Le Sud de France 6.5: Le Vendage et le Primeur Vin

The grape harvest and the presentation of the “first” wine.

It has been a year since we arrived in France with our jam-packed suitcases and drugged out wild cat, and we managed to celebrate this anniversary with our whole community. We live in a “vigneron” village where most residents either own a vineyard or work on one. The vines are the main source of income and the very existence of Tourbes depends on them.

At the beginning of October, the vendage, the harvest, began and the roads and vineyards were filled with huge harvesters. Unlike the movie version of a wine harvest, with happy peasants taking days to pick the grapes, these monsters harvest a vineyard in a few hours. The harvested grapes are loaded onto trucks that deliver the tons of fresh grapes to the wineries co-ops where they will be pressed.  

However, viniculture has had a particularly tough grind for the last few years. The Languedoc-Roussillon has had a drought with rainfall in some areas down by 80%. Water tables are precariously low; and you need water to make wine and for the mundane tasks of cleaning vats, trucks and other equipment. In the last few years, the drought reduced vineyard production around our village to the point that our cave stopped producing wine and the vignerons elected to merge their operation with that of another co-op. 

The arrangement is that while grapes would continue to be pressed at our co-op, the juice would be transported by tanker the dozen kilometers to a cave in the town of  Montagnac for fermentation and bottling. The wines would then be sold under their “Montagnac” label.

Once the vendage was over, wineries around the region celebrated by opening their “primeur” wines. Most wineries produce many different wines and the primeur is simply the first drinkable red, white or rosé, from the previous year’s harvest. These openings are part celebration and part marketing event with speeches, food and music.

Although le Sud de France had had an exceptionally hot and long Indian summer, by mid-October, autumn arrived, gray and wet and we ended up walking to the cave in a cold rain. As we neared it we heard music and people singing, and it turned out to be a guy was playing accordion with a bunch of people performing old French songs. Diane and I joined in, although knowing neither the words or the music, the best I could do was to hum and scat along.                                                 

After about half an hour of music making, the official program began. The president of the regional winemakers association got up and spoke about how hard it was to market wine, especially with competition from the well know wines of Bordeaux and Burgundy. He spoke of the irony that these famous wines were actually made largely from Languedoc grape juice that those wineries quietly bought from us.  Next the mayor spoke, reminding everyone that wine making was the very life of the village. He is a vigneron himself and happily announced that the vendage had gone well. It had been a good harvest and this year they were getting good prices for their grapes. The mayor was followed by the director of the co-op, who spoke about the new wine. 

When he finished the vignerons and their wives began to bring out tray after tray of slices of paté, cheeses, hors d’oeuvres and of course, bottle upon bottle of the new wine.

The mayor came over to me, filled our glasses with the new wine and we tasted it together. He sipped and I sipped, we sipped again and then agreed that this “sauvignon nouveau,” as it was called, is a damn fine wine. 

The trays of food and the bottles of wine kept coming out. When I looked around me, I realized that this was a rather private gathering of our village. In an atmosphere of “Bonheur,” it seemed that we were reinforcing community bonds as well as celebrating a good harvest. This was a crowd of no nonsense, tough vignerons, who were relieved as people refilled their glasses again and again, visibly enjoying the new wine. Oddly, this means that once again, like so many great Languedoc wines, all of it would be sold locally before it had a chance to reach a larger, worldwide audience.

After a while, one of our friends pulled us aside and led us out of a side door where we found ourselves in front of a fire pit of burning grapevine stems, the glowing embers swirling up in the currents of hot air like fireworks, exploding in the darkness. Sitting over the fire pit was a steel wheelbarrow contraption filled to overflowing with mussels. Several men stood stirring the mussels with long ladles that were also used to scoop up the cooked mussels and pile them onto paper plates. Soaked in olive oil and garlic before barbequing, the hot barbequed mussels were delicious and despite the quantity of hors d’oeuvres everyone had consumed earlier, the wheelbarrow quickly emptied. 

 

We sat eating with a group of friends, mostly Parisian émigrés, on an old stone wall, struggling to balance the plates of hot mussels on our laps. We had no silverware so we ate with our fingers and ended up laughing at ourselves. Here we were a bunch of big city sophisticates, sitting around a blazing campfire, eating mussels with our fingers like children, happy as clams. No one even minded the persistent, cold drizzle anymore.