day one

The past two days have been my romantically painful introduction to la vendange. Eating breakfast in the dark we notice the sun’s faint glow rising outside the window and onto our kitchen table. At this moment Philip opens the door and serves out the morning tasks before we begin walking down to the parcel nearest the main road.
The first day was actually quite nice in that we spent five and a half hours harvesting in the sun before lunch and the rest of the day was spent pressing and cleaning up, but because Philip wasn’t sure if we had enough grapes to fill the press we had fill it by hand so as not to brake and grapes. This took some time but it was pretty well full at the end and he decided to press.
The second day we were down to only five people because Caroline was very sick and her mother left to catch a flight home the evening before. I chose to be the transporter during the whole six hours of harvest and have some major bruises to show for it. Because Philip had pruned the second half of the parcel a little differently they had produced many more grapes and we had to return after lunch to harvest the rest. The gray sky wasn’t looking promising during lunch and sure enough we picked the last two rows in the rain.
At about nine in the evening we were finally pressing and took a break to eat dinner. Caroline’s brother was very kind to quite a few bottles of beer from a local brewery 200meters from his house in Germany which went very well with a few well deserved bowls of soup. After the pressing was finished we cleaned everything up and finally walked to back to the house at around 12:30 am.
I don’t know how many days of harvest are left but I heard that we might do the whole vineyard by hand. I took the day off today because the weather forecast wasn’t looking the best but I’m looking at blue sky right now and it hasn’t rained at all.

Once again it’s my day off, only it lacks the clean skies and worm air of last week. Even so, I didn’t spend much time at the market, after buying doux pommes from my favorite organic vendor I decided to ride about an hour south to a town called Eauze. A little smaller than Agen yet much larger then anything around the farm Eauze was a plesent city. I bought a penini and walked around the book store. Eauze (click on it to make it larger)
Now I’m back in Barbotan for the next hour of so. I’ve sent about eight emails out to some farms near or in the Alps. Mostly cheese producers, I made sure this time to only email the farmers using French in their posts but mentioned that they speak at least a little English. I’m hoping to work it out so that after a week or so here I can take a train south to Marseille and then a ferry to Corse and then another to Livorno, Italy. I’ve met with the surprisingly hospitable friend of a fried over Facebook. She’s going to an art school in Firenze and was more than happy to let me stay with her for a while and show me around the city. If everything works to plan I could enjoy a week in central Italy before I return to France!
I’m finally getting used to the daily live of my host family here, but I just get the feeling I’m wasting precious time that I could be learning French. I’ve made the commitment though with Caroline and the children, it seems to be helping at least a little. Victor is always up to embarrass me when I mispronounce words and what better way to learn than humiliation by an eight year old?
Caroline’s brother is coming tomorrow to join us in La Vendange and I think Philip said that a Japanese WWOOFer will be here on Friday. It’s going to be long hard days but you know, I’m looking forward to it. If anything, I’ll be drinking some of the best grape juice in the world.