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La taille de la vigne
This year has given me a hard and intense introduction to life in the vineyards.
Until now I had no idea how rigorous and difficult life was making wine. Labour is constant, dure, all-weather work ( they only stop if there’s a heavy thunder storm, snow or the temp drops to –10°) and I applaude all vignerons for their dedication and sheer hard work.
Earlier work in the vines this year made me realise that the key to understanding wine production lies in the control of vine growth. How the vine grows and therefore how much fruit is produced etc lies in the way they are pruned. Obvious, I suppose. But then to me, like cooking, it was all something of a romantic French mystery!
Low on income and in need of work I read in the local paper that there was a training course run by the local council employment agency to encourage the unemployed to train in various aspects of wine production. Specifically, a two week course in ‘La taille de la vigne’ – vine pruning. I signed up.
Mid November, from 8:30 to 12:30 and 14: to 17: 00, four days a week for two weeks we went as a group of some twenty-eight hopefuls to various vignerons’ estates with a couple of dozen retired vignerons, ‘les benevols’, all charming, passionate men entirely at home with their expertise who were our mentors teachings us the principles. A great priviledge indeed, especially for a foreigner like me. An added bonus was the apero offered to us all in the cave after work. A glass or so of excellent Coteaux and a bottle or two to take home. Grateful for our voluntary efforts mutilating one of their less important parcels of old vines.
Having passed the test I received my certificate and was eligble for work.
A week later I was offered work in a vignoble just down the road near Thouarcé at a domain in Faveraye.
Turning up for my first day just as it was getting light and the temperature was 0° I wasn’t entirely sure if this was what the rest of my life should be about but I was game for the experience…despite already suffering RSI from using hand secateurs during my training. And it was cold. I had been waking in the early hours with extreme pain in the hand and wrist aleviated only by getting out of bed and exercising like Bruce Willis and consuming anti-immflamatory drugs and paracetamol by the blister pack could I manage to continue the dream. It lasted ten days.
Eight days of fog at -4°, non-stop pruning from daylight to dusk , less lunch which required an hour of intensive care and a certain amount of heavy ‘dutch courage’ to return for the afternoon shift. I always returned to work.
I was one of a team of five on an estate of some forty-five hectares (about 112 acres). Each of the others, much younger than me, had spent their lives in the vines, all-fit, all-knowing, French don’t forget, quick and expert.
We were using pneumatic secateurs an each of them was connected by an air hose that ran up to 250m from a reel on the compressor fixed to the tractor parked at the end of the rows of vines.
Very powerful and immediate are these secateurs because before I had realised what had happened a long hissing snake was writhing all around me. I’d cut throught my compressed air line. Sammie my young mentor quickly came to the rescue and re-connected me to the devilish tool and I continued my snip-snipping knowing smugly I’d never do that again and anyway it was my first day and you always learn from your mistakes.
Ten minutes later I cut through the main supporting wire running along the row of posts. I definitely didn’t cut anything after that apart from vine shoots.
I spent the first working hour for several days pruning beneath an enormous pylon that hummed and buzzed and sometimes sparked reminding me of the Thurber drawing where an old lady is looking up at the central light fitting without its bulb and seeing pulsing zig zags of electricity coming from it into the room.
I don’t wear a watch and have learnt over the years to kind of feel what the time is and am generally quite accurate, yet one morning I was so deep in concentration I’d completely lost track. I became aware of a church bell chiming the hour but I hadn’t counted from the beginning so I had to wait for the second chiming, which is what French church clocks do: chime the hour twice.
It was evidently later then ten because just as I counted the eleventh chime and started thinking of lunch I involuntarily threw myself to the ground shouting ‘bastard’, shocked and shaking as a fast low flying military jet screamed overhead coming as if from nowhere and disappeared into the distance with what I thought was a deliberately triumphant wing roll.
Each day I started bravely determined to keep up with Sammie but alas I was old and too slow and just couldn’t. We were also a team and so when everyone else had finished their ‘ronde’ and I was still only half-way along mine the others were always having to come back and help me before they could go on.
After three or four days the patron, charming and polite explained that although my pruning was exemplary, I was too slow and I was holding back the team. I was given a couple of day’s grace to try and speed up. I went home a little crestfallen but full of resolve that I could improve over the next couple of days despite the continuing RSI.
Arriving next morning as usual in the cold, damp dark anticipating a day of rapid improvement in speedy pruning I was told we were going to do something else.
Old vines that are no longer productive are taken out and later a different crop is sown.
The day before, anxious that the dry weather would change to rain, a three hectare parcel of land with old vines had been grubbed out by machine, tearing at the roots leaving them free to be pulled out by hand.
Stumbling over newly ‘ploughed’ soft, uneven terrain we had to pull the remaining vine stocks out of the ground and throw them up into a trailer.
Led by an over-zealous foreman we rushed and fell about tugging and heaving and throwing hefty old vine stocks up and onto an ever increasingly higher pile in the trailer. This was truly madness. Ideal old-fashioned circuit training methodology for the young and fit but not quite what I needed at that moment.
This went on for two more days until I finally threw in the towel. An amical parting and the prospect of pay – 59 hours at minimum wage payable a month later after deductions. I was tired and it was two weeks before Christmas.
A day later the sun was setting behind me, clear, bright and cold as I turned left onto the road for Tigné on my way to Bruno’s to buy some wine.
Our wine stocks were low and some degree of comfort and reward were needed. It was five fourty five pm and dark.
Within minutes as the road took me higher I suddenly saw the moon just emerging above the horizon – a deep red half-crescent in a dark blue-black sky.
Within eight minutes as I arrived in Tigné it had become a golden ball high and mighty, cold and mesmerising. Then I arrived at Bruno’s and as always, he was welcoming and full of the weather….humide, sec, pas beaucoup d’eaux… etc.
We talked at length about the year’s wine, how it compared with 2003, would it be special etc. Everything pointed to it being a good not exceptional year apart from the Coteaux du Layon which had suffered because of late rain and bad weather. Good reds, reasonable but bland whites and rosés.
OK but ‘curious’. A term Bruno often seems to use for the wines of 2002 & 2003.
Also ‘suple’, ‘pas beaucoup de fruit’, ‘ils manques l’acidité’, ‘reasonable’, ‘assez correct’, ‘buvable’.
He always seems to able to produce very drinkable wines whatever the weather.
And he always pruned his vines himself, each and every one.
Hugh Stephens
28 December 2004
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