French.
The memory of the year's sun, rain, wind and earth's richness is contained within.
The grape harvest is a time of celebration—the culmination of a year of working the soil in the vineyard, fighting insects and fungal infections that attack the vines, and nursing the grapes from their springtime promise to their ripened fullness in the fall. It’s a time of expectation, of anticipation, and of long days of backbreaking work.
For going on 20 years, a group of 20-or-so Portuguese men and women have been making the annual fall trip from their village near Porto to the little village of Lenthéric, the Languedoc home of the Domaine Léon Barral. Didier Barral named the estate after his grandfather, and the first Portuguese workers who came here worked for him.
The always-singing, ever-cheerful Paolo.
Three generations later they are still key elements in making the domaine’s wines. By 7:30 a.m. they are in the fields, picking two or three tons of grapes each day. The grapes are first placed in plastic crates. The 30-kg crates are loaded on a flatbed trailer, which is hauled by tractor to the wine cellar where the grapes are sorted.
There is a sincere community feel to how they work. Mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, grandparents and cousins all work side by side. Everyone is related to one another. This human transhumance is slowly disappearing from the Languedoc vineyards. Before, I was told, each vineyard had such families who came from Spain, or Portugal, or Morocco, to harvest the grapes. These families have become dispersed as sons and daughters leave their rural villages to work in cities.
There’s also the difficulty in housing and feeding these workers. Most of the vineyards now use interim agencies, which find the hands needed to harvest grapes. If you feel that someone is not working hard enough, you just tell the agency, and they’ll be a replacement the next day. It’s not as easy telling someone that their son or daughter is a slacker, but I doubt, viewing the work ethic displayed here that this is a problem with the Portuguese who come to Lenthéric each year.
Tanya even enjoys sorting grapes.
And no interim agency could replace the guitar-playing Silvio or the ever-smiling Valentine (both of whom, incidentally, are master grapevine hat weavers), or Paolo, whose good looks and nasal, melodic singing rival that of the Italian singer Eros Ramazzotti, or the winsomely shy Tanya, who was always laughing, even after sorting grapes for ten hours.
Valentine and Silvio take a well-deserved break from grape-picking.
