Bordeaux Harvest - how to pick grapes

Wait for days till the man is happy and says “go”. He waits a long time this year. On this date last year, we'd already finished vintage.  Get up at 6.45, put on layers of clothes and go out in the pitch dark to get baguettes from the bakery. Hot baguettes. His oven is blazing still.

Avoid huge harvesting machines with lots of blazing lights like extraterrestrials that straddle the roads as they race for the next vineyard. Some of these will have been going all night. The whole region echoes to their whirring and whooshing. But we are harvesting by hand still. Neanderthals.

Breakfast is like a silent monastery. We are all wondering why we are doing this.

There is now some faint light as we assemble at the winery and get our kit.  

It's tough on the knees

Drive in convoy to top of the hill above Ch du Bois. Get our 'panniers' and secateurs, strap on knee pads (to much mirth) and attack! Grapes hang low here. And hide. So the best bet is first to rip away leaves. If you can see what you are snipping you'll cut yourself less. Put the basket under to catch the escapees. Snip away.

Good crop this 'parcelle'. The highest vineyard in the village. And our ripest.  10 bunches per vine! That's good.  Can be just three or four.  Fill six pallet boxes – a full trailer – in an hour and a half. Going really well. Tom shouts he's found a bunch with rot. That's the only one all morning.

The sun breaks through and disperses the low cloud, we take off jackets etc and the larks trill away high above and the view down the valley, vines, villages and spires, to St-Emilion is stunning. You call “pannier” when your basket is full and the hod carriers come. They shout “hod” and you tip and watch them wince as the straps bite their shoulders. Grapes are heavy.

Up and down you go, two or three to a row. Bantering away. Times flies today. Sometimes it drags. But we've had no real wet harvests lately. The young don't remember any. I do … but 20 years ago.

And so it goes.

Till 12. Which is time to go to La Clarière for vegetable soup then cauliflower and beetroot salad then pork and potatoes then cheeses then apple pie then coffee. With a little wine.

Then we sort our grapes in the afternoon, put them in their tank, tell them a bedtime story,  wash down the equipment, put everything ready for tomorrow and get ready for a BBQ at the Chai OK with a party of visting staff from around the world and any customers who happen to be passing. 

The evening meal is not at all silent-monastic. Quite the opposite. Now we know why we do it this way.