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.  

Sud de France 4.5: All Dat Jazz

My relationship with jazz has been a sometime thing. Growing up in New York I’d take the subway home after late night dates and there’d always be some musicians on the trains. Slouched over their bass cases and trombone bags, tapping their feet to the rhythm of the car wheels, they were going back up to Harlem in the wee hours of the morning. 

Tired and drained after a gig at some midtown hotel dining room or a club in the Village, their fingers  would unconsciously practice a riff on their unreachable fret boards and valves. 

These were the anonymous foot soldiers of jazz. Black musicians who loved to play but never made any real money at it. Every once in a while I’d recognize a face (say was that Miles?) but usually they were the sidemen who supported the big “names” and remained in their shadows. 

It was the late nineteen sixties and I was learning to play guitar. My heroes were another bunch of black musicians; blues men like Bukka White, Son House and Lighting Hopkins. With the anti-War movement and the rise of folk music, the action in Greenwich Village shifted from the Blue Note to the Café Wha and middle class white kids hauling banjos and washtub basses filled Washington Square pretending to be authentic Appalachians singers. 

I stayed in touch with jazz though because my best friend was a jazz enthusiast with a huge collection of vinyl LPs. Pretty regularly I'd get a call to come over and listen to some new record he had just gotten. Or we'd get together and hang out in a tiny Easy Village jazz club. By now I was performing in a folk band made up of college kids and I too was pretending to be a country boy. It didn’t last, there was this war on called Viet Nam and I had to move on leaving the band and New York behind. 

1967 rolled in and I found myself in San Francisco in the heat of the "Summer of Love. It wasn’t the sex, drugs and rock and roll thing the media made it out to be. Instead it was a sad, desperate time with lost kids from places like Topeka, St. Louis or Dallas, running away from the stifling world of Middle America hoping to find something; hoping to find anything, really.

Rock was the theme music of those days  but jazz held on. Groups like Jim Kweskin’s Jug Band and performers like Leon Redbone were rooted in the jazz of the 1920s and musicians like Charles Lloyd with his big old Afro and color splashed batik shirts brought jazz to a new, “hip,” young audience. Jazz stayed very much alive although undervalued and sidelined.

After a year in San Francisco I headed north and for the next couple of decades I was the photographer for Seattle Center, the city's performing arts facility. I shot hundreds of concerts including the small number of jazz performances that were included in the big Labor Day Bumbershoot Arts Festival.

Usually presented in the Center's smaller venues, it meant that I got to meet and hear artists like Ray Charles, Marian McFarland, Buddy Guy and Etta James, in intimate rooms and halls.

In America today the audience for jazz has been aging while here in France it seems the jazz scene is healthy and the audience is young. 

For example, within a few weeks of arriving we were invited to a jazz “house party” in a private house in a nearby, very small village. For 8 Euros you got a glass of wine and some food and then sat down in the living room for an evening of live jazz performed by a local group. 

Pezenas is a renaissance age village in the South of France.

Then other day we were having a meeting with the owner of the house we are hoping to buy when out of the blue he turned to me and said, “I do hope you like jazz.” 

It turns out that Pézenas, the next town to ours, is a hotbed of music. The town’s old train station has been remodeled into a theater and there's a schedule of all sorts of music and art performances (and lots of jazz) throughout the year. 

And for a town of only 7500 people what’s even more surprising is its lively and active music club scene. 

Typical of what I mean is this notice I found in the local paper this morning.

Son du Swing

“At Club Butel (Pézenas) at 20:00. 18 December 2010. Le Son du Swing a collective of musicians based in Southern France who share a common passion for ‘jazz manouche’ or ‘Gypsy Jazz’. The line-up of the group is inspired by and celebrates the 'Quintet du Hot club de France'."  

The thought of all this jazz so close to my new home is heartwarming. In a way for me, it honors the legacy of those hard working musicians I shared all those late night subways with so long time ago. Men and women whose lives were all about all dat jazz.

And, of course, there's always Django.

Sud de France 3.3: The Forgetting Machine

I was in Villeneuvette again to photograph the ruins of the town’s once prosperous textile factory. (See Sud de France 2.2 for my first visit here.) For over four hundred years Villeneuvette fabrics were known throughout the world and the town was a Royal Manufacturer for the King. 

It was a prosperous hard working place so much so that the words “Honor through Work” are etched over the entrance to the town. But the town died because of wars and cheaper products made in other countries. The mills and factories are now empty shells and the town is struggling to rebuild itself on the strength as a crafts and art center.

Wandering around the ruins reminded me of a conversation I had a few days ago with some British friends over dinner. We were talking about the recent protests against raising the retirement age and one of them, Liam, said the cause of the problems were, 

“There’s a real difference between Northern and Southern Europeans is that the south is just lazy. Just look at where all the economic trouble is Greece, France, Italy, Spain.”

I was surprised to hear this because Liam seemed to be selectively forgetting that just a week ago his own British government announced Draconian reforms to cut its deficit. More severe reforms than the French passed. Ones so severe that had they been passed in France it would have really blown the country apart. 

What was going on I think is what I call the “The Forgetting Machine.” That wonderful mechanism in our brains that selectively edits reality to fit our personal world views. Liam was stereotyping the people he lives amongst in such a smooth and natural way he doesn’t even realize that he’s doing it, he simply holds his “truths” to be self-evident.

The “laziness” of the Southerners discounts the fact that just a few years ago the Spanish, Italian and Greek economies were rapidly growing and the envy of the Northern nations. Then came the economic recession and it turned the world upside down. But was the recession caused by Greek laziness or by Wall Street shenanigans? By the French retirement system or by banks reselling risky mortgages? Wasn’t the economic recession caused by the North and not the South?

The funny thing is that Liam is forgetting that what he is really talking about is the division between Europe's Protestant North and Catholic South. A divide that's hundreds of years old. He’s now in the laid back Catholic South and it's a bit uncomfortable for him. 

“The French are just not entrepreneurial" Liam says. " They prefer to spend time at home with their families than to work a little longer to make more.”

I was surprised to hear that putting family before work was a bad thing. 

In response I pointed out t him that we were sitting in a new restaurant in the heart of Clermont run by a couple of young French guys. (The food here is wonderful, a modern reworking of traditional French dishes done with the lightest of touches. For example, for dessert I had a crème brûlée with just the hint of fresh ginger and a small side dish of granulated coffee sorbert.)
So weren't these two young Fenchmen entrepreneurial?  

I'd say that what the French may lack is not an entrepreneurial spirit but the ruthless competitiveness of the North (and of the US.)

But Liam is right when he says that the French put their personal lives ahead of their work lives.  I have yet to meet a French person who works two jobs. They do work long hours but when they are not working, they are NOT working. 

If enjoying life is a crime then I think that the Southern Europeans are guilty as charged.

There's also an irony here. Liam within a few kilometers of Villeneuvette and its stone buildings. These  stand as a silent reminder that even in the sunny, soft, Sud de France an awful lot of people have worked very, very hard to earn their daily baguette. 

Photos and text © 2010 Steve Meltzer