The fair fruits of labour
Oct 9 2009 by Helen Savage, The Journal
HARVESTING machines are great, although my old friend Joan Bunting (former BBC Masterchef and Journal columnist) doesn’t agree.
The last time I phoned her at her home in Provence she complained that mechanical harvesters were working in the nearby vineyards at three o’clock in the morning.
She said she hadn’t had a decent night’s sleep for days. They work at night to enable the fruit to get to the winery as cool and fresh as possible; but kick up a fearful racket as they slap the vines to dislodge the ripe grapes.
Hand picking is expensive, time consuming and can only be done in daylight. A good way of cutting costs is to invite all your friends and a hefty contingent of foreign wine writers and merchants and get them to pick for nothing.
And so I found myself on the last Saturday in September slaving under a blazing Languedoc sun picking super-ripe Merlot grapes for Gérard Bertrand, French rugby star turned wine magnate, at his family estate near Narbonne.
Each armed with a pair of horribly sharp secateurs and a bucket and protected by identical, capacious white tee-shirts and blue baseball caps, we set to work off the effects of the huge barbecue lunch we’d just enjoyed on Gérard’s front lawn.
After two hours we were splattered with juice, dusty, horribly sticky and desperate for cold beer. Fortunately we all began and ended with a full set of fingers. The usual method of picking is to work down a row in pairs, one harvester on each side of the vines.
The berries are small and tightly packed on long dangly bunches and are gorged with sugar. The finished wine from our plot will make between 14 and 15% alcohol.
Most sweet table grapes on sale here would make a wine barely half that strength. Some of the berries had raisined in the sun and tasted like concentrated bramble jelly – but with a huge nutty pip in the middle.
Similarly ripe Syrah grapes I tasted on another plot were like black cherry jam. Although most of the bunches had ripened evenly I found occasional clusters of hard, still green grapes. They didn’t make it into my bucket. I was also told to cut off the few berries that were rotten.
The buckets soon filled. A team of bearers armed with bright orange hods strapped to their backs shuttled to and from the pickers and a trailer waiting at the edge of the vineyard.
Oz Clarke, wise to the perils of grape picking, hung back a little at the distribution of secateurs and found himself landed with this even more arduous task, which he knuckled down to with good humour: I found a full bucket hard to lift, each hod must have the capacity of around a dozen buckets. And the temperature was, we were told, 34ºC.
The biggest problem for the picker when faced with a row of low-trained vines is to decide whether to stand, squat or kneel. I tried all three.
Standing is backbreaking – and tricky because the best way to ensure that you don’t snip your fingers is to support each bunch of grapes from below with your other hand. To squat for any length of time demands that you have thighs like a Cossack dancer. I don’t. So I sank on to my knees, which felt like jelly for days afterwards. Kneeling didn’t do a lot for my jeans either.
