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.
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.
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