Post Harvest Trip to France

It just gets faster.

When I was young, every year, just after vintage, I could belt round the main French vineyards in about four days by road. Am not up to that anymore. Even if it was allowed. And I don't like being driven as it'll usually be a Frenchman and God never intended the French to drive. (I did just buy a new car in France ... one of those huge 4x4 Japanese tanks. A Frenchman came up to me as I was sitting in it, in the showroom trying the knobs. "You must get one of those, Monsieur," he said. "I've had three, and each one saved my life" (laughing uproariously). Mmmm ... but how many others did you massacre? Anyway, these days, to cut the time down to 2 days, and stay off French roads, we fly.

7.10 Oxford airport. Misty sunrise. Take off in a chartered 'King Air' ... a Beechcraft, very reliable, propeller-job. All mod cons, but the toilet is a commode ... so a very sociable plane. Proper Brit ripping-prang type pilots. Take off to south, turning east. Sun just burnishing Blenheim House. Coast at Dover. Clear sky. Head for Burgundy.

Why are we doing this? Because we are the early bird and we want the best worms. Perhaps not the best of comparisons, but you probably get my drift. Wine is not made on factory lines, like, for example; deck chairs. Presumably, if you are in the deck chair importing business, you feel no great need to keep rushing over to the deck chair factory to find out what the deck chairs are like this year and to grab the best ones. With wine, you have to do this or some German will nick your wine and that is a lot worse than him nicking your deck chair. I trust that is all crystal clear. Engine note and plane drop, circle a shed with roof that says CHALONS.

It's 9.40 ... still foggy ... at Terminal ... to meet puzzlement and then mirth ... peals of laughter from our normally taciturn Anne ... it's the wrong bloody Chalon! "Ici Châlons-en-Champagne, Messieurs. Nous sommes en Champagne pas en Bourgogne!" A fine mess you've got us into, pilots.

Have a cup of coffee and fly on with deeply embarrassed pilots. "It wasn't my fault ... boss can't read maps" ... down south we fly right along the Côte de Nuits vineyards; green, gold and russet autumn colours. As it happens we do not have a Wine Atlas with us, but we do have Mr. Hugh Johnson himself. A game of spot the Crus. He wins. The patterned rooftops of Beaune, its golden Côtes and ... on to the real Chalon-sur-Saone ... with deer on the runway.

Alain Roy, the Montagny producer, to meet us, so this must certainly be the right Chalon. He cannot talk on account of laughing himself silly. Only the English could get the wrong Chalon. Drives us to Mancey. White knuckles; this is the man who demolished his 18th century ornamental gateway with a tractor last year. At Mancey there are a couple of farms, a joinery shop, the co-op wine cellar and a brand new shed. Full of barrels of new wine. Taste, firstly the sparkling wine 'base', as you do; it's a wine always harvested a bit green so at this immature stage of its life, like Champagne, it is a bit of a table-gripper. So we wine buyers get this eye-watering stuff out of the way first ... before moving on to the much riper and nicer new vintage Chardonnays. The growers hover around in little father and son groups looking worried. They always do look worried here ... don't know why ... these days their stuff is so good we always buy the lot. But they are farmers and farmers never like to look happy do they? This year they are actually worried about a LACK of acidity due to the baking summer. Their grapes were all harvested in August ... never been known before! We are not worried at all ... gosh, they are soft, succulent whites and the darkest reds we've ever seen here in the land of the pallid Pinot. Would love to bottle and sell the Gamay right now before Christmas.

A Yorkshireman called Tim Marshal, who was once one of the best Burgundy brokers ever, (now retired to sing in Beaune choir) introduced me to this unknown village which made plenty of wine, cheaply. Only problem ... it wasn't very nice wine. We tasted the whole cellar and decided we still could not do a big blend ... but we wanted just the best vat. One grower stood head and shoulders above the rest ... a certain Monsieur Touzot ... we had them bottle just his tiny production for us. Mancey is a co-operative where it's 'one for all, all for one', supposedly. So the other growers were unhappy.

Their inspired young Directeur, Bernard Derain, turned this to his advantage and challenged them to compete ... he arranged that the grapes from every grower were henceforward vinified separately and the wines put into a big annual tasting ... with me and my buyers AND every grower in the village each spring. All bottles masked. He realised that if all their fruit continued going into a big, anonymous blend, they would work moderately hard. And the blend would stay unremarkable. If, on the other hand their wine was to compete with that of their neighbours ... wine against wine, fair tasting, no cheating, then they would move heaven and earth to improve and win. It worked so well! We still don't have a big blend but we still have Touzot's wine, plus that of the Dupré family, Monsieur Boirie's wine and that of Verchère ... with several others all constantly trying to beat them. We all do well out of this. Look out for them.

Grab a crust and local ham, back to the plane. South, past Mont Blanc far to the east. Clouds. A bit bouncier. To Aubenas in the wild Ardèche. Jagged hills, deep gorges, wild scrubbland. One flat -topped hill, with an apparently abandoned airfield ... wild Scottish sort of landscape. Get out, wander about, no-one there. Worrying. Screeching tyres and screaming gears ... here's our genial Ardèchois chums.

They tell us this airport is usually only used by firefighting planes ... much needed here. It went over 50 degrees this summer! 30 mins eyes-shut to Valvignères ... those ravines! The 'Valley of the Vines' is where we have for many years introduced an Aussie or two into the winemaking, and can boast, have helped revolutionised the prospects of this remote place. Nowadays their cellarmen go off to Oz in winter to return the compliment. Just taste the new Serret, Combelle etc for an hour ... then get driven 40 minutes down to the Rhône Valley and Chusclan ... another hugely important cellar for us. André Roux is there showing what he insists is his penultimate vintage (we dragged him out of retirement in 1993 and keep bribing him to keep going with cases of fine claret but he is in his seventies and wants to go live in Paris! We stay, tasting and cooing over the new vintage just an hour then on to find our plane at Avignon, and hop to Toulon. Huge airfield, guess must be military. Laurent Brébant is there, brown nut of a face bobbing and grinning. He is Provencal and thus a seriously mad driver so endure 30 minutes of terror until we get to some place near Brignolles (eyes tightly shut no idea where we are really) ... where there is a flash hotel where Général de Gaulle once wrote his memoirs. Hugh Johnson gets to stay in his bedroom. Big bed, apparently. Eat well, sleep soundly, get up to taste enormous number of Provence pinks. The hotel is next door to one of the huge, wonderfully equipped wine centres now built all over France with Brussels money. No earthly use to anyone, of course, except to provide luxury tasting facilities for us on our trips. The Saint Tropez rosé comes out best.

Toulon, take off over the Med to circle ... hover, almost over the towers and turrets of Carcassonne. Spectacular but can I find my blasted camera? We work with many producers across the Midi, of course but we have specially close ties with this brilliant new cellar ... conveniently near the airport. Worried about the whites this year what with the heat and all. But very re-assured. Hot summers are the norm here, so they know how to cope. Sauvignon, Chardonnay and Viognier ... take two big tanks of each ... lovely. Quick picnic amongst the tanks. Then off again. Weather now intervenes. Thought it would. Been so lucky till now. We now can't land at Libourne-Lussac which is just 10 mins drive from next destination ... our own vineyard at La Clarière. We have to land at Bergerac ... an hour's drive. This cuts down our tasting time considerably. I did the vintage here so know what to expect but I want to impress Hugh and the others. Do my best in half an hour. Lots of wines ... from all over Bordeaux ... all such friendly wines this year ... the incredible summer heat grilled a lot of the crop to raisins which worried all the locals who had never known this in these usually damp parts. Me, I have been to many vineyards in places like Chile and Oz where cooked fruit is not uncommon ... and, provided it goes in with plenty nice sappy, fresh-tasting fruit it can make gorgeous velvety wines. It has at La Clarière in 2003.

Anyway, taste, blink, gone back to Bergerac. And up into the storm. Lashing it down, bouncing all over the sky, lightning, the lot. We chomp sandwiches and sink a few beers. We are old pros. When things calm the pilots say to come and see this. Brief panic clambering into cockpit. Right across the wide horizon before us as we head home over France is a vast, glowing, green thing. The pilots dont know for sure, never having seen anything like it but believe it is a huge display of Aurora Borealis. There has recently been much stuff about huge sunspots in the paper. So maybe. I thought you had to be in Norway to see Northern Lights. But apparently, if you're high enough you can see as far as Norway from France. Eerie, and impressive.

Land Oxford Airport ... deserted but they left the lights on. But no taxi. Next year will organise better ... but we got our fat worms.