Juice bath!

Nicholas is still out of commission with a back injury, so at present it's just Jordan and me in the cave, with Nathalie coming by regularly to give us instruction. First thing this morning we gathered tank samples for more tasting by Nathalie and Cyril to decide which tank to empty tomorrow, and where to put it. We're also still dealing with cuve 7, which is a syrah with stuck fermentation. We've got 2 small fermenters with the lees from the white cuves trying to get it working, and this afternoon we pumped a few hectoliters of the mourvedre that's just finishing fermentation into the syrah cuve to try and get it working.
Jordan and I started the debourbage of the clairette that came in Monday. That's the process of pumping the clear top juice out of the cuve, leaving behind the heavier junk at the bottom. What I didn't know was that it's very important in this process to never stop the pump, because stopping the pump lets the wine in the hose fall back into the cuve, unsettling the settled heavier bits at the bottom, and mixing them back up with the clear juice. So, Jordan was up above, and I was down below with the pump when he started shouting something to me. It's hard enough to understand what's being said to you in the cave with a noisy pump running, to say nothing of the language barrier. I stopped the pump to ask him to repeat what he'd said. Rather than repeating it, he told me not to stop the pump, so I turned it back on, and again he started trying to tell me something. Again I stopped, and again he told me to turn it back on, so finally I turned it back on, and went up the stairs to ask what he was on about. He was trying to tell me to prepare a bucket of water to clean the pump when we were done, and then he told me why you should never stop the pump during debourbage.
The result of the whole debacle was that we had much more cloudy juice than we should have, so it wouldn't fit in the small cuve we'd planned on putting it in. By this time Nathalie had come around, and had gotten the story from Jordan. I had a feeling that his version of the story put the blame fully on me, and whether I was right or wrong she was definitely irritated, and we both got a telling off.
At this point the cuve that wasn't big enough for all the heavy bits was completely full, and we were about to move it all to a bigger cuve. I was up above to pump the juice out of the too-small cuve, when Nathalie accidentally pressed the button on the pump, causing the too-small cuve to overflow, showering me with grape juice. I proceeded to pass the rest of the morning in a decidedly ill humor, now having cold sticky grape juice dripping down my back and into a number of places I prefer not to have grape juice.
Lunchtime came, we finished moving the white juice around, and I got to have a shower, which cheered me up tremendously.
The afternoon was devoted mostly to cleaning and getting the cave ready to empty the marc out of cuve 32 tomorrow, and possibly receive the cabernet. I was assigned the task of cleaning 2 drapeaux. I can't think of an English word for them, drapeau literally translates to curtains, but these are big metal things with water tubes through them that are used to cool the cuves during fermentation. The rough part about cleaning them, especially when they've come out of a red cuve, is that they're covered with tartaric acid, which is deceptively difficult to clean off. You start off with a hose, and some of the bits just flake off, making it seem like the job's going to be easy as pie, but then you learn that the bits that didn't just flake off are holding on for dear life, and you've got to use some manner of caustic cleanser that's so nasty you have to wear gloves just to handle it.
And that was the second major chemical event today. The premises were also sprayed for mosquito abatement, which is awesome. But it does speak to the issue of organic farming in winemaking. I make the point quite often to customers that there are a great number of winemakers who adhere to organic or sustainable practices, but who don't get certified because they want to keep their options open. This is a perfect example. There is no organic option for taking care of a major mosquito problem, and even though in this case the spray was only dispersed on the areas of the property where the grapes had already been harvested, this treatment would have nullified an organic certification if Carlot had one.
At this point I'm keeping one eye on cuve 19, which is being used as the receptacle for the juice from cuve 32, which is to be emptied tomorrow. It's emptied by gravity, which means cuve 32 is just sitting with an open faucet, with a hose leading down into cuve 19. The danger here is that one never knows exactly how much juice one will get, so there's the possibility that cuve 32 will overflow cuve 19. So I'm checking it regularly while I watch Heroes.

Tasting day again!

First thing this morning we pulled samples from all of the tanks and all of the whites in barriqe for tasting with Alain the enologist. The barrel samples of white were interesting, you have to kind of use your imagination, knowing that they will be mixed mostly in small percentages with the tank whites. The rose tanks are great, and I can't wait to taste them when they're complete. The red tasting was interesting too, we were considering which tanks were best for the Chateau Paul Blanc Syrah, which sees more time in wood, and which would be better for the Enfants Terribles and the Tradition. It was particularly interesting because Cyril and Nathalie didn't entirely agree with Alain on the blending, so after he left they pulled new samples of all the red tanks and tried blending them again in various permutations until they'd decided which ones to put where.
I'm off to the store again. I've been wearing the same clothes for a month and I'd really like to have at least one nice shirt to wear when I'm not working.

More white grapes and remontage

We got in the rest of the clairette today, and pumped it into a cuve to settle. The juice that came in Friday had been sitting over the weekend, to allow the heavier material to sink to the bottom of the cuve. The good juice on top was pumped into a new fermenter today to start fermentation, and the thicker stuff at the bottom went into the two cuves of mourvedre.

The mourvedre is getting a lot of pumpover time to extract color and help it through fermentation, it should be done with primary in a couple of days. It was mostly just me and Jordan in the winery today, so when Nathalie told us to do the pumpover for maximum aeration, Jordan got a little creative, here's the picture. The wine on the ground surrounding the bucket gave me the impression that this wasn't necessarily the best way to do it.
There were an obscene number of mosquitoes today. All the water we're moving through the winery for cleanup and whatnot makes for perfect breeding conditions for them, and unlike the mosquitoes that I'm used to, who come out generally in the early morning and the evening, the French seem to have developed a supermosquito that could give a rat's ass that it's hot outside, and will eat you alive regardless. I'm very itchy.
We also pumped the remaining finished marsanne and roussanne out of the cuves in order to gather all of the lees to be used to help along a cuve of syrah that's currently stopped fermenting.
After work I went to the grocery store, and I finally figured out why I can never find a shopping cart. Bags are also hard to find. It seems the French have decided that the best way to make sure everybody remembers to bring their own bags when shopping is just to not have bags at the checkout. I'd seen shopping cart return in the parking lot, and I'd seen people with carts in the supermarket, but I'd spent the first five minutes of every shopping trip so far looking for carts at every entrance, with no luck. It turns out they're not free. You have to put a one-euro coin in the cart in the cart repository in the parking lot to free it from it's fellows. Or find one that somebody else didn't return to it's resting place. So that pretty much eats, but at least now I know.

Paella!

Went to Guiot yesterday for the end of harvest paella party. Paella is a traditional dish in this area, and it's typically made with a combination of seafood; fish, mussels, shrimp, etc, as well as chicken, rabbit, and sometimes sausage.
We had a great meal outside, with plenty of Guiot rose. After eating we played petonk, which is the French version of bocce ball. It's played with one small ball, which is tossed about 5 meters from the players, and each player has two larger balls, and the goal is to be closest to the little ball. It's a fun game, although I did have to serve as the official smack-talk translator between the Australians and the Frenchmen, which is no easy task.
I got lost on the way home because it was dark, and the road I'd come in on was one-way, so it ended up taking me twice as long as it should have to get home, but I made it.

A few fun new ways to spend money!

I finally got my laptop back which, for the new hard drive, labor, and tax cost me about 130 Euros, which is just shy of $200.
Wednesday I went to visit Alex and Numa Cornut at Chateau Guiot. Alex ended up occupied fixing a tractor out in one of the vineyards, but I tasted through the wines first with a French woman named Sylvia who works there. Then Brendan, one of two Australians currently working harvest there showed up to tell her there were customers there to taste. However, Brendan speaks about 2 words of French, and Sylvia speaks about 2 words of English, so I had to translate. I'm not sure how Brendan and the other Australian get along here when Alex and Numa aren't around normally, but that must be tough. I still feel intimidated doing new things when I'm not sure if I'm going to understand what's being said, and I'm told I speak quite well.
So Brendan took me through tasting some tank samples, and some barrel samples of 2008's, then Numa arrived, back from helping his brother fix a tractor. Numa and I had a very interesting chat about the influence of Robert Parker, and what Numa has noticed as a decrease in Americans' preference for extremely oaky wines. He gave me a few bottles of Guiot wine, and invited me to an end-of-harvest paella party today, which I'll be going to as soon as I finish writing this.
I left there just about 6:30, and I was about 17km from Nimes, which meant I'd be able to make it before the computer shop closed, but they hadn't called yet, so I didn't know if it was done. Still I decided to give it a shot. I tried calling as I drove, but there was no answer. I tried again, and again, and finally somebody picked up at about 6:45, just as I was entering the city. The computer was not ready. I turned around and headed to the gas station next to the grocery store, which was the closest one I knew of. I had tried to buy gas the night before, but apparently the '24 hour' gas stations here only accept French bank cards after the attendant has left for the evening. Despite having a sign with Visa and Mastercard logos, the machine wouldn't take my card. I was starting to get worried. I had just under a quarter tank. I drove back toward home, and on the way stopped again at the station I'd tried the night before. This time there was a woman working in the booth, and she told me to use Mastercard I just had to fill up and then pay her on my way out. I filled up and paid. It will be a long time before I complain about the price of gas in the US. About 33 Liters of unleaded cost me over 50 Euros. I left the gas station and the car started to klunk. I had put the wrong gas in the car.
The real irony here is the fact that I've been making a real effort, and doing a very good job at making sure I know exactly what I'm being asked to do at work. I'd say I typically understand 50 to 75% of the actual words that are being said to me most of the time. Sometimes more, but I'd call that the average. Now, through inference and reading body language and just generally knowing what's going on in the winery, I'd say I know what I'm being asked what to do on the first try 80% of the time. When I do have to ask for clarification it usually just takes asking once to figure out the meaning of whatever words I didn't understand.
So that's why it's ironic that I didn't perform the retrospectively seemingly elementary step of asking what kind of gas to put in the car I'm using. I'm sure it's due in fact to the fact that I've never put anything but unleaded in any car I've ever drive. Also, the fact that I was desperate to get some gas in the car.
Needless to say I didn't make it very far, and thank god I had a cell phone. Cyril came and picked me up. We tried to siphon the unleaded out of the car, but the car has anti-siphoning technology of some sort, so we left it and Cyril called a mechanic the next morning.
In the end it was all ok. Apparently a diesel engine, though it won't run on unleaded, won't be harmed by having unleaded in it, while an unleaded engine that gets fed diesel is well and truly screwed.
The real bummer for me at the time was that it put a damper on what had been a pretty awesome day for me up to that point. I did decuvage (shoveling grape must out of the fermenter) in the morning, which is rough work, but I was no worse for wear, and was proud of myself. It's like being in the garbage smasher on the Death Star, but it's full of really thick mud and you've got to shovel your way out. We prepped two other fermenters to receive Mourvedre Thursday, and Thursday afternoon we bled off the rosé, which I hadn't gotten to see before. The rosé is made using the saigneé method, which means the red grapes go into a tank, they're allowed to sit for a while to extract color. How long depends on the grapes. In this case, the Mourvedre sat on the skins for about 6 hours before being bled into another fermenter.
Also on Wednesday, Cyril came over from Bressades to borrow some wine. He has a cuve of white that had stopped fermenting. There are a few ways to deal with this, and one is to introduce some wine that is still fermenting vigorously. We've done this once here at Carlot already. We had a tank of Syrah that had stopped, so after emptying a cuve of Roussanne that had just finished, the lees were left in the cuve, and the Syrah pumped in. Today, Cyril took about 5hl of Marsanne that was fermenting well to add to his stuck fermenter.

That's all I've got right now, and I have a paella party to get to.

Sulfur stinks.

Last night I found out that I hadn't correctly understood the way we're using gravity flow to empty the finished cuves into cuve 19 (aka The Cuve Under the Stairs). I had thought the cuve being emptied was just opened in the morning, but it's actually opened the night before and allowed to drain all night, that way the must is essentially pressed under it's own weight, and it's relatively dry by morning.

I'm working with 3 other guys here: Nicholas is the one in the middle, he's the foreman essentially, he's in charge when Nathalie's not around, he has a wife and a daughter and they live on the west side of Nimes. He has invited me to dinner sometime this week to meet the family. There is also a Nick, who is on the right here, his family has a tiny 4.5 hectare place in Chateauneuf-du-Pape. And on the left is Jordan, who comes from Burgundy, and whose father has a place in a Burgundian appellation I'd never heard of before. So that's the team.
This morning Nathalie gave the Morroccans a break and had Jordan empty the cuve, and since most cuves take 2 pressings to empty, Nick got the honors in the afternoon. Tomorrow morning is my turn.
Today I also added sulfur to a wine for the first time, which smells a bit like lighting 1000 matches and then sniffing the smoke. After nearly adding way too much because I confused milliliters with centiliters, I got the job done. I thought it important to note exactly how much was used too, considering all the hubbub out there about sulfite allergies and whatnot these days. I used 150ml of an 18% solution in a 35 hectoliter tank, which works out to about 0.000007714258%, or roughly 0.07 parts per million. Later I found out that sulfur is actually added at several different points during the winemaking process, but still, even if they put in ten times as much by the time the wine is done, that still only makes .7ppm.
Anyway, we've got everything cleaned and prepped for tomorrow now, and I've got to go grocery shopping. I'm out of baguette, and it just wouldn't be very French of me not to have baguette in the house. I think I need cheese too, come to think of it. Here's hoping my computer is finished tomorrow!

Bullfight!

I drove to Mouriès today for lunch with Eve and Yves. It's really not that far, only a 40 minute drive, and it's remarkable how different the landscape is. The Baux de Provençe area is in the Alpilles mountains, which aren't really big mountains at all, they're more like granite foothills, but definitely make for very different growing conditions. Eve made a tomato tart for lunch, with pastry crust and cheese and tomato and herbs. I need to try that out when I get home. I picked up the couple of things I had left behind at Luc and Lucienne's house, and some wine to give to Nathalie and Cyril, since Nathalie gave some to Eve the day she dropped me off here.



This weekend was the Green Olive Festival in Mouriès, so I went to the village to check out the party. It's also bullfighting weekend here, and apparently churros are a big thing this time of year or something because every food cart was selling them. There were also street vendors with all sorts of regional products, organic produce, and pretty much anything you can make with olives or olive oil was for sale, proudly marked as having been made with local oil.
There was traditional dancing and costumes, and I don't know if this guy's unibrow was part of the costume or what, but it's nice, right?










There was also bullfighting, and since I knew that they don't kill the bull during the fight around here, I went to check it out. The way it works here is, there are about 15 guys (here at least, I don't know if there are more in bigger arenas.) and their job is to grab 2 strings that are tied, one each at the base of the bull's horns. There are two different jobs it seems; some of the guys are actually trying to grab the strings, others are just trying to get the bull's attention, kind of like rodeo clowns, but no goofy costumes. The arena is all stone and concrete, then about a meter inside the arena there's a fence that goes all the way around the inside, so when the bullfighters are being chased, they run and jump the fence to get away, and of course the closer they come to getting gored in the backside, the more the crowd cheers. They jump really high really fast, and it seems like a really impressive display of agility, but as Cyril pointed out later, having a pair of horns pointed at your ass is pretty good motivation.


It's kind of hard to catch on film, but in the picture here you can see one bullfighter running from the bull, jumping, and almost kicking me in the head, then another comes from the other direction to take a swipe at the ribbon.


Unfortunately even though they don't kill the bull, the thing they use to try and grab the ribbon is metal, it looks a bit like a brush you might use on a horse, and one of the bulls must have caught a scratch above the eye, and as soon as I saw the animal bleeding that sort of spoiled it for me. It was about time to go home anyway. I grabbed some frites at one of the food booths and hit the road.


I got home about 7:30, so when I went to drop off the wine for Cyril and Nathalie I was invited to dinner. We had rabbit, rice, salad, and cheese. It was quite nice. I got to formally meet the children, although they were all on their way to bed. The oldest is Blanche, then comes Eugène, the boy I met last night, then the second daughter, Olympe, all three of whom look like their mother, then the youngest, Achille, who looks just like his father.


Now it's bedtime and I have an upset stomach. Perhaps the unrefrigerated mayonnaise I had with my frites was a bad choice.

Surprise visitor

So, I step out my front door and have one of those creepy horror-movie moments when, in the dim twilight, I see the silhouette of a small blonde boy standing in front of the fountain across from my door, looking at me. It quickly turned from a creepy horror movie moment to a cute French kid moment when I realized it was one of the Marès children (Eugène, I learned later), who was feeding the fish in the fountain. It then changed again, now from a cute French kid moment, to an American who's speaking gibberish moment when, after saying hi, I meant to ask if he was feeding the fish, but got the word wrong and instead asked if he was feeding the peaches. He was confused.
I tasted tank samples with Nathalie and Cyril and the enologist Alain today, which was very interesting. The wines are of course very young, but each tank has a disticnt character already. We tasted the press wine too, which was pretty good. No rough or vegetal character that can often spoil the taste of press wine. They don't decide right away what to do with the press juice, they wait to see how it is, and if it does taste good that's a bonus, especially in such a low-yield vintage.
We finished work early and I went to take my computer to the repair shop in Nimes. The good news is the hard drive is a relatively easy fix, and not too expensive. Bad news is I lose all my pictures since my last backup, which I think was September 9th, so that eats.
It's also bullfighting weekend in this region, and of course the repair shop had to be 2 blocks away from the arena, so I parked the car about a kilometer away and walked. I did want to stay and check out the festivities, but I had left the car on a curb and I wasn't entirely sure it was going to be there when I got back, so I figured best not to dawdle. It was still there. I went to the grocery store again to get everything I've forgotten so far, and to activate my cellphone since I don't have a computer for the next 5 days.
I drew a couple of ideas for a patisserie/sandwich shop with a speakeasy-style bar in the back that I've been tossing around in my head.

I almost die, and my computer skips the 'almost'

Yesterday started out standard; remontage, battonage, delestage, etc. Nathalie invited me to have lunch with her and Cyril, which was lovely. We had omlettes. It seems like eggs aren't so much of a breakfast food around here. On my way back to work I stopped at my room and saw that my computer was frozen, so I restarted it and went back to work. A bit later, it was just Nicholas and I, and he had to take a couple of samples to the office, and after finishing the tidying up I was doing when he left, I had nothing to do, so I went to check the computer, which was now giving me the Blinking Question Mark File Folder of Death, which generally means that either my OS has been corrupted or my hard disk has failed, and either way almost certainly means all of my photos for the last 10 days are lost, because that was the last time I did a backup.
After giving up on the computer, I went back to the winery, but Nicholas still wasn't there. I had nothing to do, but I knew Cuve 19 needed to be emptied because it had just been pumped out, and I was apparently feeling proactive. The problem is, carbon dioxide is heavier than air, and the door to Cuve 19 is the lowest point in the cellar, so it's always a bit of a dodgy place to hang out. There is also a lot of CO2 in the cuve, which comes rushing out as soon as it's opened. So I opened the door and it turned out there was more wine left in the cuve than it had looked like from above, and it came pouring out the door. Having forgotten to bring the remote control for the pump, I ran up the stairs to turn it on, but it didn't pump fast enough and the wine was already overflowing the trough below the door. I ran back down the stairs and directly into a cloud of CO2. My heart already racing, and adrenaline pumping, I found out what it's like to breathe and breathe but take no air. I just managed to get the door shut when stars started popping in front of my eyes and my vision started to blur. I had stopped the flow of wine, and I went for higher ground. It took me a while to recover. Meanwhile, Nicholas had returned, and when I told him what happened he explained that's why you never, ever empty a cuve alone. He pointed out that if I hadn't been able to get above the gas in time, we might not be having this conversation. I passed the rest of the day in less than prime condition. I was very preoccupied about the computer, and still shaken up, and it turns out it really does take quite a bit of my concentration to understand and speak French.

This is what a cuve full of CO2 looks like just before you open the door and it tries to kill you.

After work I told Nathalie about the computer, she let me use one of the office computers, and she called a computer repair place in Nimes for me. They were open until 7, and it wasn't yet 6, but it was in Nimes, which meant I'd have to drive myself, and I'd never driven in France before. It also meant I'd have to talk about computers in French, which isn't exactly a strong department of my French vocabulary. Still, there was nothing to be gained from waiting, so I set off. Driving in France is exactly as disconcerting as riding in a car in France. The roads are too narrow for comfort and you feel you're going too fast because your speedometer says you're doing 80, and you can't do the math in your head fast enough to figure out that's only like 45 or 50mph or something. But even when you think you're going way too fast, you get passed by some dick on a loud motorcycle doing 120.
Nimes isn't that far, and I made it to the computer shop to find they don't support Apple. They gave me the name of the place and directions. It wasn't far, but it was near the center of town, by the bullfighting arena. Ironically, the only part of town I'm at all familiar with. The streets are more confusing and the traffic is worse nearer the center of town, and I got lost. By the time I got my bearings it was near 7, and it was raining. I decided to bag the computer store and try again today. I'm on my way as soon as I finish typing this entry. I turned around and went to the Casino. Casino is the grocery store chain in France. They come in all different sizes, there are little ones in the villages, then there are gigantic, mall-sized ones like this one. It's basically like any large grocery store in the states, but with a way better bakery and cheese selection. But no peanut butter. Also, the beer selection's not great by Northwest standards, but still better than you find most places I've been to. I remembered to buy honey, tea, baguette, beer, pastisse, almond syrup (pastisse and almond syrup is my new favorite coctail, it's called a Mauresque, but I'm not sure I'm spelling that right.) chicken, detergent, socks, shampoo, herbs, pasta, olives with anchove, sausage, and lentils. I forgot olive oil, nail clippers, and something else, I think. Good thing I'm going by there on my way to the computer store.

My ipod works at least, but I wish I'd loaded Rosalie onto it. I'd really like to listen to that song.

Pumpovers, yeast food, tasting juice.

I got to taste juice from several tanks that had just barely started fermenting, it was my first time tasting that many different juice samples all at the same time, and the first time I've been able to detect distinct differences between samples of what's basically still just grape juice. I tasted syrah from two different vineyards, one was much less extracted than the other, so it got additional pumpover time. Nathalie likes to do most of the work early in the fermentation cycle, and once the wine nears the end of primary fermentation she prefers to leave it pretty much alone. I tasted one roussanne and two marsanne tanks. The roussanne was very pretty, rich, and very floral. The marsanne was more reserved, with more minerality and some banana bread character to it.
We're doing longer pumpovers than we were doing at Gourgonnier, both for additional extraction and to help kick off fermentation. We're also doing something else that I keep forgetting the word for, I think it's debranchage, it's essentially a more aggressive version of pumpovers, where nearly all the juice is drained out of the cuve, in this case it's gravity-fed into a concrete cuve below the floor of the winery, then it's pumped back into it's original cuve, which breaks the cap up more than just regular remontage, and gains additional color and extraction from the grapes. We also did the second step in a process called 'pied de cuve' which is an attempt to re-start a cuve that has stopped fermenting. About 5hl of juice is pulled off of the stuck tank, and 5 pulled off of another tank that's fermenting very rigorously, and they're put together in another fermenter overnight, which lets the happy yeast from the good tank start going after the sugar in the stuck tank. Today we pumped the whole 10hl into the stuck tank, and tomorrow we'll find out if the whole process worked.
Most of the harvesting here is done by machine, and I got to have a look at the harvester today, it looks like a monster truck with teeth. I'll try to remember to get a picture tomorrow.

First day at Mas Carlot!

The rainy morning was a perfect for the sad goodbye I bade the Cartier family this morning. Fortunately they're not far away and hopefully I'll have the time to visit them while I'm here at Carlot. We took the long way getting here, stopping in the Camargue region, which is in the delta where the Rhône river splits as it approaches the ocean. It's not more than a half hour drive away, but a pretty different climate, much wetter. Eve's uncle Pierre has a winery there, the wine is vin de pays appelation, so he has a lot of leeway with what varietals he grows, he has some grenache, mourvedre, merlot, a few hybrids, roussanne, etc. He also grows rice. The region is known for honey, rice, horses, bulls, and apparently mosquitoes, as my numerous bites can attest. They're not like Idaho mosquitoes, who are rightly too ashamed of their miserable existence to show their faces in the fully light of day, and only come out in the early morning and evening. These Camargue mosquitoes will eat your face off at high noon if you're not careful. Not far from Pierre's vineyards, there's a wildlife preserve. I can't quite find the right word in English, it's not quite a marsh, but it's not quite a lake. The French word is 'etang', which the dictionary translates as 'pond', but it's much bigger than a pond. Click here to see it on the map.
We drove part of the way around the etang, we saw some of the famous horses and bulls, and flamingos! Yay! I'd never seen flamingos before. After that we went to a grocery store on the outskirts of Arles, and I found out that French people DO have malls! However, their gigantic, Wal-Mart sized grocery stores have a much better cheese selection, and you can buy a whole rabbit, head on and everything!
So, we arrived at Mas Carlot about 2:30 in the afternoon, I got my stuff settled. I'm staying in a little apartment with my own kitchen and everything, so the downside is I won't have dinner with the family every night like at Gourgonnier, but I can cook all my own food, and I can eat in my underwear!
I'm already very excited about all the new things I'm going to learn here. Mas Carlot has about 75 hectares of vines, compared to the 44 at Gourgonnier, so the operation is much larger, and the winery is proportionately bigger. They've got some fancy high-tech gadgets that I'll describe as I begin to see them in use. They've also got concrete fermenters, which is pretty traditional in this area, so that's something new and fun too. They have stainless fermenters too, as well as a lot more barrels than they use at Gourgonnier. Today I did some battonage, which involves a metal rod with sort of a half-propeller on the end, which is inserted into a full barrel, and used to stir up the lees. This is done to add body to white wines. It's pretty much the exact opposite of what's done with the white at Gourgonnier, which is taken off its lees pretty early, to preserve the very clean, crisp character. Battonage makes a white richer and rounder, and is most often done with chardonnay, although I completely forgot to ask what varietal I was batton-ing this afternoon.

Ok, that's it for this exciting installment. Stay tuned for more, now I'm gonna go make myself some chicken for dinner!

Last day at Gourgonnier

Last day of work at Gourgonnier. Plan was to leave after work today to go to Mas Carlot, but it’s 6pm and we just finished pressing the Sans Soufre Cuvee, so it made more sense to stay here tonight and do some laundry and head over there tomorrow. At this point all but the one small fermenter of vin de pays has been removed from it’s skins and pressed. Malolactic fermentation has begun for most of the reds, and finished for a few. I don’t know if I mentioned, but I am tremendously grateful to the Cartier family for giving me the opportunity to learn from them, and I will not soon forget my time here. I am looking forward to whatever tomorrow has in store for me.

Labeling day!

Woohoo, something new! So, since Gourgonnier sells their wine to several importers in the US, and since the wines going to each importer needs to bear a back label saying who it was imported by, the wines here are not labeled when they're bottled. They go into bottle and are stored in bins like this.








So when an order comes in, the machine gets all set up with labels. The label depends of course on which wine, but also on which importer. Today we did orders for Diyonysos Imorts in VA and for Michael Skurnik Wines in NY. Both orders were 2007 Rouge Tradition, but Dionysos likes the new labels, and Skurnik likes the old labels, so we did the first order (3,000 bottles labeled, boxed, and palletized in 2 hours) then we switched labels and did the other. Since we weren't bottling today I didn't get to see the whole machine in operation, but basically the way the whole thing works is, the wine is fed via hose to the bottling machine, which of course has bottles in it. There bottles are filled then fed to the corking station by conveyor belt, then via the same conveyor belt it gets a cap, there are two units that tighten the cap on the neck of the bottle, then it's transferred to a spinning platform where it gets the front label, then the back, then back onto the conveyor belt and out of the machine, where it's packed by hand. The full case then gets stuck through a unit that tapes it top and bottom, and the finished box gets a sticker bearing the name of the importer, and it goes on the pallet. And that's pretty much my whole day right there.

Oh, and for lunch we had cured ham. Yay!

Now that was a long day.

So, first thing yesterday I went to an old abbey with Eve and Luc. It's now a historical site where they also have art shows, so there was a photo expo inside too. A big chunk of the abbey has been destroyed, I don't know if by time or by war or by what, but most of it is still standing, including the tower, which is 26 meters high, and it's 126 steps to the top. I counted.
So, after the abbey and lunch, Eve and Yves and I loaded up the car and drove north for a birthday party for two friends of Eve's in the Ardeche region. On our way we passed a place called le Monde du Nougat (Nougat World). Apparently the Ardeche region used to make a lot of silk, and Eve's hippie friends live in an old silk factory. The birthday party had everything you could want, there was music and mutton and sumo wrestling and everything.










Oh, also, alcohol and marijuana. The beer on tap was Kwak, which is a Belgian beer that's 8% alcohol, and may explain partly why I'm having a bit of a hard time remembering the concentrating, remembering and spelling. Also, at some point during the evening somebody was walking around with a water bottle full of some unidentified cloudy booze, insisting that everybody try it. It tasted like kerosene filtered through a dirty gym sock, then flavored with artificial kiwi.










When we arrived at the party, just outside of a tiny, tiny village, there were 3 sheep in a pen just at the entrance to the designated parking area, which was designated by a couple of bright hand-painted signs on cardboard. We parked the car and were greeted by the birthday girl, Maude. The party was inside a little stone-walled courtyard. There were inflatable sumo suits and a sparring ring, a big canopy erected with counters underneath made out of pallets and two-by-six covered in fabric. At the far end there was a long table that was just starting to be loaded with food, and a long barbecue being lit. Yves and I chatted while Eve disappeared with Maude. It turns out Idiocracy is one of Yves' favorite movies. After a little while I took part in the sumo wrestling.









A large container of mutton appeared and the pieces were put on the barbecue. For a second I thought maybe I should go count the sheep again, but it was dark.









I met a friend of Eve's who's a winemaker in this area, and learned that Grenache, Syrah, Gamay, Viognier. It's not a very well known region in France, but he said the wine quality has improved dramatically over the past 10 years. He also told me that there's an American grape that goes by the name of Clinton here that ended up here when vines were brought over for root stock grafting, and he says some of the best wines from the area are from this grape. It was after my conversation with him that things started to get weird. The reggae band was replaced by a rap band. Apparently French hippies love American rap music. I couldn't understand the frontman well enough to tell if he was any good, but Yves said he wasn't great. It did sound like he was rhyming Ardeche with Ardeche an awful lot. Eventually they started just playing songs off of a cd, and the frontman was still on stage with a mic bouncing his hands in the air (like he just didn't care) and singing along when he could, which wasn't that often because it was American rap and he didn't seem to know many of the words.
Then Jerome, the winemaker I'd been talking to, suddenly had his shirt torn off for reasons I was never able to ascertain. Then the first award for Drunkest Guy at the Party went to a stumbling guy long black hair in a ponytail, who went onto the stage, then promptly dismounted, nearly taking a lighting tree with him. I pointed out to Yves that Ponytail was performing a valuable public service by being so drunk, thus letting me know that I'm not the drunkest one at the party, and I can keep drinking. The second award went to a guy who, earlier in the night, claimed I wasn't an American because I didn't know that Nirvana was why Seattle is famous. At least I think that was his line of reasoning. He won the award when, too drunk to stand, he sat on a barrel that was being used as a beer cooler, toppled it over, soaking himself and several people around him.
This morning when I woke up the first person I spoke to was Ponytail, who was trying to locate his pants, and who told me it was a good thing his girlfriend wasn't there because she'd freak out about him losing his pants. At least I think that's what he said, he was talking kind of fast, I don't think he realized I wasn't a native French speaker, since all I said was 'bonjour'.
After a breakfast of baguette, more mutton, jam and coffee, we broke down the tents and headed out. I didn't see the sheep in their pen when we drove by.

Tasting wine and learning new words.

So, Henri the enologist was here today, so we tasted all the wines, which works out perfectly since one eager reader recently asked me what the wines taste like at this point. So, thanks for the excellent question EagerReader1119. With the heat in this area, the wines can go through malolactic fermentation pretty quickly, so the white and the rose have to have sulfur added pretty early to stop malo and retain the freshness of the wine. At this point we have one cuve of Grenache that has finished malo, the sans soufre cuvee is still fermenting, the Carignane has finished fermentation but is still on it's must and hasn't started malo yet. The cabernet has all been pressed and racked and should start malo soon. So, the white and the rose taste pretty finished, although they still have to settle and clarify, and there's still more co2 than there will be in the finished wine. The reds are funny at this point. The Sans Soufre which isn't finished yet still tastes sweet, but it's developing more power and depth, the wines that are finished with primary fermentation but haven't yet started malolactic have definite varietal identity, but are still very lean. The Grenache is great, supple and fruity, concentrated. Awesome. Gourgonnier had a small harvest, and Henri says that everybody else he works with has had the same issue. The harvest is small, but there is good concentration and acidity in the wines.

So, for a little while there, I was thinking that Fred was a little annoyed by me. Fred is Eve's uncle, and does most of the day-to-day winemaking stuff in the winery. Now I'm just thinking he takes a little longer to warm up to new people, because he's been very pleasant and chatty with me, and taking the time to explain what's going on in the winemaking process, even when it takes an extra minute when I don't understand. Fred's a funny guy, he's a slight-built man, not more than 5'6", with glasses and less hair than he must have had when he was younger. His stature makes for a funny sight sometimes when he's moving around some of the larger winery equipment. He looks like a kid who's trying to reach something on a shelf that's just a little too high. He's got that look of confidence like he knows he can do it, with his tongue stuck out to the side in concentration. With the help of Fred, Arnaud, and Eve I learned some new words today too. Ecuruil is a squirrel, which isn't a particularly important word, but apparently they are fairly rare in this area, because Fred and Eve were both excited to see one. I also learned a new phrase, which translates to 'to put flies up your ass' which basically means to be anal retentive. I also learned another saying, which translates to "when the river runs red, it's time to take the muddy road." I will let you interpret that as you wish.

That's about it for me today, I gotta get a shower before dinner.

I gotta start taking notes in the middle of the day or something

By the end of the day I'm having a hard time remembering everything I did today and keeping it separate, especially with the midday nap that people take around here. I didn't sleep very well last night, I kept waking up. Yesterday we discovered there was an air leak in the press, so today we had to do our best with a less-than-perfect press, and finally we had to stop half way though emptying one cuve and wait for the repair guy, who arrived at 5:30, and is just leaving now at 7:00, apparently he patched it up, and we'll see how it works tomorrow. Looking at the repair job, it looks like the kind of repair job that could have been tackled with duct tape. We've got 4 cuves left to be pressed; the sans soufre cuvee, the carignane, and 2 cuves of vin de table. It's a complicated ballet moving the wine around in a winery this size. It's not like they've just got a whole row of empty containers lined up for after the wine is pressed. Fred has a whole map drawn out in dry erase marker on the side of one of the fermenters of where everything is coming from and where it's going. The fermenters are labeled numerically, and by volume. For example, there are 5 210 hectolitre containers labeled 1-210 through 5-210. Not all of them go in proper order either, for example there are only 10 158HL containers currently in use, but they're numbers 8-158 through 17-158. So, for example, 2-210 and 3-210 both contained grenache. All the free-run juice from 2-210 that would fit went into 7-158. The rest went into another temporary holding tank. The must was pressed, the first press went into the holding tank with the free run, the second press went into another holding tank just for press juice. The cuve was cleaned, then the free run and first press from 3-210 went into 2-210, then the second press from 3-210 went into the same holding tank with the press from 2-210, and finally the free run that had started in 2-210 and was now waiting in 7-158 was pumped back into 2-210, so now we have one large cuve of just grenache juice, and the press juice waiting in a holding tank. This process takes about 3 days. From the time sitting in 7-158, some of the lees settled to the bottom of the Grenache, so that had to be scraped out of the container so that the rosé could be racked off of it's lees, and the 3 less-than-full fermenters of varietally segregated rose could be mixed together into 2, now residing in 6-158 and 7-158. This whole process involved cleaning lees out of several containers, which is essentially like scraping two inches of mustard out of a shipping container.

After work Eve proposed we all go to town for pizza, and I love me some pizza. We stopped at hers and Yves' apartment on the way, the two of them have a massive flat-screen tv, and Yves loves Midnight Club on xbox360, which I'd never played before. Not that I needed another reason to really, really want a giant tv and an xbox360, but now I have yet another.

Upon arriving at the pizzeria and ordering a beer, I remembered that I love beer. I mean, I love wine too, but there's an expression I've heard from more than one American winemaker, "Its takes a lot of beer to make good wine." And that's an attitude that doesn't seem prevalent in this area at least, where everybody seems to be content drinking rosé for every meal. Not that I'm complaining about the rosé by any means.

After dinner it occurred to me that I really should not eat pizza. I absolutely adore it, but as a result I always eat too much, and large amounts of dairy products don't get along that well with my digestion anyway. However, after further examination I found that I had just a small fraction of the reaction that I would typically expect from that kind of cheese binge, and I began to think that perhaps this whole pasteurization mess that all of our American cheeses have to go through is perhaps a pile of horsehockey.

Ok, that's it for now. Until tomorrow, eager readers!

I did pumpovers all by myself!

Eve and Luc went to an organic farming expo, so it was just me and Fred and Arnaud in the winery today, and I was in charge of making sure the pumpovers got done, and taking the measurements on the still-fermenting wine. Not that it's all that complicated, but I still did it all by myself. It seems that a small rip has developed in the press that's preventing it from pressing as hard as it should be able to, so there's some uncertainty as to whether or not we're going to be able to de-cuve the last fermenter of Cabernet tomorrow or not. There's also speculation as to whether I will be the one doing the de-cuve-ing. Obviously I'm here to learn, and to do any work I'm asked to do, however climbing inside a fermenter and shoveling out grape must isn't necessarily something I'm all about. It's kind of like the trash compactor on the Death Star in there. Today I also learned exactly why it's vital to push most of the must through the big hose after emptying each fermenter by running water through it, because if you leave the hose full of grape must in the sun, the must will dry out and create plugs, and you'll fry your pump trying to push them through. Oh, and also, the US should totally start having nap time in the middle of the work day. And a 9a.m. rosé and baguette break.

My hands are purple.

So, we did a little pressing yesterday, but I wasn't that involved in the process. Today I got to hold the giant hose, which is not a sexual thing at all, so clean your minds. Yeah, like I'm one to talk, today at one point, while I was handling the big hose, Eve asked me in French if it was getting hard yet (meaning the handling of the hose, because it's pretty goddamn heavy when it's full of grape must) and it was really only the fact that I was pretty sure the joke wouldn't translate that kept me from saying 'that's what she said'.
Anyway, the way it works is, there's a big metal box with an auger in the bottom. The juice is drained from the cuve, then the door at the bottom is opened and you start pulling all the must out with a pitchfork. At the beginning, the tank is full up above the door, but eventually you get enough stuff out that a person can get in through the door (not me fortunately), then somebody goes inside and keeps shoveling. Meanwhile, the metal thing with the auger in the bottom is catching all the must and pushing it through a big pipe, about 4 inches in diameter, which leads to the press. I'm quite certain that the word 'muck' was invented to describe something just like grape must. It's slimy and messy and it gets everywhere, especially when it's coming out of the big hose at unpredictable intervals. What happens is, air pockets form in the pipe, so you'll get big sections of must, then when the air comes it forces the last of the must out like an air gun, so it explodes all over. Also, there's just enough room in the press for all the must in the fermenter, so when the press starts to get full you have to start shoving the must all around to make as much room as possible, which is why my hands are purple.
So, most of the Grenache is pressed, the Syrah is almost entirely de-cuved and pressed, and the Cabernet will be done tomorrow or Thursday. The Sans Soufre Cuvee is still fermenting, as is one fermenter of Grenache, and the vin de table. That's about it, and I need a shower before dinner.

Last day of harvest.

So, after the art show Saturday night I went to Eve’s apartment for dinner with her and her boyfriend. I had my first beer in a week and it was delicious, despite being a Heineken. I tried my first pastisse, which was not bad, basically like milky licorice with alcohol. Eve’s boyfriend Eve loves xbox360 and guitars. They both love Battlestar Galactica and True Blood, among other things. My less than perfect French came in handy, because they haven’t seen the last season of BSG yet, and I’m sure I would have blurted out something if I was capable of blurting in French. Is blurting a word? That doesn’t look right. Anyway, I had a lovely time. There wasn’t too much work to be done Sunday, just the pumpovers, then we went into the village. I didn’t understand how exactly the system worked, but basically it was all of the clubs and groups and activities that are in Mouriés, like tai chi and painting and fencing and astronomy, and they all take sign-up. I don’t know if you sign up for a whole year or what. It was basically like club sign-up in school, but not just for kids. We had a picnic in the park, and I had a lengthy discussion about wine, a subject about which I seem to be quite good at speaking in French. Not everybody here is aware that Americans even make wine anywhere other than California.

I had been instructed a few days earlier that keeping the fridge flush with cold rosé, and that Lucienne and Luc had friends coming to dinner Sunday night, and that more rosé than usual would be advisable, so when we returned from the picnic I made sure the fridge was stocked. The friends, Joél and Florénce arrived just in time for dinner. I tried andouilette for the first time. Bobby warned me ahead of time about andouilette. He tried it on his trip last year without knowing what it was. He was unpleasantly surprised. Andouilette is a sausage, and like most sausages it has a lot of assorted things in it. It’s the distinctive odor that makes andouilette, unique. And it’s the fact that it’s supposed to smell like that which makes me wonder why anybody would ever eat it. My co-worker Arnaud put it quite succinctly; he said “Good andouilette is like politics. It should smell a little like shit, but not too much.”

Today we did more rémontage, plus some pressing. As most wineries do, here at Gourgonnier they keep the press juice separate from the free-run juice. The press juice can be more rough and harsh than the free run juice, so everybody deals with it differently. Here it will be kept in a separate vessel until assemblage, at which time they will decide whether the incorporate it into any of the blends, or just put it in the vin de table.

We picked the last of the grapes today too, which means that much less work for me to do around here, so hopefully the grape maturity is a ways behind at Mas Carlot.

AWESOME art show.

So, I misunderstood Eve a little yesterday, it wasn't a quarry that became a cathedral, it was a quarry that's now called the Cathedral of images, so it's this amazing, huge cut stone space where stone was quarried for buildings all around this area, so now there's this gigantic room, probably 10 meters high, cut into the mountain itself. And they weren't showing Picasso's paintings just by themselves, it was like this moving retrospective through Picasso's career, moving through his work, set to music. I don't think the pictures will do it justice entirely, but they're here.

Ok, we just finished remontage and we're going to visit the village now.

Windy Saturday

You may already know this, but in case you don't here in the Rhône there's a wind called the mistral, which blows down from the north. It blows at all times of the year, it can be warm or cold, and it's generally pretty strong. Today's the first day we've had it since I've been here, so it's very windy outside. Not knocking-trees-over windy, but definitely no-eating-outside windy. The other major effect of the mistral is that it blows all the clouds out to the ocean, so it makes for a stunningly clear day. I took a walk in the hills after lunch and took some pictures. Hopefully this gives a bit of an idea just how bloody windy it can get.





Luc and Lucienne took me to eat at a restaurant in Mouriés last night, a beautiful place that unfortunately wasn't that busy. If I understood correctly it was formerly a farmhouse, there was a large open patio in the front for seating, and a lounge and a few smaller rooms inside for private parties. The lounge/great room was formerly the garage for the larger farm equipment. We all had the same tasting menu, it was all in French so I wasn't entirely sure what I'd be getting, but the words I did recognize sounded fine, and Luc and Lucienne seemed to have great confidence in the chef. Unfortunately I didn't notice that the first course was melon-based, so it wasn't exactly my favorite thing. There was a diced mixture of fennel, melon, and celery root with olive oil, and a little drink of a melon puree. The main course was quite good, grilled beef, mashed potatoes that were mixed with a lime confit that was awesome, and which I totally want to try making when I get home, and crayfish. Dessert was tiramisu, but a more liquid version than I'm used to. It was served in a glass, rather than like a cake, the top layer was a chantilly cream aromatized with rosemary, which was awesome. The rosemary scent was very subtle, but gave a regional authenticity, what with all the rosemary that grows wild around here. Below the cream were peaches, a kind of custard, and a cookie on the bottom. All in all an excellent meal, and very kind of Luc and Lucienne to take me, despite the fact that I'm running low on clothing and must have looked an ass going out to eat in a Simpsons t-shirt.
Oh, also at dinner I found out that pineapple tomatillos (in French, physalliz) are common around here. The restaurant was serving them as a garnish on one of their cocktails.









Today is a lazy day for work, there is no more grape-picking until monday. I got to sleep late, eat breakfast, and just did the rémontage with Éve, which only took about an hour and a half.











Later this afternoon she's taking me to someplace which, if I understand correctly, is an old quarry that became a cathedral, and is now used to show artwork, and they're
showing Picasso paintings, so that should be super-cool.

Last night I also learned an interesting fact about the olive trees in this area. When I first arrived I noticed that a lot of the olive trees seemed to be planted in this funny circular formation, with anywhere from 3 to 6 trees to a group, like you can see here.
Apparently it's not what it looks like. There was a major freeze here in 1956, and almost all of the olive trees, most of which were very old already at the time, froze all the way to the ground. However, they didn't die. That spring they began sending shoots up from the ground, and since the root systems were already established, the farmers figured just let 'em grow, so now the olive groves all look like this, with what look like little clusters of trees, but in fact each cluster is one tree, most of which are at least a hundred years old.

Another day of grape picking, and forgetting sunscreen, but at least I brought my hat today. Picked Grenache from 7 until 2:30, now I’m sitting by the pool. Not much new to report for today. I did determine that sneakers are much more comfortable for picking grapes than boots, although new sneakers will not look so new at the end of the day. Nearly all of the grapes are picked now, there is just one small block left I’m told. It must be a much warmer pocket here than at Mas Carlot; my email from Nathalie a few days ago informed me that they’ve just started bringing in the Viognier, and the rest of the grapes are still on the vine. I did successfully carry on what I hope was a fairly coherent conversation with Eve’s father Luc, and mother Lucienne, and her sister Laure last night at dinner without Eve’s translation assistance. I still need them to speak fairly slowly, it sometimes takes me a minute to find the word I’m looking for, and I’m sure I’m mis-conjugating my verbs half the time, but I think I’m communicating reasonably well. I’m guessing Bobby must have had a rough time while he was here, speaking as little French as he does. I’m also finding it hard to keep English, French, and Spanish separate in my head; I keep talking to Frankie in French, and even as I’m typing this I keep misspelling English words. I think that’s about it, here are some photos from the last few days.

Grape-picking day!

After writing in my journal, I read bit, and finally fell back asleep sometime after 3.
At 6:10a.m. I woke and hit the snooze button.
At 6:20a.m. I woke and turned the alarm off.
At 7:15 a.m. I woke, cursed, and dressed as fast as possible. I shoved 2 Clif bars in my pants pockets and ran out the door. I found Eve in the garden and she drove me to the vineyard, I ate one Clif bar on the back of the ATV on the way out. Thanks to Dad and Bobby for telling me to take them with me. Tip of the day is, Clif bars are awesome. Yesterday's omitted tip of the day, Sweet n Salty Nut bars, while delicious, do not survive well in your pocket after a full day's work.
I also learned last night that most of the men working on the picking crew are Moroccan, and are Muslim, and this month is Ramadan. That means these guys are getting up at 4 a.m., eating and drinking all they can, then working all day picking grapes in the sun when it's 32 degrees centigrade (I don't know exactly what that is in farenheit, about 90 I'd guess. I suppose I could look it up, but clearly I'm not going to.) This really did make me feel like a candy-ass when my back started hurting half-way through the day. From my time picking I learned that Syrah grows in longer bunches than Grenache, and that the Syrah clusters have pretty distinct shoulders, while the Grenache has more of a conjoined twin kind of thing. I learned that goblet pruning makes for prettier, more consistent clusters which are more backbreaking to harvest. I learned that not all Muslims know George W Bush well enough to hate him. And finally I learned that, when instructed to watch your fingers when handling grape clippers, you should also watch your hands. I nipped the heel of my left hand, but not that badly. But now that I've sustained injury the adventure has truly begun! I don't know if "It's not really an adventure until you hurt yourself." Is something I've actually heard Jen Adams say, but it was her voice in my head when I thought exactly that after cutting myself.
I count myself blessed that this work is not my full time job, although I do have to do it again tomorrow. Fortunately the Cartiers have a pool, where I spent about 3 hours lounging away the day's lower back pain. Tomorrow I will take aspirin before work. And I'll wear a hat. And sunscreen.
Eve won't be here for dinner tonight, which means I've got to make conversation in French without any translation assistance. Fingers crossed!

It's dark outside.

Merde.
I woke up in the dark, which is a bad sign when you're still dealing with jet-lag, because it typically means you've woken up way too early, and are going to have a hard time getting back to sleep. In this case, it means that I have woken up too early, and I'm going to have a hard time getting back to sleep.
I woke from more fitful dreaming. Perhaps I'm having too much cheese before bed. I can't remember the context of the dream, just the feeling of having been dealt an injustice. Of having been given something I deserved, that I had earned, and at the same time having it taken away.
The clock read 1:23 a.m. when I woke up. I need to get back to sleep, I'm supposed to go pick grapes at 7a.m.. I sat in the dark for a while, listening to the moth that's trapped in my room flying into the wall over and over again. Moths are morons. I found out last night that the French word for Moth translates to 'butterfly of the night,' and I wondered if I'd like them anymore if I thought of them as butterflies. I don't think so.
I tried to count sheep, but the sheep turned into some kind of muddy water or oil coming out of a fountain and forming numbers in the sky and in my mind they were getting my feet all wet and dirty, plus I couldn't settle on which language to count in, so I stopped.
Then I started entertaining myself with fantasies that I'd actually publish this whole adventure, and the book would be wildly successful and I'd do a book tour and insist that my publisher get me on the Jon Stewart show. It was at that point that I decided I was brilliant, and got up to start writing.

When I turned the light on I found out that the moth was actually a grasshopper. There are some big-ass gnarly grasshoppers here. Like, the kind that don't just fly away when you get close to them. They sit in the grapevines, and when you reach in to pick the grapes they look at you like 'we don't take kindly to your type around here...'

First day of work

I set my alarm for 6 am, woke up at 9. Ironically I was having very fitful dreams about being late for work. Eve's family is very nice. We ate dinner at her uncle's house with some friends of theirs who apparently summer in a caravan on the Cartiers' property. I don't remember their names, but they had a little girl named Caroline and a yorkshire terrier that looked like a bigger version of Chiqi and Maddie. It was their last night in town. We had pasta with fresh tomatoes and merguez sausage and rosé. When the cheese course came, Eve's aunt was concerned that the cheeses might be too strong for me. She clearly didn't know who she was dealing with.

The place where I'm staying is a less-used part of the house. The whole chateau is connected, but divided into sections, so I'm between Eve's parents' house and the winery. I'm just thinking how much some in the states would pay to make their houses look like this, and here's this place just sitting here barely used.


















As I'm writing this I'm sitting outside under a canopy of grapevines eating toast and homemade quince (fr. coing) jam and drinking tea out of a bowl. Go ahead, tell me you're not jealous. Last night I tried a fruit wine made from néfle, which is a tree fruit that's apparently native to this part of the world, and also grows in Japan. We looked it up on Wikipedia to see if it grew in the US, but the Wikipedia page was in French, so I didn't understand it that well. Eve's uncle Fred has the Japanese variety. Eve's aunt's name is Blanchine and her cousin's name is Olivier.

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We had salad, tomatoes, peppers, eggs, bread and cheese for lunch.
Today we did pump-overs, topped off some barrels, and married together some wine from last vintage with new juice for the vin de table. I got an email back from Nathalie, she tells me I'm going to have to practice my French before I get there. Good thing Eve is the only one here who speaks English.

I did my p90x chest and back workout, made it almost all the way through before my shoulder started to hurt. Eve's mom made Tian, which is a provençal dish with onions, potato, eggplant, zucchini, tomato, and pretty much everything else from the garden, it was awesome. We also had a toast spread called Melet Provençal, which is a puree of fennel seed, anchovy, and pepper, which was pretty awesome, and I'm definitely going to try and make it when I get home. Eve's dad made pork chops.

During dinner I explained why we call the funny bone the funny bone, and found out that the french nickname for the humerus translates to 'the little jew'. I was not able to obtain any explanation for this.