Sologne is a mostly wooded region located south of Orléans and Blois in the Loire, now home to a couple appellations like Cheverny, Cour-Cheverny and Orléans-Clery.
Because we always have a hard time figuring how everything was looking like in the past__even in the recent past__ it is always useful to get some visual reminders about how the wine culture has evolved and transformed itself along the last century. The knowledge on everything related to winemaking and vineyard management was entirely pragmatic back then at the turn of the 19th and the 20th century, which was both a good thing and a bad thing : a good thing because on the whole, vintners were doing honest wines by just following an inherited tradition, and a bad thing because as their knowledge was not deeply rooted in the arcanes of what makes a great wine, the following generations would eventually easily fall under the appeal of the promised miracles of chemical sprayings and massive winemaking corrections.
I found these reproductions of old postcards in a vide-grenier (a village attic-sale) in the Loire, there were only a few of them about the harvest and I bought a few others featuring other scenes of early 20th-century Sologne (plus several harvest ones that I found on the web) because they help get a better picture of the context. Among the non-wine pictures, note the coal man and his family, his job probably carried a heavy stigma, you almost feel it by looking at his daughters. I wonder if the bottle of wine (a liter, apparently) was there naturally or if the photographer had it placed there for more impact. The pictures speak volumes on how poor this region of the Loire was : much of Sologne was covered with wild expanses of woods and ponds and apart from vineyard growing here and there there was little agricultural riches. The wine was made for local consumption, like it was the case in most French regions, even the ones people wouldn't figure today wine has ever been made there. We also have to put in perspective here the fact that this was in the middle of the phylloxera turmoil, with lots of vineyards being destroyed and replanted (that may be why several of them look so low).
Some other India pictures, here and here.
I wonder if the Sologne pilgrim is on his way to Santiago or some other destination. It's unlikely he was a Sadhu since he has a rosary.
Posted by: Frank | October 12, 2012 at 05:23 PM
Awesome post - love the old vendage photos!
Posted by: L. M. (Lyn) Archer | October 13, 2012 at 12:21 PM
Great post and wonderful photos. Did they really crush the grapes in the vineyard, or were they just posing for the photo?
Posted by: Fabio (Vinos Ambiz) | October 23, 2012 at 11:49 PM
They crushed the grapes in the vineyard. It's actually still done nowadays by people making wine for themselves, I saw it myself not so long ago. See this story :
http://www.wineterroirs.com/2004/10/family_harvest.html
Posted by: Bertrand | October 24, 2012 at 07:05 PM
Bonsoir Bertrand,
Curieusement et alors que je n'avais pas consulté votre très bel article jusqu'à ce soir, j'ouvrais un post sur le même sujet quelques jours plus tard sur LPV.
Quelques images complémentaires sur http://lapassionduvin.com/phorum/read.php?50,688356,710310#msg-710310.
Amicalement,
Oliv
Posted by: Oliv | October 31, 2012 at 09:22 PM