Frantic harvest just complete!

On Saturday the Metro said rain was coming on Wednesday so for the first time I can recall, we had pickers in the Presbytere vineyard on ... wait for it ... and this is France ... SUNDAY! It was all hands to the deck, code red, scramble anything and everything. Except it never rained on Wednesday (in fact it was 30 degrees and blue sky all round). Do the weather boys in Paris know how much work it takes to raise a Bordeaux harvest team to work Sundays? Better safe than sorry, I suppose.

The Merlot tastes fantastic. The grapes were warm to touch in the afternoon sun, healthy and ... the real mark of a good year ... the pips were brown. Doesn't matter how ripe the grape seems, if you've green pips you'll get that harsh note that's put so many off Bordeaux. Not this year, in fact the grapes were so tasty and sweet I saw kids riding past with bunches balanced on their BMX handlebars. Do the rascals know the vines are 100 years old, an old roman site? That fruit is precious, lad!

We're now up to 6,600 vines per hectare at La Clariere up at the top of the hill. Standard for Bordeaux is about 3,300. But we end up with the same amount of fruit as more vines mean greater stress, more of a struggle for the goodness of the soil and water. So you end up with the same amount of grapes but much better, concentrated, deeper colours and flavour. More expensive, too, because you've twice the work to do green harvesting, pruning, picking ... but the proof is in the drinking. It also means you harvest the grapes by hand, one bunch at a time, because when vines are packed so densely there's no space for machines.

The roads are sticky this year, sticky with red grape juice. With overloaded tractors carrying their cargo winerywards every which way around Castillon and Saint-Emilion some bunches are bound to go flying ... mostly at roundabouts and uphill bits. Makes the tarmac jammy and if we wind the windows down, can actually hear the tyres sticking to the road. Take your foot off the pedal and the car immediately comes to a halt. Stiction. Climb out on a hot afternoon and your shoes are bonded to the road. Lie down and you'll never get up. What a way to go.

Our own farmer is Olivier Delage, following father Guy before him only with an even shinier tractor. And maman Bernadette makes the lunches for the harvest teams. Be nice to Bernadette and I'll get an extra bit of saucisson. Patrick helps too. He's a vegetarian (unusual in France, let alone Bordeaux) who has one tiny, tiny weakness ... foie gras!

Picking is backbreaking work, even for the young ones. No wonder so many go for machine harvesting these days. These machines whack the vines with great paddles to force the fruit to fall, grinding away under headlights in the middle of the night. In the early days, they struck so roughly some of the vines refused to bear fruit the next year!

Doing it by hand puts you back in control. Snip a small size bunch, roll it over and flex it in your hand. Any powdery green-grey stuff hiding near the spine of the bunch? Knock those grapes off, it's botrytis, leave them for the birds. If a machine picked this vine row, the botrytis would go into the mix ... and then the winemaker needs to add a lot more sulphur. While we're on it, for wine drinkers who think they've a problem with sulphur in their reds and the headaches it can bring, the answer is clear - hand harvesting.

Philippe at Chateau Poupille (more on him later, we hope to bring you some) told me his pickers walk through the vineyard giving each vine a swift, solid kick before they begin the harvesting. He swears most of the bad stuff falls off right away, making the second sweep much easier.

Maybe will try this next year. But our pickers are mostly young ladies from the village ... not much good at putting in the boot. Besides, the Presbytere vineyard's 100 year old vines are a national treasure, needing a protection order rather than a boot.

Then it's off to La Clariere and the sorting table. Kind of a conveyor belt, and teams of five or six people keep an eagle eye on the grapes as they are unloaded by Olivier and Patrick and whisked into the winery, looking for any imperfection, powder, leaves or ruptured skins missed in the vineyard (we had a frog and several spiders to 'relocate' this year). Two of our sorters are retired surgeons ... they miss nothing! When we lugged in the sorting table in the late 1980s, all the neighbours hooted at les anglais with their crazy table. Now, I'm happy to report, they are de rigeur.

At every tiny step along the way, there is a quality decision to be made and there's a whole year of further care in our tiny winery and cellar before you'll see these reds.

Of course you could make more wine, cheaper and quicker ... if you let these little nuggets of trouble through your guard. Many chateaux do, so no wonder Bordeaux feels the need to spend so much on image consultants and brand gurus.

Why not just make the wine better?