
September 20th, Les Bois Lucas, Touraine (Loire Valley). The estate is located near Pouillé, a village along the Cher river between Chenonceaux and Saint Aignan.
I wanted to see a harvest at the Domaine des Bois Lucas, part because I love their wines and part because looking at a group of japanese picking the grapes in a french vineyard is still a curiosity for me. Alas, there were no japanese pickers this year to satisky my liking for exotism, except for Junko Arai herself (the owner), but the experience was still worth it. I began this visit on harvest day by dropping at the chai for lunch time. The pickers were gathered around a table outside to eat and drink. 3 of them were playing pétanque under the shadow of the trees and a (tired) girl was napping in her car.
Junko Arai and chai master Noella Morantin were busy doing urgent tasks in the chai in between short pauses to eat a sandwich. Junko Arai and Noella Morantin make natural, unfiltered wine from organicly-farmed vineyards on the southern slope along the Cher river. The varieties grown in the Domaine are Sauvignon Blanc, Gamay and Cabernet Franc, plus Cot (also known as Malbec) which has been planted recently and which will need some time to be productive.
Junko checks the sugar level of the Gamay in the different tronconic wooden vats [picture on left]. The one she checks is now at 1076 and 19°C. It was harvested 5 days ago (sep 15). She writes the data every day on each wooden vat to follow the vinification. She seems very busy, the next thing she does is cleaning the empty boxes with a hose [picture on right]. At one point, Junko brings me a glass of Gamay juice which is still a deliciously sugary grape juice, but already on its way to fermentation. I would not label this one "bernache" yet though, I think it needs a couple of days maybe to reach this magic stage. Bernache, also named "vin nouveau" is as easy to drink as grape juice, and makes you high smoothly but surely, with its undetectable sugar-coated alcohol... I love it ! Whatever, watch as Noella is drinking MYYY glass while I shoot pictures [pic on the left] ! In the background you can see the press on the left and the cute Bodin piston-pump on the ground. This is a very old one indeed : 1955... A piston-pump is much softer on the juice than a rotor-pump would be, Noella says : no vibrations at all. As I watch it, it is true that it seems so smooth and silent... Noella says that vignerons around here use most of the time Bodin pumps and the factory is located further down the Cher river, in Bléré.
Junko and Noella worked till past 1am the previous night, to check the press and clean everything. Junko adds that she woke up at 5am this morning to communicate by telephone with her employees in Tokyo (she runs a wine-import business there too) when it's noon, local time.

Time to get back to the vineyard (2pm). The pickers pack in 3 cars, plus one girl sitting on the back of my motorcycle (in spite of the lack of extra helmet), we all head for the Sauvignon plot a couple of kilometers away, and the 14 harvesters soon walk the rows two by two.
Summer has been quite dry around here. There was a big rainfall last friday but you don't feel it that much when you walk on the plowed earth. The Sauvignon vines are quite old, 40 to 60 years. While Noella stays in the chai, Junko alternatively picks, checks the harvesters and helps the carriers haul the boxes between the vineyard and the chai, where she will temporarily store them in a refrigerated room if the press is already full and busy. Her Volkswagen Caddy minivan can hold 22 boxes, so she comes and goes all day. Two carriers bring the full boxes at the end of the rows so that she can load the car faster. She dispatches the empty boxes and picks herself 10 minutes or so until another car load is ready.
Pickers sort the grapes before putting them in the box : when a cluster has grapes with bad rot, they taken them out delicately with the tip of the shears. The vineyard is organicly farmed and that makes a difference : it looks at the same time more messy with all the weeds growing wildly between the rows, and more healthy. At one point, one of the girl screams : she found a small frog and holds it carefully for every one to see [pic on left]. These animals are quite fragile and I guess there would not be any in a conventionally-sprayed vineyard.
The pickers are quite young, most of them are students. They all come from Saint Aignan sur Cher, a small town along the Cher river some 8 km upstream.
Noella told me earlier that the grapes are in great conditions this year : volume is not very big, which means there has been lesser risks to have degraded, rotting grapes. July was very hot and dry, with just a little bit of rain to allow the grapes to increase their size and juice content. August on the other hand, was not so sunny, but it was mostly dry over here. Maturity has been early too : Harvest begins usually in the first days of october, but the grapes were ready and perfect around mid-september this year. I am sure that there are many different micro-climates in the Loire and I would like to know if all its sub-regions fared that well in 2006.
Lots of laughs and chats between the rows, as pickers speak and joke about everything including about the photographer/sound-engineer who walks among them...I took many more pictures like usual but had to make a choice (or I'm on my way to have 20 pictures per post...).
After I left on my motorcycle, I decided to drop at nearby Clos Roche Blanche. Alice Feiring had written last week on her blog that she would do the harvest there and I was thinking on my way : what a good idea to stop, see Catherine and Didier, and maybe meet Alice for the first time if she is still there ?... Alas, she was already gone. But I was happy to chat several minutes with Catherine Roussel.
Asked if the work is difficult, Junko Arai says that the most difficult thing is to choose the right day to harvest. There is the good rot and the bad rot (grey rot) : pickers must take the grey-rot grapes off the clusters, and this is a lot of meticulous work. Picking earlier would have allowed you to have less grey rot, but the overall quality of the grapes would not be as good. And on the other hand, the more she waits, the more selection and sorting she will have to do.
Asked how she does the work, she says she opts for having a maximum of pickers work on a given plot for harvest when time is right, so as to harvest it at once. This sauvignon Blanc then goes to the press. Yesterday for example, she began to press at 8pm and finished late in the night at 2am. She says that as she is not using any SO2, she is obliged to be very careful, to harvest very healthy grapes, and to be fast in doing it.
Merci beaucoup.
Posted by: Henry | September 26, 2006 at 01:40 AM
Hi!
Congratulations on the pictures and the articles: very interesting. I actually landed on your site as I was searching for the Domaine des Estanilles' site. I was there last summer and opened two great bottles of their Rosé Prestige for my son's second birthday party last Sunday. What a delight!! I was just wondering why you don't write in French, unless there's a French version of your blog somewhere...
I'll be back here!
All the best.
Fabrice, Paris 17.
Voici l'adresse de mon blog (dédié au vin et à Paris), just in case...
http://vinsurvin.blog.20minutes.fr/
Posted by: Fabrice | September 26, 2006 at 04:55 PM