September 2020: Harvest ends with Ceres’ blessing

Earth’s increase, foison plenty,
Barns and garners never empty,
Vines and clustering bunches growing,
Plants with goodly burden bowing—
Spring come to you at the farthest/
In the very end of harvest.
Scarcity and want shall shun you.
Ceres’ blessing so is on you.

(From Shakespeare’s The Tempest)

We could do with some blessings from Ceres, now that the harvest is over and Spring seems unlikely ever to come! Snow is forecast this weekend (and it looks like a long, dark winter before that).

But at least the harvest is in;  though any thought of  generously filled cellars and store rooms, or of staving off scarcity and want has  gone to the wind… and probably to the prevailing wind,  coincidentally called Cers:  a good, clean, dry wind much loved by farmers, which comes from the north west,   and apparently is the oldest-named wind in France – but no relation to the Ceres quoted above, also much loved by farmers, who was the Roman goddess of Agriculture.  Even so, you would have thought that the two of them together, that is, Cers and Ceres, could have done a better job of Harvest 2020, as far as the bountifulness of it goes …

But back to the point:  Harvest 2020.  It began on 21 August, a day earlier than our earliest harvest ever, and it ended on 15 September, pretty much around the start date of many  harvests before it.  And the yield was  low, despite our  vines bowing under their goodly burden of beautifully clustering bunches.

The good news is that the grapes were in great condition.  The bad news is they had gave unexpectedly  little juice. And why?  We are trying to work it out. Lab tests show no  water stress at all, even though it was a dreadfully hot and dry summer.  That’s terroir for you: the heavy spring rain held enough deep groundwater in store for our vines to motor on and promise great things. They just didn’t deliver, that’s all.

Ah, promises, promises.

Perhaps it was the over-wet Spring, and the over-hot Summer?  We’re still reflecting.

But the grapes do at least  promise  to deliver very good wines.  Just not very many of them.

And it was our most hassle-free harvest ever, all the recruitment and paperwork for the harvesters outsourced to a third party, which greatly lightened the load.

On the other hand, our tractoriste broke his elbow and was unavailable and unable to do anything throughout the entire harvest.  That kind of timing is almost as close to catastrophe as you can get, on the eve of the harvest. But he was replaced at the last minute by a very helpful and amiable septuagenarian Welsh ex-Rugby player called Denys, who saved the day and our sanity.

 So we had our ups and downs in equal measure this year.

And then before we knew it, the party was over, even before it had actually begun, it seemed.  We ended not with a glass of Blanquette and shared jokes with the team, not with a Harvest Banquet the following week with these people who had shared such an intensive time with us; not with the administration of pay packets, or goodbyes punctuated by kisses on cheeks,  back-slapping and ‘see you next year’s, but instead with a complete lack of anticipated nostalgia for any shared experience, and a cordial Merci beaucoup, c’était très bien passé.  

And it really did go well.

We finished the last press, had baths and showers, washed our hair and cleaned our nails, and met on the terrace for a very last glass of the very last bottle of our pink fizz, Vintage Rose, and drank to a job well done, and to a bright future for the wines that will for ever remind us of this most peculiar year.  And yes, we missed the old team, those were the good old days.  But on the other hand … wasn’t this a doddle?

Monday 21 September

We spend the morning in the cellars tasting the fermented and still-fermenting wines.  There are some surprises in them-there tanks and barrels, and they look like nice ones.  It’s still early days, but we think we can begin to relax a bit.

Tuesday 22 September

Odyssée 2018, our top Chardonnay,  gets 90 points and a silver medal from Decanter World Wine Awards today.  That’s nice news, particularly since that was also such a complicated harvest, and way more difficult than this year’s.  That was the year when yields were even lower than this year, and we could make only two of our five appellation Limoux wines. (It was the  Cers that let us down.  It is supposed to blow 270 days of the year, but in 2018 it seemed not to blow at all, and left the door wide open for the worst outbreak of mildew ever recorded in history.)

One of the surviving wines of the 2018 vintage, our Chardonnay,  was sent to Decanter, the other (Dédicace) was sent to Robert Parker Wine Advocate, and both emerged triumphantly with 90 points each.

Wednesday 23 September

Speaking of the Cers, as we seem to be, its name apparently comes from the Roman “Circius”, a ‘good’ god-like wind that so impressed the Emperor Agustus  he dedicated a temple to it while passing through Narbonne.  That’s according to Seneca, and who’s to argue with Seneca?   But that temple, in a place called Saint Cyr, which also sounds uncannily like Cers, Circius, and Ceres, or even Rabelais’ Cyerce  (and let’s not forget the Roman goddess of Agriculture, Ceres, while we are about it), all rolled up in one, has since been forsaken by the gods and also gone to the wind, so to speak.

Apparently some activists are really annoyed that it hasn’t been given AOP status (a protected appellation of origin, like our Limoux Blancs, Odyssée and Dédicace), blaming the ‘too-French Languedocians’ and the ‘too Franco-French Republicans’ for this terrible oversight … now, there’s a perplexing head scratcher for you.

Sunday 27 September 

“Normally” we’d be harvesting today, but then there’s nothing “normal” about normalement, a French word which to foreign ears is redolent with hesitation, qualification, and reservation.  No, we are not harvesting, and yes, the first fire of the year has been lit, it’s 13 degrees, and there’s a thick layer of snow on the mountains lounging lazily across our rainswept horizon.  But we don’t give two hoots, because baby, it’s warm inside … and there are no grapes hanging around outside.

Wednesday 30 September

And then incredibly, Spring comes to us –  at the very end of Harvest, just as Ceres said. The air is full of balm and birdsong, and the mountains lounge lazily across our blue-skied horizon, smiling down benignly through lavish lashings of fresh snow.

Thanks to record-breaking snowfall for September,   a satellite called Sentinel-2 managed to capture the Pyrenees in all their glory for the first time ever at this time of year.  40 cm deep, the snow is up there, and already at 1400 m – that leaves only 1000 m between us and deepest winter.

And yet today it’s Spring.  As for tomorrow, who knows?

…/to be continued