We went to Lyon on a day we both had off, and swore to try and have a picnic on the way back, we went off the beaten trail and drove for miles, Buffy totally lost faith that we would find anywhere suitable, and just as we reached the end of our tether, voila! this place appeared, lake, shelter with BBQ, frog chorus that lasted about 15 mins. fishes and stuff, all good in the end.
Sunday, September 17, 2006
Cool French School Architecture
The French enjoy putting effort and money into public buildings, which means all these great well designed public buildings that are obviously still loved and used, it restores faith in the modern movement, yay le corbusier!
Grape Picking
This is the only, but yet worst, picture from our grape picking charity weekend. It was on the West side of the Cote de Brouilly, in the Beaujolais region, about 50km north of Lyon, we were on the fields of the chateau Thinvin, owned and run by the Geoffrey family. The head of the Grenoble South rotary club was walking through here and got chatting about a possible charity weekend, and I was one of the volunteers that he managed to round up, (Buffy works for him). We showed up at 9am on Saturday and were in the fields within 40 mins, after a breakfast of bread, ham, sausage cheese and coffee. All served in the basement room of the chateau, a building started in 1387, and added onto constantly until the 'new' wine making shed from 1975. We walked across the small valley you can see here and started on a patch on grapes, part of an entire hillside, and big once you stand over a small bush that comes up to your waist, and realize that once this one is done there are more for as far as you can see.... but the whole grape harvets only takes about 2 weeks.
We worked till 12.00 and retired for a very hearty lunch overseen by the very glamorous Mrs. Geoffrey, and a staff of three of four, the bread came in 4 foot high paper sacks and was dispatched with very quickly, the cooking was hearty and very good, super slow cooked beef in a rich fragrant sauce, wine made from the grapes picked in the very same spot last year, fermented in the barrels in the next room, and bottled in the shed next to where we gathered after every session of picking to clean the crud of out hands at the long, old sinks. We cut the grapes with small, hand held scythes, basically thick steel wire wire flattened out into a razor sharp 'C'shape at one end, and with a loop for your little or ring finger on the other end. These were called Serpets, there was also the option of Seceteurs, but everyone that used the seceteures seemed to cut themselves, you basically cup the bunch of grapes in one hand, letting go if you feel any dry or rotten grapes and if all is good and firm you wiggle it, and cut the stalk where you feel the apex of the wobble, no need to actually see the stalk. Mr. Geoffrey and his winsome daughter were in the field with us all the time, they naturally picked about twice as much as us and seemed to de-grape an entire bush by the time we had bent down and cleared away the leaves to find the first 'grape' the French word for a bunch, what we would call grapes are called 'raisin'. At the end of the first day we all went and found beds in the Gite, next to the chateau, very comfortable and accommodating, we were 8 to a room, and silent exchange students aside everyone was great company, I unfortunately didn;t sleep well, with my head next to the door because we were the last to arrive and got the worst cots, and my fear of being spoken to and not knowing what to say conspired to make me not sleep at all. damn brain.
That same evening we had a tour of the rooms that are used for cleaning and squashing the grapes, they use gravity to cruch the grapes, and for fermenting the juice. They have a classic long barrel vaulted cave with huge wooden vats for fermenting the wine, we were shown around by the deputy picker, one of the nice, but harsh guys you know you don't want to piss off. We had another huge meal, and a lot more of last years wine, very nice, but quite young, brash almost, not hugely fruity, but quite spicy and big in the mouth, high tannins and a short but clean finish. The meal finished with a short but moving speech by our leader about the charity we were raising money for, a blood disease research foundation, there were a couple of the researchers there, and they told us about some of the people we would be helping, One of the wives of one of the Rotarians there was also an organizer of the huge rotary student exchange program, and they told us all about that. it really bonded us all for what would be a hard day on Sunday.
We were in the fields by 7.30, after another hearty breakfast, we were doing a different type of grape that morning, it was trained up chest high wires, and was smaller and less red than the grapes from the previous day, and also much easier to pick, the plant was essentially flat, so the grapes grew on one side or the other, more on the side that got the sun, perhaps not surprisingly. We broke about 9.15am for a second breakfast of Wine, chocolate and sausage, with more excellent bread. The wine was an unlabelled rose from the last year and sat surprisingly well, and was a new PB for 'earliest drink ever' of which a part of me is quite proud of.
The morning lasted a long time, with a few steep parts of the hillside being done, and more of the scrubby low growing bushes that seemed to have not got quite enough herbicide to stop weeds getting all over the place. We were told we had picked over 4 tons grapes the previous day, which has ok, said a shrugging Mr. Geoffrey. Maybe this was supposed to motivate us, but we picked a lot less on Sunday. We all had quiet large open buckets to put our grapes bunches in, when these were about half full a 'porteur' would come round, and take your grapes off you, these have guys have the shitty end of the job, they have huge tapered buckets on their backs and have to run up and down the rows collecting everyone's grapes and dashing up to the truck at the top or bottom of the hill and back to do the same, the bucket getting more and more heavy, and responding to the calls of 'Porteur!' or 'Soue' (bucket) indicating there were full buckets that needed emptying, you get paid 2 Euros extra per hour for doing that.
We broke for another excellent lunch around 12.00 and continued until 4.15 and then it was more wine and a quick dousing with water to get most of the grape crap off our hands and into the car, I had another allergy attack at the end of the day and ended up having to wipe my nose on my shirt, rough. A quick Mac Donalds espresso on the way home and we were all good. We earned about 120 euros each for the weekend, there were about 30 of us, nice work.
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