Harvest In Chinon

While in the Loire in July, I struck up a friendship with a Chinon producer called Domaine du Fossile.  They have some excellent vineyard holdings that neighbor well regarded producers you might recognize like Bernard Baudrey in that traditional Napoleonic code patchwork of four rows here, six rows there.  Located in Cravant-les-Coteaux , this is considered the sweet spot of Chinon.  When an opportunity came up to do harvest AND drag my friend Joe out there after he had introduced us, I didn’t want to pass it up.  I had helped my friend Lauren out at Baci Vineyards in Grand River Valley last year, so I knew what I was in for.  Despite seeing various “wine influencer” posts over the last couple weeks that present harvesting grapes as some dreamy holistic yoga vibed mumbo jumbo that women in designer clothes do while an angelic chorus sings out above, I’m here to tell you that it’s really just a shitty bunch of yard work that seems to never end.  I figured if I wanted to “embrace” harvest, I needed to go to a small operation in the backwoods of France that does it all Old School.  

After spending jetlag day tromping around Paris, Joe and I took the train to Tours and rented a car to get to Chinon.  The Loire has a kazillion producers you’ve never heard of as 70% of the wine they make is sold within France.  Let’s be honest, most Americans don’t know chenin blanc is a grape, so they sure as shit can’t tell you what a typical Bourgeil, Anjou, or Chinon tastes like much less where it came from on a map.  Chinon is noteworthy to me as the cabernet franc wines from there tend to have the most concentration of all the reds in the Loire.  You can argue about intensity or complexity from top Saumur producers, but for the most part the Chinon producers have an edge in the raw materials of making age worthy interesting cabernet franc.

It's not a huge place.  Everyone that makes wine knows everyone else with various marriages, divorces, and minor arguments creating a back drama for seemingly simple interactions.  For example, Fossile’s assistant vigneron (if that’s even his title because he works at a furious pace doing everything) is divorced from the daughter of the property just down the road that has a viticultural agreement with Fossile and shares harvest resources.  Everyone’s last name in town is seemingly Lambert or Baudrey.  This guy is that guy’s cousin but used to be in a relationship with his brother’s now wife so there’s some bad blood about that which is why they don’t really sit near each other at the association meetings but still hang out at family gatherings because, well, family is family.  He will help him out if his tractor is broken but there will be grumbling.  It’s that kind of place.       

When we got there a couple of other men had already been there for a few days helping the shared crew tackling the grapes needed for the easy drinking “Rouge” bottling.  Both of these guys are old friends of the owners, people like us that wandered in like stray dogs.  We stayed in the  house right above the winery so when you open the door in the morning, the sweet sour distinctive scent of fermentation is in the air.  It’s typical of the area with the houses merging in with the chalky rock of the hillsides where it becomes unclear what is natural cave and what’s the facility.  The house is primarily used during harvest.  It’s a worn but cozy flophouse for the out of towners as well as the winery owners Chris and Moira.  The cast includes Fabrice, a French sales executive of some kind that has a weakness for stinky cheese and beer, Terry, a Boston based raconteur with the desire to pitch in anywhere and everywhere, the boisterous owners Chris/Moira, with Joe and I trying to help while avoiding fucking anything up by accident.

When we arrive on Tuesday late afternoon, the crew is assembled under the shade of some ornamental vines at the metal bistro table drinking last year’s rose.  They had a slower day today repairing broken equipment (there’s always something broken) and processing a lot that just came in.  It’s unusually hot, around 85F and Fabrice is sweating his ass off fresh from helping the shared crew harvest today.  The destemmer is loudly laboring away as gorgeous looking cabernet franc gets guided into the machine to be crushed and sent via pump to the cement fermentation tanks.  There is a sense of satisfaction from everyone as the last of the Rouge gets into the tank.  We drink rose until the sun starts to set and then crack into the wine in the cave.  We drink vintages from 2010, 2005, and 1996.  The wines hold up surprisingly well considering the tannins seem soft and ripe while the wines are young.

Dinner is a casual home cooked affair upstairs, animated and fueled by copious amounts of wine.  We brought some champagne from the enormous French version of Meijer where you can buy 713 different kinds of sausages, a power drill, kid’s pajamas, killer champagnes and world class baguettes.  Imagine if Meijer replaced Hamburger Helper and Wonder Bread with Agrapart Champagne and a $9 world class berry tart and you’ll get the idea.  We stayed up too late, drank too much, and would pay the price the next day.

Morning came early.  Too early.  The way the harvest was timing out meant Joe and I would be off the hook today as there was no picking today for Fossile.  The other crew was working parcels for the other Domaine, so we hit it over to Saumur, St Nicolas Bourgueil and Bourgueil to see what was doing.  We hit a great traditional wine store that kept multiple tanks in the back of local bulk wines where people would bring in plastic jugs to fill up for $2-3 a liter.  The fancy stuff was the St Emilion at $3.90 but something that appeared to be a “everything but the kitchen sink” tank was only $1.85 a liter.  In the afternoon we went back to the winery to see what was happening with the cranky labeling machine, the ferments and a gushy hydraulic on a tractor.  We’d get going early the next morning after a more sedate night and pick some of the best fruit for the winery.

As I noted earlier, we wanted “the real experience”.  Now it can be argued that in 2025 “the real experience” is watching a guy drive a mechanical harvester or maybe watch a professional Romanian crew handle the task with ruthless efficiency.  But as this is a small family operation, it’s almost all locals who are doing the work.   About 15-18 people workers were packed into white vans with makeshift wooden bench seating.  Everyone chain smoked.  Most of the men were missing multiple teeth and had haggard faces hinting at hard lives led.  No one spoke English.  Then you have us, these two Suburban jackoffs trying to figure out how they want us to do The Thing.

It wasn’t hard to figure out.  There was no Mystical Mother Nature Energy despite whatever bullshit social media posts you’ll see this Fall.  The grapes are trained fairly low, somehow reaching the perfect height where crouching is too low and bending over is too high.  There’s no perfect height to work.  I knew that as soon as I started my back was going to be very, very angry with me later.  We got handed a bucket, a pair of secateurs, and luckily remembered to bring gloves.  Clip and move.  Clip and move.  The morning dew and misty morning made the work cold and wet.  Sometimes the grapes come off easily in a heavy satisfying cluster.  Sometimes they have grown in a twisted fashion around the trellis wire and it’s impossible to figure out where the stem is located which led me to hack away like a horror movie villain.  It’s hard work.  We were just visiting but for the locals, it’s a good little score where a 10 day burst of labor could fund their modest lives for a couple months.  Everyone is nice, unintelligible and seems OK with us being there after we show we can almost keep up to their pace.

At lunchtime we all piled back into the vans for a lunch at the vineyard.  The French don’t fuck around with lunch, and there were three courses.  I don’t know how wise it is to stuff oneself full of roasted pork, mashed potatoes, and chocolate soufflé washed down with red wine and rose to go work in the sun, but that’s what we did.  After the lunch, all the locals smoked cigarettes until we climbed back into the van to pick again.  Joe and I didn’t know if we were going to do the afternoon pick for the other producer, but Chris told us that he expected that we’d only go another 90 minutes or so until 330p.  Hey, I can do another 90 minutes for sure even though the sun was now beating down at 84F.      

We picked a number of different vineyards across the entire day.  Something of interest was the difference in fruit quality between the vineyards which had been farmed organically + manual labor, (Fossile’s) which was obviously the highest quality and the others.  As we were part of a shared crew, we also picked some non-Domaine fruit for the other producer.  One of these had evidence of mechanical canopy management, angular “haircuts” on the top and sides of the shoots.  The fruit in this vineyard was more variable, some gorgeous clusters interspersed with some that had a level of rot due to lack of airflow from tight leaves around the fruit, to some light red underripe high bunches.  When crushed together this would certainly be good quality, but not nearly as good quality as the previous grapes destined for the “Les Battereaux” of Domaine du Fossile.  The last vineyard we harvested was seemingly a hobby vineyard in the back of someone’s home that was destined for co-op wines.  Sun burned grapes, tiny shriveled tough little clusters, even the weight of the bucket seemed to be half of what the earlier healthy fruit had been.  You can make bad wine with good grapes, but you can’t make good wine with bad grapes.  Example illustrated.  The partner winery makes some bulk wines destined for God knows where, and this fruit would undoubtedly be headed there.  

Remember how I said we’d only go for another 90 minutes?  Yeah, that was bullshit.  We picked until 615p.  It just went on and on and on.  When we pulled into the shitty vineyard at the end, I thought we were pulling into the winery to end the day.  It’s a panel van with a bunch of sweaty people jabbering in French.  I didn’t know what was going on.  What?  We gotta pick this too?  For fuck’s sake, gimme the bucket.  Clip and move.  Clip and move.  When we climbed back in the van at the end of the day, my first thought was “Where can we get a beer?”.  I was spent.  When you tell people you’re going to harvest, they go “that’s so cool”.  If you said, “I’m going to help put up a fence on a massive property.”, they’d say “that sucks”.  It’s basically the same job.  

When we got back to Fossile, the grapes we had harvested earlier were already in the rustic cement tanks.  The local winemakers and Chris were sitting around several bottles, a bunch of vintages open.  I peeled off my sweaty shirt and walked upstairs hoping to steal one of Fabrice’s beers.  I popped the cork off the artisan blonde ale and rooted around my toiletries case for a couple Tylenol, impending autism be damned.  I climbed into the shower for perhaps the most satisfying rinse off of the year.  There’s a satisfaction to doing “real work” that you just don’t get selling TV ads, but damn am I going to be sore.  The sun was down, and we needed to get some dinner going.  In 11 hours the crew would start again.  I’m way too old for this.