Le Couvent Diary

By popular request we've offered an alternative date in February 2009 to come to help at Le Couvent, Roujan. If you're up for some fun and hard work in the vineyards and here in the old house, do take a look at this page . We've had volunteers apply from several other countries, so the talk should be good and the jokes multi-lingual/cultural.

Don't hold back - this will be an extraordinarily interesting week/fortnight. You'll learn loads and get fitter into the bargain.

There's nothing like a bit of teamwork for getting things done.

As soon as we saw the damage and realised we had just a few grapes we could rescue if we did it immediately, we started ringing round our team. Within one hour of seeing the damage we had thirteen pals and all the equipment in the vineyard. What fantastic friends. We hit the remaining grapes like demons possessed in that thundery heat that threatens another storm. To the chorus of endless yells of 'BUCKET' meaning 'this ones full and I need another' - a signal for the porters to hurry over bringing empty buckets and lugging off the full ones, we cleared the surviving grapes in less than three hours.

As you can see, the grapes are not pretty. The hail has smashed them open, but they might just be usable if we're quick.

There's so little that we have decided to use them to make some wine for ourselves, so we take them to our new cuves at my brother, Justin's, house.

The grapes come up to the 750 litre mark on the cuve, but that includes stalks and skins so we'll have precious little when all that gets taken off eventually.

As if the day hasn't already been difficult enough, the cuve containing the grapes decides to lurch into a jaunty angle thanks to a rather-too-soft floor. There's only one thing for it, we have to move all of the grapes into the second tank. And there's only one way to do it - by getting into the tank with the grapes.

Here's Michelle, my sister-in-law, getting down and dirty with the grapes.

Now, you have to understand that we are wine-making virgins and all this has come upon us with a rush. So a hurried phone call to the charming and helpful winemaker, Simon Coulshaw , gave us these instructions.

And those led to a rather inexpert approach to measuring out the stabiliser and yeast.

After the addition of the stabiliser and yeast we got our mate Kate to say a few fine words to encourage the mass to turn to ruby nectar.

Now it's up to Bacchus and a fair wind.

This is the scene that greeted us this morning. We have almost nothing left. Last night we had the most enormous rain and hailstorm. We spent the morning in the roof repairing a leak, then went to the cave co-operative to see if they had a date for the harvest. 'Have you looked at your vines yet? We have an emergency and if you have more than 20% hail damage you can harvest all your grapes now, whatever variety' We shot up to the vineyards and were greeted by scenes of devastation. A tornado had passed and ripped off every bunch of grapes and the plum-sized hailstones had shredded of every bit of leaf on 95% of the vines. In the picture above you can see one bunch of grapes caught in the branches of the vine. All the others have been ripped off and carried off by the deluge to God knows where. There's no sign of them here.

Not a pretty sight eh? There is barely a leaf left on any of the vines. The only vines with any grapes left on are the Syrah and Cinsault in the amphitheatre. All the vines on the upper slopes are completely naked.

Today we took a sample of 200 of each variety of grapes, picked at random, down to the cave co-operative to be tested. We stood in line with all the other vigneron waiting for Mme La Cave to squish our grapes and tell us the potential alcohol. When they have gathered all the results they can then declare when we can harvest our grapes and deliver them off to the cave.

Our grapes all came out higher than anyone else's with our Syrah having a potential alcohol of 15.4%. That's enormous and all the other wine-growers had between 10.5% and 12.5%. Ours are this high because we have a relatively low yield, but of high quality thanks to very heavy pruning in the winter. Now we have to wait until the average is high enough, then we get the go ahead. We have all our buddies lined up to go at the drop of a hat and the trailer is loaded with dozens of buckets, crates, secateurs, rubber gloves and sun tan lotion.

Now we just need a date. It's all very exciting. This is how the vines look today. 

Well it had to happen. We'd been looking at the muscat grapes for ages, tasting and wondering when the Cave would put out a call for the grapes to be picked. We took a selection off to our friends, Hans & Christa, from Domaine Bourdic to test. On squishing the muscat sample and squirting some of the juice onto his shiny refractometer, Hans let out a guffaw and declared they were already too mature to make wine, unless we were prepared to wait to make a sweet 'tardive' later. We don't have enough for that, so we just picked them.

And the guests squashed them in buckets using their very clean feet, and squeezed the slush through an Ikea muslin curtain. Who needs a pressoir? Well we do actually, and one's on order, but it hasn't arrived yet.

We gave gallons away and we've all had glass after glass of the sweetest, most luscious juice imaginable. It doesn't last long so it's a good excuse to dive in head first.