Vendemmia

Ripe.

On the Amalfi Coast, October is the month for the vendemmia - the harvesting of the grapes. Carefully choosing just the right moment, when the grapes are ripe and the weather is kind, the vineyard owner organises his friends, brings along a few litres of last year's wine and plenty of food, and heads off at dawn to the vineyard. Using simple secateurs, or even just a knife, each grape-gatherer moves along the rows of vines, clipping and gathering, filling plastic crates with bunches of grapes.

The vineyard where I helped - yes, I clipped quite a few bunches of grapes! - is located on a steep hillside in the Amalfi Coast village of Furore, on seven terraces high above the sea. Around about noon there's a break for panini, pastries and wine from plastic cups. Everyone lolls about on the grass, chatting and resting from their labours. OK - I'll admit it - I did take a nap under the vines. But my more hardy companions carried on harvesting. The grapes must come in. There's a year's supply of wine to be made. And everyone who helped at the vendemmia will receive a share.

Harvesters at work.

Vineyard with a view.

Picking the grapes was all very well, but then the crates of grapes had to be carried down the hillside. There is no road access to this vineyard, just a very long and steep flight of broken stone steeps. Between the terraces themselves, there are mere suggestions of steps, and in one case, a ladder.

In the old days, strong local Italian labourers would take on this daunting job. These days, there are teams of young Ukrainians - the EU rules. The strength of these guys was astonishing. On each trip down the hillside they carried two crates full of grapes, weighing about 20 kg apiece - that's 40 kg loads. And they used the ladder, never missing a beat.

We picked about 75 crates of grapes that day, red and white varieties, which will make about 2,000 litres of wine. Once the Ukrainian ragazzi carry the crates up another 150 steps to the cellar where they'll be pressed, that is. God bless the EU.

Vino rosso on the vine.

 The beginnings of vino bianco.

Low hanging fruit.

Seven terraces.

Ripe and ready for harvest.

Ferragosto Fiasco

Italy heads to the beach.

In August, Italy celebrates a holiday called 'Ferragosto' during which everyone has a holiday and goes to the beach. All over Italy, people dress down and chill out. The tradition goes right back to Roman times - the name of the holiday derives from the Latin expression Feriae Augusti (Augustus' rest) - the Emperor Augustus introduced it in 18 BC as a holiday at the end of the harvest season, a time to take a rest. So Italians have been taking their August Rest since 18 BC!

The whole thing was apparently given a boost by Mussolini during the Fascist period in the 1920s. Wiki tells us that:

The popular tradition of taking a trip during Ferragosto arose during Fascism. In the second half of the 1920s, during the mid-August period, the regime organised hundreds of popular trips through the Fascist leisure and recreational organisations of various corporations, and via the setting up of the "People's Trains of Ferragosto", which were available at discounted prices.
The initiative gave the opportunity to less well-off social classes to visit Italian cities or to reach seaside and mountain resorts. The offer was limited to the 13th, 14th and 15th August, and comprised two options: the "One-Day Trip", within a radius of 50-100 km, and the "Three-Day Trip" within a radius of about 100–200 km.
For many families, it was only during these trips that they saw the sea, mountains, and Italy's many artistic marvels for the first time. Moreover, since the trips did not include food, the connected tradition of the packed lunch arose.

The packed lunch on the train? Ah! Another mysterious Italian tradition explained!

I can report that, as far as Amalfi is concerned, the tradition of people with little money packing up and going to the seaside during Ferragosto is alive and well. The town filled up with budget local tourists and the beaches - the free public ones, not the pay-for-your-beach-lounger concessions - were packed. People arrived on buses and in their own sturdy vehicles, not in chauffeured hire cars. Still, despite the shoe-string budgets, they all appeared to be having a good time.

The cantina.

The locals too: up in the Valle dei Mulini, opposite my place, a new joint has opened. It's called 'Msieria & Nobilta - Cantina è musica' - which means something like 'the poor and the rich - cellar and music'. Each evening since it opened we have heard the strains of what sounds like bad karaoke drifting through the night air. The place claims to serve good basic Neapolitan food. During Ferragosto, with the town full of dodgy day-trippers, we decided to eat at the new cantina.

We found the place full of local people, including a long table of friends and numerous children. We grabbed the last table, close to the band, which consisted of two guys, one playing electronic keyboards and the other singing. The singer was the chap from the post office where I buy my stamps. They stuck to Neapolitan pop songs. The post-office singer was fairly tuneful, but the proprietor, a round and cheerful chap named Rocco, liked to take the microphone and add his own less-tuneful voice to the cacophony. Various patrons of the cantina also joined in - there was a spare microphone provided for the purpose. Rocco also had a variety of musical instruments around - tambourines, clappers, strange noise-makers - which he handed out to guests as the evening grew more raucous. I found myself energetically tapping away at a tambourine.

The party starts to swing.

Musical instruments causing hilarity. 

Rocco dances with his customers.

Our fiasco.

Of course, a few beverages will help you to get into the mood for a party like this. The choice of drinks  at the cantina was: water or wine. The wine - red - came in a fiasco bottle, the typical Italian straw-covered, round-bottomed bottle in which we all used to buy cheap chianti in the 1970s, and then save the bottle for a candle. The wine we received at the cantina had no name or provenance, but was very good.

In English the word 'fiasco' refers to a stupendously inept disaster: "A thing that is a complete failure, esp. in a ludicrous or humiliating way;" but Wiki says of the straw-covered bottle:

A fiasco (/fɪˈæskoʊ/; Italian pronunciation: [ˈfjasko]) is a typical Italian style of bottle, usually with a round body and bottom, partially or completely covered with a close-fitting straw basket. The basket is typically made of sala, a swamp weed, sun-dried and blanched with sulfur. The basket provides protection during transportation and handling, and also a flat base for the container. Thus the glass bottle can have a round bottom, which is much simpler to make by glass blowing. Fiaschi can be efficiently packed for transport, with the necks of upturned bottles safely tucked into the spaces between the baskets of upright ones.

Yes, they started to dance on the chairs.

A family occasion.

Rocco's table in the stream.
In case things got too hot indoors, I guess.

We enjoyed the wine in our fiasco, and as the evening progressed the whole experience seemed to descend into something resembling the English meaning of the word - but although things became a bit ludicrous, I don't think any of the participants would have called it a failure. It was a wild night at the cantina - great to see the Italian locals enjoying their night out.

Buon Ferragosto!

The Small Producers

Small producer Herve Gallais shows us his vines.

One of the unexpected joys of our visit to Champagne was discovering the "small producers". The Champagne region has 32,000 hectares and 19,000 producers: that's a lot of people with only a hectare or two to put under vine. The price of a hectare of land in this region is between €1m and €1.9m (the more expensive are the 'grand cru' and 'première cru' areas which are said to produce the best fruit). The big producers would love to buy out the small producers, but the small guys aren't selling. They'll sell their grapes, yes, and do -- otherwise the big houses couldn't make the quantities of champagne that they do. But the small guys like to keep producing their own wonderful champagne -- some for themselves, some they sell on to lucky purchasers. The quality we found was astounding! And at a fraction the cost of the big houses, since there's no marketing spend.

The Champagne region marked in red on a map of France

Join me on a photo tour of a visit to Herve Gallais, who runs a small vineyard and champagne winery with his family in the village of Boursault.

In the village of Boursault

Chateau Boursault: Madame Cliquot's old hunting lodge

Herve explains the grape varieties.

Chardonnay -- champagne on the vine. 

Herve explains how to tell which grape is which...I didn't really get it. It's subtle.

Pinot Noir and Chardonnay. Hold that thought.

Looking out across the beautiful Marne Valley.

It's not easy having a chateau in the family.
The place is presently under slow renovation.

Not quite sure what Herve is illustrating here.
I think he's saying "we press gently..."
This is the stainless steel vat in which the first fermentation takes place.

In his own small cave Herve shows us the yeast and sugar lees in a bottle.

Learning to do the remuage.

The tasting facilities may not have been swanky, but the champagne was
delicious and plentiful, and the view divine. Plus a very reasonable price list.

A case is on its way to me!

Happy Champagne visitors: guide Sydney with us.

More champagne? Mais naturellement...

The Tattinger Estate, Champagne

Visiting Champagne provides a cornucopia of experiences - the champagne itself, the lush French countryside, large houses, champagne, small houses, more champagne, delectable food, rose champagne, vintage champagne...well, you get the idea.

The vines!

Our base for exploring the region was the small town of Cumières, a few minutes from Epernay. Our landlord, who ran a three-room establishment, gave us lifts to nearby restaurants, stuffing his Gauloise in his back pocket and speeding dangerously through the vine-clad hillsides.

Our address in Cumières.

Dom Pérignon

Above Cumières was the even smaller village of Hautvillers, ridiculously picturesque, and the site of the rebuilt Abbey once inhabited by Dom Pérignon, the monk who some say "invented" champagne -- bless him. Wiki says:

Contrary to legend and popular belief, Dom Pérignon did not invent sparkling wine, but he did make important contributions to the production and quality of Champagne wine. The oldest recorded sparkling wine is Blanquette de Limoux, which was apparently invented by Benedictine Monks in the Abbey of Saint Hilaire, near Carcassonne in 1531. They achieved this by bottling the wine before the initial fermentation had ended. Over a century later, the English scientist and physician Christopher Merret documented the addition of sugar to a finished wine to create a second fermentation, which occurred six years before Dom Perignon set foot in the Abbey of Hautvillers and almost 40 years before it was claimed that the famed Benedictine monk invented Champagne. Merret presented the Royal Society with a paper, in which he detailed what is now called méthode champenoise, in 1662. Merret's discoveries coincided also with English glass-makers technical developments that allowed bottles to be produced that could withstand the required internal pressures during the secondary fermentation process. French glass-makers at this time could not produce bottles of the required quality or strength.

I don't think it would be wise to get into an argument about wether the English first invented champagne, but whatever his contribution, Dom Pérignon seems to have spent a good deal of his time perfecting the technique, and he's glorified for his efforts today. The Abbey, and by association, the name Dom Pérignon, is today owned by the house of Moët & Chandon. They produce a high-end vintage champagne labelled "Dom Pérignon" - first made in the early twentieth century.

Moët & Chandon caves.

Moët: the largest.

Inscrutable codes on the waiting Moët bottles -
referring to the blend, the year and the location.

That odd-looking gap supported with a couple of bits of wood?
That's were a bottle exploded.

Dom Pérignon magnums, resting quietly.

Ah! The tasting moment at Moët & Chandon.

All sizes.

Moët & Chandon is the biggest house in Champagne, both in terms of the land owned and the quantity of champagne produced. But like all the big houses they cannot produce enough grapes on their own land to make their large quantities of wine, so they buy grapes from the small producers. Moët is also one of the oldest houses, founded in 1743 by Claude Moët. Napoleon is said to have visited his friends at Moët & Chandon rather frequently - understandable. At the house, on Epernay's famed Avenue de Champagne, you can view the very tree under which Napoleon is said to have sipped champagne.

But let's leave Napoleon sipping his Moët and head on over to another large house in Reims, Pommery, where they have their own innovative champagne widow. Madame Pommery is said to have launched the first commercially successful 'Brut' champagne in history in 1874 at a time when champagne was excessively sweetened with sugar.

Pommery.

The Widow Pommery.
You'd think she'd look happier. 

Over at Pommery, they celebrate their own champagne widow - Louise Pommery, an almost-contemporary of the Widow Cliquot, and like her, successful in building a house that thrives today.

Looking upwards in the caves at Pommery. Roman excavated.

Pommery champagne waits in the dark.

Pommery's caves: attractive.

If a visit to Veuve Cliquot is about innovation, and a visit to Moët & Chandon is about the biggest, then a visit to Pommery is about quirkiness. There, they fill their caves with not only champagne, but also funky modern art works. If it's your third caves visit, and you've already had plenty of champagne, it's fun.

A little modern art with your champagne?

From the Pommery website:

Monumental exhibitions of contemporary art named "Experience Pommery" have been staged annually in the Domaine's chalk pits cellars since 2004. These selections of works provide a wide-ranging panorama of the international art scene, showing the diversity of cultures, languages and procedures. These exhibitions make the Pommery Estate an essential venue on the contemporary international artistic scene and, like Champagne, are an experience to share.

Ah! The tasting moment again!

"Madame Pommery described her Champagne in two words, joyful lightness." 

"Going a little further, Pommery has delicacy and intensity, heart and spirit, and a subtle style that is able to distinguish and promote the elegance of the flavours rather than their power. A completely fresh style, with a flash of flavours that settle on the palate to produce a tender taste."
Thierry Gasco, Cellar Master, Pommery

Saluté from Pommery.