Private Harvest in the Loire

a multi-generational harvestA private family harvest in the Loire
This story takes place somewhere in the Loire, and what you see on this page is still a routine, if festive, yearly activity for many families of farmers in the Loire and in other parts of France. This is a story about the few rows of vines that some farmers keep to make wine for themselves. The wine that is going to be made from these few rows will never land on the market and will never be sold. If I had to give my guess about the regions where they are the more widespread(I don't have the statistics and these private harvests are not going into the official figures), I would say the Loire, the Beaujolais, the Languedoc, plus some parts of the southern Rhone (maybe Jura too). Many small farmers and older country folks still own a few rows of vineyards that they use to make their own wine. It is a survival from a bygone autarcic economic-model when there was no grower living exclusively from grape growing, winemaking being a side activity along with other crop growing. I have visited quite a few unrenovated old farms in the Loire and there is hardly one which doesn't have an outbuilding with all the winemaking tools (even if often in beyond-repair condition), a press, cement vats, a few casks. These vineyards are often composed of a handful of rows, sometimes as little as 3 rows stuck between fields and/or near woods. Most of the time, these farmers don't have the machinery for the harvest and rely on help from family and friends to harvest the grapes. If not with this enduring, self-sufficiency-minded tradition, these private rows would have been uprooted long ago, and that's by the way what is going to happen to half of these particular private rows this winter : they have two such vineyard-planted plots a couple of hundred meters apart, each with 3 to 5 rows of vines, and one has to go because this is too much work to tend for the elderly retired farmer who is the official owner. It will be plowed and overlapped by the field nearby. Thierry Puzelat, in the Loire, iniated a special cuvée in 2007, made from a collection of tiny such private plots from which he bought the grapes through a non-profit group dedicated to save them : "le Rouge est Mis" is the name of this cuvée , a red Pinot Meunier, a beautiful, peppery wine made with a now minor variety. He made two casks of this wine. I hope he'll repeat that operation because first, the wine is good, and second, because it helps prevent these tiny isolated plots from being uprooted and from melting into the fields nearby.

Emptying buckets in the back-basketEven if still common in back rural areas, you may drive through the wine region and not be aware of these private harvests. You often have to take secondary roads, then dirt- or grass roads before falling upon these patches of vineyards in the middle of nowhere. I was supposed to post a story about this particular family harvest last year. I had heard about it by an acquaintance in the Loire and had been told where it took place and on which saturday. But the very morning of the harvest was a day of fiery rains in the region. There hand'nt been a single day of rain for weeks if I remember, and the scheduled day for this harvest was such a mess with torrential downpours of rain. I stayed indoors, thinking about the nighmare it must have been to harvest in these conditions. Any way, I'm not even sure I would have found the exact location because I was explained the itinerary without checking on a detailed map, and locals often tell itineraries on a sketchy way. This time, I had been shown the location a large-scale map where small dirt roads were indicated and was pretty sure to find the spot. The weather was fine albeit cold, about 6° C at 8:30am, and I decided to take the old Citroën. The temperature eventually rose to normal levels after 10am but the grass roads to the vineyards being particularly bumpy, the Citroën was a better choice than the road bike which might have had some trouble or skidded. As soon as I engaged on the dirt/grass road, I spotted in the far several cars parked along a wood near what looked effectively like a few rows of vines. This was it.Harvesting shears on a vine poleThere was 15 to 20 people busy picking the grapes, a single back-basket man carrying the collected grapes to the gondola. People of all age, from an 8-year-old boy to the 80-something grand-grandpa who dropped a couple of times to see how things were going. His wife who told me about this harvest stayed home where she was busy preparing lunch for the party. These were mostly relatives of the elderly farmers, with a few friends, all of them coming back each year for the fun of it and maybe a bit of wine. The guest who came from the farthest was from the Orne département in Normandy, and there was also a former Parisian who settled near here in the early 80s'. Others teased him kindly because he told them about his taking part in the 1968 youth unrest in Paris at the Nanterre University, where we was enrolled.
The harvest, which was to be finished in a single morning, concerned these 5 rows and another 3 rows a few hundred meters away. On the first site there was mostly Gamay, plus some Arbois (Menu Pineau), and on the second, Gamay and a row of Cot (Malbec). A good tool can be used for ever, if properly cared of, and these old shears seemed to do a very good job, but local country folks are not into vintage craze, and the rest of the tools were normal plastic buckets, a back-basket, and a tractor-pulled gondola.Connecting the pumping hose at the back of the gondolaAs you can see on this picture, red grapes and white grapes were harvested together and are going to be be vinified in the same vat. They sometimes harvest separately the white and the reds, especially that the Arbois/Menu Pineau is ripening later, but for some reason (I think it was a question of lower yields for the Arbois this year) they harvested them all together. The two plots yielded two such gondola-loads and by noon all the pickers were at the farm a couple hundreds meters away, in front of the outbuilding devoted to winemaking. There's the old press on the outside on its cement base, and inside, a tall open cement vat in a corner, the rest of the room looking like a surface cellar, complete with bottle racks and casks. 4 men are holding the hose so that it can be screwed on the back of the gondola, the other end going through a small upper window in the cellar and in the open vat. When it was fixed, the tractor-powered rotating screw at the bottom of the gondola hurled the clusters, which werer crushed in the process, into the cement vat.Moving the grapes with a fork in the vatWhen all the grapes were harvested, half of the pickers drove directly to the elder couple's home (which is not in this farm) to help prepare the last details of the meal, while the rest helped put the grapes into the vat and clean the tools and gondola. After the hose was successfully secured to the back of the gondola, a young guy climbed into the cement vat to guide the pouring of the crushed grapes evenly on the bottom of the cement vat. There's no danger of CO2 at this stage yet but after this initial intervention no one will risk his life by staying inside the vat : the fermentation, which in some instances starts quickly, will produce lots of carbon dioxide (CO2), an odorless, life-threatening gaz that killed more than one novice vatroom worker over the years. The whole-clustered grapes having been crushed by the rotating screw, the juice is already in contact with the skins and stems. Even if this open cement vat is technically modern, it is very traditional at the same time, with these wood planks on the side which will be lowered as a lid on the fermenting wine in a few minutes. As I look on from the top of an old wooden ladder, the guy takes a plastic glass and fills it straight from the bottom of the vat so that we can taste the very first juice. Very sugary and pleasant, a far cry from what I occasionally drink from a grape-juice pack. After tasting himself, he says that the white grapes have brought more acidity to the juice.Measuring the sugarInstant of truth...The old farmer is behind the group, near the ladder standing against the cement vat. His son, a farmer himself, is in charge of supervising the harvest and the handling of the grapes. He is the one on the front (right) looking at the juice container. The wooden lids now cover the crushed grapes and time has come to check the potential alcohol with an hydrometer. There's a big iron-cast tap on the lower outside of the cement vat, from which a couple of liters of juice were siphooned. The fragile glass-device is left floating in the juice to measure the sugar level, which will determine the alcohol level of the future wine. Asked about any yeast additive, The man says that they always leave the juice by itself and it never failed to ferment.I ask the old man about any sulphur adding in the vat, he reacts with surprise, saying that they never add this sort of thing during the vinification. We'll not try to categorize this wine but it is pretty natural and additives-free. One of the young picker said it was a real organic wine, and not one of those outrageously expensive wines posing as organic. I didn't want to look too inquisitive about the treatments in the vineyard but from the many red patches and stains on the leaves, I think it didn't get much chemical sprayings. On the other hand, the ground had the characteristic hardness and green mosses resulting from regular weed-killer sprayings, even if some grass had grown back when the harvest took place. Overall, I think that they don't try to make such or such wine and haven't any particular organic-minded attitude, but the wine ends up being quite true and devoid of tricky additions. I think they would just need to get pinpointed advice from an experienced winemaker to make the final step opening the way to a little gem.A typical farm cellar in the LoireThis room has been the farm's chai for more than probably 150 years if I can judge by its age. This surface cellar has everything to make the wine of a family : half a dozen casks, a piston pump (in the foreground), bottle racks, and the cement vat behind near the door, a later addition maybe in the mid 20th century. Some farms even display remains of large-capacity foudres. There are more such micro wineries in the back country that are still in use than we commonly think. I spent a day with a hunting party a few months ago in the Loire and in between two hunting ambushes, we stopped at an isolated farm in the woods, known to a few hunters, where the owner filled a few glasses with a very welcome Gamay. It was surreal to see the wine flowing through a plastic hose from a cask in the back of the barn...
For us wine lovers who have some interest about the vinification styles and their results in the wine, this seems an extraordinary chance to have all these tools at hand (plus the yeasts cultures that probably inhabit the walls of this old cellar) and a few rows of vines (including rare minor varieties !) dedicated for what can be described best as an artisanal wine. But for many country people, this is for granted and it has always been part of their life. The young boy who took part to this harvest day told me that this tradition was very old indeed : "it started at least in... [looking at the sky and thinking intensely]....I am born in 2000 and I have always seen this harvest every year..."A fountain of juice and grapesTime has come to clean the tools.The gondola is rinsed shortly first, which fills two buckets of diluted grape juice that are added to the vat. Then, a thorough rinsing on the inside of gondola and on the screw produces this beautiful fountain of grapes and water as final fireworks.
Probably the best moment of the day was the lunch at the couple's farm a couple of kilometers away, which took place a few minutes after this last picture was shot : all the family and friends who took part shared a lunch prepared by the elderly woman. This is a festive meal, 20 people around a large table, probably outside or under an open barn with this kind of weather. Being not intimate, I didn't take part but I can imagine that it makes eventually forget the tiredness of the work, the hands and clothes sticky with grape juice, and it comes as a relief when the harvest day has been ruined by rain and mud, like last year's.
There's one thing I'll ask, the next time I see the elderly couple, it is to taste the wine, or maybe (should I dare it ?) to have a bottle to bring back to the big city, a bottle no money can buy...

Comments

[Pat B]

Bert,

Great story, great pictures. Thank you.

Pat B

[hikalu]

Nice post! I'm looking forward to tasting the wine of this year.

[Craig B]

Thanks for another great post. A few years ago when we were cycling in the Burgundy area near Nantoux we were motioned over to take part in the harvest of a small plot. It was much more difficult than I expected, and my wife and I lasted about 15 minutes before giving up. They were amused at our efforts and rewarded us with a bottle of white and a bottle of red - both unlabeled. The white was excellent - a bourgogne aligote. A great wine, a great memory, and in the future if anyone ever again holds up clippers and asks if I want to take part in a grape harvest I won't hesitate for a second.