CRICKET & LUNCH BREAKS

We only harvest grapes when they’re properly ripe. Grapes that are properly ripe are juicy and bursting with sugary goodness. It’s important that this is the case, because without that sugar there will be no booze, and without that booze we’re wasting a lot of time and energy making smoothies. Supermarket fruit and veg aisles may have dulled most folks to what proper ripe fruit is, when it’s grown properly. Ripe fruit explodes. Ripe grapes burst from within like nothing you’ve ever seen. Their innards are sticky, viscous, globular fleshy lumps of what is essentially one of nature’s very own candies. As they are nature’s very own candies, the entirety of nature seems to want to munch on them. In the vines they bring down wild boar from the hills, who have destroyed whole tracts of our Syrah vines. In fact, the boar are so fond of the Syrah that we’ve actually named a Syrah after them.

I avoid picking grapes at every opportunity. I’m not good at it and seem incapable of improving. So I try to avoid it. But sometimes I can’t. You do what you’re told at vintage, and sometimes you’re told to pick grapes.

 

We meet in the morning, in a parking lot above Collioure, on the roundabout by the cemetery. Already, pastel pinks and blues spread amongst the twilight grey sky. An older Audi pulls up and from it a tall, white-haired man with wire specs and a battered white polo shirt emerges. His clothes hang loose and his hair is thinning but still mane-like. Andy introduces us and his handshake is firm. His name is Yves, he’s a retired journalist who owns some vines, though not the ones we’re picking today.

Philippe arrives with the truck and we follow him up to Le Rimbau, the high hills behind the town. The valleys form natural amphitheatres; terraced with vines, criss-crossed with lanes, paths, roads and dry-stone gutters. Cork oak forests border the vines giving home to countless wild boar.

We park at the top of the Catala vineyard and the rest of the pickers arrive. Pickers come in all shapes and sizes. Some are Gallic caricatures: thin, goateed and with a rolled cigarette hanging permanently from the corner of their mouths. One year, there was a South Pacific rugby player; mountainous, earning extra cash between weekly matches. Some work in the vines all year round, others are vendangeurs, here just for the season. They live on campsites or in cheap flats, drink wine, smoke dope and, hopefully, work hard.

Everyone grabs a bucket and a pair of secateurs. The vineyard is cone-shaped, wide at the top and then tapering down to a narrow point at the bottom of the hill. It faces south/south-east, getting as much sun as possible. The upper half is properly terraced with drywall, while the lower plantings sit untamed on the slope. The vines are Grenache Gris, and their bunches are ripe and dark. Some of the vines have been shaped by the wind and lean awkwardly away from the source of the gales.

Philippe tells me not to pick anything ridden with rot, while Andy warns me away from ‘second set’. Second set are bunches that develop later and higher up the vine. They look perfect; tiny bunches that rarely bear any blemishes of the season. They’re easier to find and to pick and never have any bugs crawling through them. They appear as an idealised aesthetic concept of a bunch of wine grapes. So of course you can’t pick them. They’re under ripe. It’s the enormous bunches, bursting with ripe fruit and grown so large some need two hands to guide into the bucket, with the odd berry blemish and the occasional smooshed grape, the ones hidden under a thicket of leaves, twisted between two branches of vine, clutched by the small green tendrils of vine creep, whose stems are obscured by the sheer mass of fruit ripened by a summer of the Mediterranean sun, those are the ones that need to be picked. When it’s Grenache of any tint, there’s a whiff of honeysuckle accompanying the bunches as they drop into the bucket.

The slope is steep; precarious, and it gets steeper as we work down the vines. We pick as we descend and as we get further down we reach the rows that cannot be ploughed, even by horse. On either side the underbrush encroaches.

Once we reach the bottom we about-face and pick on ascent. The schist terrain is loose, bordering on unstable. Rocks like shards slip under foot and the pickers’ feet start many a mini avalanche.

Old Grenache vines, Noir, Gris or Blanc, begin to look more and more like the wrong side is buried. They twist and tangle, looking like a hydra or the Kracken. Gnarled and knotted, the strong Mediterranean sun bleaches the bark and, were it not for the luminous green of the dinner-plate sized leaves, you would think they were dead. The canopies are large, important to protect the grapes from that beating sun. However, the leaves combined with the labyrinthine branches make picking the bunches somewhat less straightforward than those of those tidy trellised rows that appear in all the pictures. The vines don’t grow tall, they grow out; they spread their tendrils as wide as can be. To the uninitiated it can be a tricky business. You’re snipping blind. Secateurs happen to be very sharp. It’s very easy to slice a finger and not realise it until you see the blood falling on the schist.

The pickers joke and smoke and grumble and make great pace ascending the vineyard. Aside from rolling or lighting their smokes they don’t stop for anything. Once their buckets are full, they empty them into the porteur’s tub.

The porteur’s job is unenviable. Strapped to his back sits a conical white plastic tub that can hold over 50 kilograms of grapes. The tub has curved lips on either side, so that when the porteur empties it, he just tips sideways towards a waiting comporte. He steps precariously from picker to picker, and then up through the rows of vines, back to the trucks and comportes. The mini avalanches that perturb the pickers pose more of a threat to the porteur. You wouldn’t know it to watch him, imperturbable, the shards of schist slipping down the slope beneath his feet. Just a brief pause to collect himself and up he climbs. He’s in constant motion and needs to work even quicker than the pickers. No one wants to wait on the porteur.

As the sun rises higher towards noon, so too do we as we pick vine after vine. The heat creeps up on you as the morning fades. I realise too late that I didn’t drink any water before we left the house and the drums start in my temples. Standing up from each vine thrusts a blade into my head and I need a second or two to get my bearings. Halfway back up the vines I drop a rotten bunch onto the ground and the head picker starts swearing. He chats to Andy and Andy chats to me. I’m dropping too much fruit. Being too picky.

And I learned an important lesson: fruit isn’t perfect, and seeking perfect fruit is a luxury that few wineries can afford. Vineyards are not the fresh produce section of a supermarket. My idea of grapes and the reality was somewhat disjointed. A bunch of healthy grapes with a section suffering from rot? Pull the rotted bit off and keep going.

Suitably chastised, I do keep going, but ever slower. My head is now in constant pain with dehydration and the giggles of the other growers begin to prey on my confidence. I feel their eyes, and in my imagination my incompetence grows with every bunch that falls into my bucket. In my mind, they laugh at my slowness. In reality, they laugh at my presence. They cannot believe that I am here willingly, on my holiday. The idea that their brutal work is something people would pursue as some sort of perverse recreation is hilarious to them. Understandably so, I suppose.

We reach the top and the last porteur tub tips into a comporte and we decamp to the next vineyard. It is tiny, well under a hectare, twice as steep as Catala and incredibly narrow. This is Consolation, just by the L’ermitage de Notre Dame de Consolation. A tiny sliver of steep ground, sparsely planted mostly with Grenache Gris. The base of the vineyard is also the base of the valley, a seeming subtropical forest of odd undergrowth hugging the banks of the stream that runs only when the rains fall.

I’ve lost interest in keeping pace and my speed is determined only by how much pain my head can take as we go. None of the other pickers have slowed, or even seem terribly tired. It’s afternoon now and the sun is beating down. I leap over a small gully and bend down to start on a vine when someone shouts at me. Another important lesson learned. Not all the vineyards are separated by something so obvious as drywall, and the small drainage gully I leapt over turned out to be a property marker as well. Picking other people’s vines is frowned upon, because it is stealing and it’s not rocket science to work out who’s responsible. These are cash crops, and growers make little enough for their work as it is.

Once again chastised, I move on and find a vine with peculiar grapes. They’re red wine coloured, with the translucency of an aged Burgundy. This confuses me as grapes don’t tend to be the colour of the wine they produce, whether it’s red or white. Andy has no idea what they are. The bunches are long and the berries are big. They look like eating grapes. We pick them anyway. They turned out to be a rare variety called San Sebastien.

We’re finished by 14.30. The pickers climb onto the back of the truck and from nowhere a box of wine appears, joints are sparked and the engine fires up. They disappear down the dirt road towards town leaving a cloud of dust and echoes of laughter to mark their presence. I hobble towards the car, my legs battered, head pounding and hands bleeding in various places. As I collapse into the passenger seat, Andy asks how I liked picking.

‘I think I prefer working in the winery.’

At the winery, processing grapes brings its own menagerie. Wasps, hornets, earwigs, spiders, daddy longlegs and strange white/translucent arachnids all seek the grapes’ nectar or, in the spiders’ case, those seeking the nectar. Winemakers are not immune to arachnophobia, and I’ve yet to meet someone not a little unnerved by a three inch hornet, so there is the odd bit of flailing and freaking out whilst shifting comportes.

So as we shift these great plastic baskets of explodingly ripe grapes, our grip gets steadily worse, slicked with must. Must gets everywhere. Grape innards get everywhere. You bend down and look at your loading partner, waiting for the nod to lift and upturn. It’s important to nod, to know what the other is doing, as by this point the trailer is slick and dangerous. You press down on your feet, to make sure they won’t slip. And then you lift and tip, upending comporte after comporte into the press. After a while, it’s the momentum alone that keeps you going. If it’s fucking bastard comportes, your fingers begin to lock in shape – it’s best to leave them like that until the truck is empty.

As the press fills, you need to take breaks and spread the grapes evenly in the cylinder, to fit as many per pressing as possible. At Coume del Mas, we press in small batches – 18–20 comportes per pressing. At Mas Cristine, it’s a bigger press, and we’ll try to get as many as 40 comportes in. So 2,000 kilos of grapes. We’ll run the press three times a day when all the whites are coming in. So that’s 6,000 kilos, loaded by hand, before the day is done.

Once the press is full, we slam the door shut and make sure everything’s in place. Then we plug it in. You never fill the press when it’s plugged in. It’s not so much that there’s a risk of you falling in and the bag inflating and pressing you in with the grape juice, though that is indeed the stuff of nightmares. It’s more the relentlessness of something as simple as rotating the cylinder. It could snap off a limb and shatter bone. And so it sits unplugged while we fill it.

We set some manner of programme and it twirls around, the grate facing down and a wash of free-run juice pours forth. This is the liquid that needs no coaxing, only gravity, that comes from the weight of the grapes upon themselves and their own vitality, that they were already at bursting point and just needed a little push to share. Press programmes work in stages, starting at lower atmospheric pressures and gradually increasing over the course of a few hours. The juice from the lower pressures is the purest; the fruitiest; the sweetest. As the pressure increases and the liquid left over decreases, the contact with the skins and stems and pips leads to more phenolic juice. We call them secondary flavours. You don’t want too much late press juice. Have you ever chewed on a stick? The last presses are basically squeezing juice out of sticks. We taste at every phase to make sure the juice is still balanced and tastes in no way of sticks. When it starts to taste of sticks, we switch tanks, and save what’s called the ‘press juice’ separately. The sound of hydraulics and pumps hammers around and then there is the shriek as the bag deflates.

The press is thorough. It rolls around, allowing the fruit to distribute evenly, and then the bag slowly inflates, squeezing the berries against the walls, their juices pouring forth. The bag then deflates and once again the cylinder rotates, mixing the pulverised berries around before it stops and the bag starts to fill again, this time at a higher pressure.

As the press does its job, we do ours. Comportes need to be cleaned before they go back into the truck for more grapes, so while the press works, we use a pressure hose to rinse all the skins and bugs and must off of the plastic baskets. Grape must left untended in the sunshine can be dangerous. It can start to ferment or oxidise and contaminate or infect new grapes coming in or even affect other juice pre-ferment. It’s not guaranteed to happen, in fact it’s a longshot, but the chances of it happening become a lot higher if you don’t practice good hygiene. I’m probably going to mention this a lot, but much of winemaking is cumulative; it’s about good practice and repetition. If you have great soils, climate, vines and fruit, most of your job is done for you (by done for you, I mean that you have to spend every day taking care of your vines to make sure that both they and the fruit they bear are great). Intervention with the wine should be kept to a minimum. But intervention can come from man or microbes, and to prevent the latter everything has to be kept clean. Grape detritus gets everywhere and must be cleaned away. It’s not quite operating theatre level of clean, but it’s a close as we can get under the circumstances.

As the tray beneath the press fills with juice, we hit the pump and it sucks the liquid through and into a tank. All the whites go into tank first, even those that will eventually go into barrel for their fermentation. They stay in tank for a day or two, which allows the solids, or lees, to settle to the bottom, leaving remarkably clear juice. Gravity is incredible.

Wine hoses are plastic reinforced with coiled metal, and the valves at either end are stainless steel. The standard size that we use has the diameter of a clenched fist. We fasten the hoses to the lips of the tanks with a supply of tattered bungee cords whose elasticity has all but faded. A badly secured hose loses wine. A hose valve without the small rubber washer to seal it loses wine (extra rubber washers are stored in almost every available space in case of emergency). Losing wine is the ultimate sin. Personal injury, though discouraged, is preferable to losing wine. Everything bar a broken bone or the loss of a limb should be sacrificed for the sake of grapes and wine.

While I’m talking about personal safety, it’s important to remind those beginning to get romantic thoughts about winemaking that there is nothing cuddly in a winery. The materials are steel, oak, hardened plastic, epoxy and sometimes concrete. The edges are sharp and hard. Something as simple as the steel end of a hose banging against your shin can wind you with the pain. Quite a lot of the work is done at the top of a precariously stationed ladder. Your safety is very much your responsibility. If you hurt yourself, make sure it isn’t serious. If it is, tell someone, if it isn’t, shut up and deal with the pain. Because everyone is hurt. Everyone got their fingers caught between loaded comportes, or pulled something trying to lift something, or smacked their knee on the metal end of a hose. Everyone is bruised somewhere and bleeding somewhere. No one got enough sleep and the coffee is utterly revolting. The taste wakes you up more than the caffeine does.

Pumps are a pain. Frequently you flip the switch and the direction is wrong, pumping air into the wine you’re supposed to be pulling through. At Coume del Mas, there’s a set of power plugs that somehow inverts the default direction of everything that gets plugged into them. So the grape escalator (which is exactly what it sounds like) goes down instead of up, and you have to be savvy when using the pump as the plug turns it all into opposite day. I’m not sure why this happens. I’m not sure why it’s never been fixed. It’s become one of those things you forget to tell the newbie, and then have to rush to hit the big red emergency stop button on whatever piece of equipment is moving backwards. Everything electrical in a winery has a big red emergency stop button.

The grapes define the day. You work until most are processed – you never want to leave too many in cold storage overnight. Ideally, none at all.

Lunch comes when it can. Sometimes it’s early, sometimes it’s late. The pickers have to eat, as do the winemakers, though the pickers tend to eat first. The winemakers process the pickers’ last load at the winery and then, if all’s going well, the winemakers overturn comportes, making them into stools and a lunch table, and out comes bread and cheese and wine and pâté and water and saucisson and salad. We rinse the wineglasses with the pressure hose and pour glasses for everyone. Nobody drinks too much wine. A glass or two. I always try to drink as much water as I can. We sit and talk about the grapes coming in later that afternoon, or how the ferments are going. At Coume del Mas there’s a local guy who brings us his homemade sausage made from pig’s head. Don’t flinch; it’s delicious (though I’ll admit, I flinched at first). Philippe has family in Roquefort country, and one year, towards the end of vintage, he brought down some artisan Roquefort cheese, wrapped in foil stamped with ‘Not for sale, for the manager only’. We ate it on the loading lift of the refrigerated lorry, smearing it on baguettes and adding pig head sausage to it, washing it down with some good Bordeaux from a right-bank satellite appellation. We drank a little more wine than usual that afternoon. Kiwi Johnny, my partner in crime that vintage, said it was one of the best lunches ever. I couldn’t disagree. The cheese was perfect; sweet, creamy, musty and decadent. It would have been the centrepiece of a cheeseboard in any number of Michelin star restaurants, and yet there we were, stained, caked in grape guts, smearing great chunks of the stuff on baguettes whilst waving the flies away. Time stops for a lunch like that, and even though we know we have to get back to it, for a minute or two we could be anywhere and nowhere else. It’s not about making wine, but working hard and rewarding that with something more than just a sandwich and a can of coke.

It’s tempting to stuff your face, but as soon as you’ve refilled, you get back to the inevitable. Leftovers are squeezed into the fridge between half-empty bottles of wine and various bits and pieces. Glasses are rinsed with the hose and put somewhere they hopefully won’t get broken. But they will get broken. The glasses in the winery always get broken.

Getting back into it after lunch is harder than starting in the morning. It takes a good hour to work off the food drowsiness. I try to make myself useful doing things that do not involve heavy machinery or precision. Sadly, there’s nothing at the winery that doesn’t require one of those things or both. That’s also one of the reasons why it’s important to avoid hangovers. Vintage involves constantly drinking and tasting, and the evenings involve beer and medicinal gin. Usually the exhaustion is too great for any large scale partying to be done. But then there are some nights that get away from you.

The hangovers stick to us like gum to a shoe. The night before involved fish pie cooked by Kirsten, too much wine, too many beers and quite a lot of whisky. Andy, Kiwi Johnny and I drank as though we had didn’t have to work in the morning. It all started in the Sola with beers for Johnny and I. It was just a quick one. Then we popped into the wine shop to pick up a bottle or two for dinner before heading up to Andy and Kirsten’s flat for dinner. Kirsten loves fish pie and crafts about as brilliant an example of the dish as you’re likely to find anywhere. It tasted brilliant. We drank a bottle of Olivier Pithon’s lovely white along with it, followed by one of Gauby’s less expensive offerings, and before long felt the need to walk off the huge amount of food consumed. We went back to the Sola and then to the Templiers, where I might have fallen into an argument with crazy Ronnie. Gin and whisky happened. Andy managed to find us a cab back to Argelès. The drive back over the hills felt like an amusement park ride. Johnny told me later that I had an incredible discussion with the cab driver in spite of him not understanding a word I said.

Kiwi Johnny came to Scotland to play rugby. Along the way he wound up getting a job at Luvians, the wine merchant that was home to both Andy and myself for a while. Quite a while, if truth be told. In spite of coming from a wine producing country, Johnny’s expertise was more based around beer and rugby. But he took to wine well, and when it came time to move back to New Zealand, he got a job at a local winery and started working crush (new world term for vintage) as well. Johnny has the itchiest feet I know. Any cash he makes gets put in a pot for the next trip somewhere. Africa, Asia, North America, Europe – I think next up is South America. He might even be there already.

He doesn’t often retrace his steps, but making wine in France gave him a good opportunity to revisit some old friends in the UK while earning some cash to support the whole endeavour. So he joined us one year and busted his ass making good wine with us. That vintage we shared a flat in Argelès and ate a lot of pizza. The flat was tiny, with just a curtain to separate the kitchen from the sitting room and no bedroom door. We slept in bunk beds and were usually asleep by around 9-ish. Johnny was delighted to drink the big, rustic reds we made, as it made a nice break from the New Zealand Pinot Noir he was constantly exposed to. It was the year of cricket in the winery and Kirsten’s incredible fish pie.

 

We sit at Coume del Mas and wait for the truck to arrive. It’s bringing Syrah. I’ve drunk two litres of water and am still thirsty. Blinking hurts and the sun insists on shining as brightly as possible. It’s not just the direct sunlight, but the reflection of it from off the sea and stones. I wear my sunglasses and speak little. My mouth feels like I’ve been chewing paste. Johnny shakes his head as it hangs low. Somewhere in the distance, deep in the winery, I hear Andy rummaging about. Sat in the sun on an old pallet, hoping for the rays to burn out the hangover somehow. It’s just the three of us; everyone else is picking. Not us. We couldn’t deal with sharp things today. No one talks, which is good. Occasionally one of us will sigh and comment about how dreadful we feel. I bury my face in my hands and rub the ever-accumulating sleep from my eyes. Andy has finished his rummaging and appeared from the cold room with three full sample glasses, all with a thin sheen of condensation courtesy of the cool liquid held inside. He hands one to Johnny and one to me and then swirls and sniffs the last one for himself. We do the same. It’s rich and slightly sweet to smell, with clotted cream, pineapples and candied melons. It smells amazing. I take a sip and draw a bit of air over it, making that slurping noise that wine nerds make. The sip changes the world. It scrapes the glue from my mouth whilst invigorating my senses.

I don’t know if it’s a classic hair-of-the-dog situation, but within minutes, we’re all feeling better. Andy took the wine from some reserve barrels put aside for an experimental bottling. It was all white from the Catala vineyard that we’d picked the year before, that afternoon I nearly collapsed from a more natural state of dehydration. It tastes like pure sunshine. After five minutes and half a glass, we start to resemble functional human beings again. We talk about the wine and how good it tastes straight from the barrel. It’s 100% Grenache Gris, the strange grey/pink grape that gives this whole region some spectacular wines. Bolstered by summery nectar, Andy grabs a couple of barrel staves and a couple of silicon bouchons. Bouchons are the bungs we use to close up the barrels. Some are wood, some are glass and some are silicon. They frequently get lost and it’s important to keep a stash of extras, just like the rubber washers for the hose valves. The extras are particularly important if you play winery cricket.

Winery cricket, as far as I know, is a natural evolution of shop cricket. Shop cricket was invented at Luvians in St Andrews, the small but extraordinary wine merchant that myself, Andy and Kiwi Johnny all worked at one point or another. Shop cricket consisted of fashioning a cricket ball out of several layers of the tissue paper we used to wrap up bottles, often formed with the aid of some packing tape and, if we were feeling industrious and focusing on detail, two thick strings would be stuck on as well, to act as seams. We had a yellow plastic toy cricket bat, and yellow plastic stumps. We set the pitch up to do the least amount of damage to the bottles of wine on the shelves. You might think it was a recipe for disaster, playing a stick and ball game in a shop full of expensive wine, and you’d be right. It was ridiculous, and there were many moments after a hard-hit six that we held our breath as the makeshift ball rattled off into the Burgundy shelves. But somehow we avoided disaster.

Winery cricket continues this long tradition of playing cricket where we shouldn’t. Instead of a toy cricket set and a ball of tissue, however, it’s a barrel stave and a silicon bouchon. We use the silicon bouchons because they bounce brilliantly. With no sign of our Syrah and a need to shake the boozy rust off, we double check the tanks to make sure the hats are all on, and set up with the batter standing in front of the cool room facing out towards the main door. We figure this reduces the chance of knocking the bouchon up into the attic where it will get lost among barrels of Grand Cru and Rancio Banyuls.

The bouchon is not round like a ball, nor does it bounce like a ball. It takes our dull senses some time to track the odd bounce and manage to hit it with any degree of accuracy. My job is to field on those rare occasions that Andy gets a hit. Johnny’s bowling. The few remaining empty tanks clang and echo loudly as the bung bounces about. Eventually I make a catch and Andy’s out. I move to bowl, Johnny grabs the stave-bat and Andy fields. Johnny smacks one that bounces off the tank that’s holding the Schistes, but we don’t see where it goes after that. The day’s getting warmer and we wander out into the sun, cricket on pause due to the missing bouchon. Along the road in the distance we see the Petit Forestier refrigerated lorry, full of our Syrah, winding its way towards us. We drain the glasses of wine and get ready to go back to work.

Most days there will only be one more lot of grapes in after lunch. The heat in the Roussillon makes it foolish, and a little dangerous, to pick too late in the day. Once those grapes are pressed or de-stemmed (white or red), then comes the everything else. If there are reds in tank, fermenting away, then it will be time for remontage. I like remontage. That’s when you attach a hose to the higher valve at the bottom of a tank (called the racking valve) to a pump, and then take another hose and bring it to the top of the tank. It’s called a pump-over in English. It’s like stirring a stew, and you do it for a lot of the same reasons. When wine ferments, the yeast is respiring, creating a huge amount of CO2. That gas pushes all the solids – the skins and few stems that avoided the de-stemmer – up, separating it all from the fermenting liquid below. That solid mass is called the cap. Being separated from the liquid causes the cap to dry out, and so what we do twice a day, once in the morning and once in the afternoon, is pump the wine over the cap to get it wet. This serves many purposes. Dried caps begin to smell awful. While CO2 is protecting the wine, the cap is more exposed to the elements, so it could start its own little bacterial ferment and begin ruining the wine. It can also cause the wine to get too reductive, asphyxiating the liquid, leading to volatile sulphides and a nasty, eggy aroma. Running the wine through the cap alleviates this, and extracts more colour and secondary flavours from the skins. It also helps to aerate the wine, softening it somewhat and bringing out more elegant aromatics. Most importantly, it can be fun – there’s something incredibly joyful about holding your hand over the end of the hose, pressurising the warm, fermenting juice so that you can reach all of the cap in the tank evenly. It’s hands on; a tactile connection, quite literally feeling the juice as it turns to wine. And you can smell the change as you pump over; it gets fresher, sweeter, more perfumed as the juice wets the cap and they exchange between themselves. It can be a heady experience, and not just because of the CO2 rising from the ferment (though that does mean you have to take great care at the top of the tank). Some wineries do five pump-overs a day. We do two. Our style is what’s called ‘reductive’ which means a lot of things wine, but for these purposes it can be read as anaerobic. We carefully control the amount of air the wine is exposed to, in order to preserve the freshness of the wine as well as reducing its exposure to potential contaminants. Reductive winemaking is something of a relative thing. We’re very reductive in style for the region, the Roussillon, that we’re in. If we were making modern Chablis or Alsace Riesling, we might be considered careless with the air exposure we allow.

All of our reds tend to kick off on their own. We don’t need to inoculate with any particular yeast strain; wild ferments just sort of start. It doesn’t seem to take very much time, either. I remember one 20 hecto tank of Carignan at Mas Cristine that exploded into ferment the very first night after picking. The tank fairly full, we gassed it with CO2 (to prevent oxidation), put the hat on and inflated the rubber seal (think the inside of a bike tyre – now give it a metre and a half diameter, and there you go – it runs around the rim of the tank’s hat, forming an airtight seal when inflated). We cleaned up, called it a day and most likely headed to Café Sola for a few beers and a bit of a chin wag with Laurent. Donald may well have been there, and he may well have shouted us a drink or two. If Donald was there, he likely introduced us to some new friend or acquaintance and perhaps we stayed a beer longer than we really should have. The next morning, we walked into Mas Cristine and it was as though a grape bomb had gone off. The hat from the tank was flipped over a few feet away from the tank and arising a good ten inches above the lid was the cap. All the skins and stems had risen to the top, pushed up violently by the CO2 expelled from the respiring yeast.

In this case, the cap had risen a bit higher than it had room to do so. As well as blowing the hat off the tank, strewn around the winery sat clumps of skins and stems and small pools and streams of deep purple rivers, bubbling in places, finding their ways towards the drains. The winery was a bit of a mess. We set about cleaning up and came up with a genius plan to rack some of the fermenting juice into another tank so that the cap could settle without wreaking havoc upon the winery.

So that’s what happens when reds start their ferment. They separate into two entities, the cap and the juice. As well as remontage to deal with the cap, there is also pigeage.

Pigeage usually starts before fermentation, and is the act of punching the cap down into the juice, and like pumping-over, it extracts more flavour and texture from the skins. As this can start before the cap actually forms, this is one of those jobs that starts off really easy: it’s just plunging a long pole with a round, flat end that’s covered in long prongs through a cool mix of juice and grapes, again, sort of like stirring a stew. Except it’s plunging, not stirring. Then ferment kicks off and the cap rises. Sometimes it’s easy. Sometimes you just put a bit of weight on the end of the pole, and there’s a satisfying give as the prongs and pole disappear under the mass of grapes. The walls often give way at the sides, like when you dig a hole in the wet sand at the beach. There’s not quite the childish glee that comes with spraying the hose in remontage, but perhaps a more physical satisfaction that comes from punching down the grapes. If you can. Sometimes the cap is too thick, so thick that you can stand on it and jump up and down on your pigeage stick and it won’t budge an inch. That’s when you get the hoses and pump ready for remontage.

One of the other jobs while waiting for fruit is taking the temperature and density readings of all the wines fermenting. This should be done every day. It’s a long, tedious job. I remember hearing about one stagaire in Burgundy for whom it was their only job; barrel after barrel, sample after sample, morning until evening. It works like this: you take a 250ml graduated cylinder, a wine thief and the most fragile, breakable thing in the winery, the hydrometer, which is basically a weighted thermometer. You draw a sample from a barrel with the wine thief and pour it into the graduated cylinder. Because the wine is fermenting, it’s fizzy, cloudy and foamy, steadfastly refusing to settle down. If it’s Muscat, then it’s also covered in Muscat scum, because that’s what happens when you make Muscat; you get covered in scum. You then dunk the hydrometer into the foaming tube and try to read what the temperature is and what the specific gravity is. Usually there’s a period where the foam obscures an accurate reading while the hydrometer bobs up and down like a buoy. It requires patience and a steady hand. I’ve not the latter, so I need more of the former. The higher the specific gravity, the more time the ferment needs. The higher the temperature, the faster you run to either Andy or Philippe and ask them what the fuck you should do.

Specific gravity readings are particularly important for wines that are going to be fortified. At Mas Cristine, this will be the Muscat de Rivesaltes and Rivesaltes Ambré that we make, and at Coume del Mas it will be the Banyuls both red and white. Fortifying a wine is the process of adding very strong alcohol (in our case it’s about 95% and comes from the distillery that we ship all of our marc to at the end of the day) quite early on in the fermentation to stop it in its tracks, leaving considerable residual sugar. In France, somewhat confusingly, this style is called Vin Doux Naturel. For all these wines, we tend to let nature do the initial ferment, due to fear that induced fermentation would be so strong that the spirit added would fail to halt it, leading to a bone dry, ridiculously strong and probably unpleasant concoction. With the Muscat in particular, the timing can be so sensitive that Philippe or Andy might, if the right point isn’t reached at a reasonable hour, have to check up on the tanks in the middle of the night. One year, Andy had to pop in and fortify the Muscat at Mas Cristine at 4 in the morning.

The spirit for fortifying comes in large blue plastic barrels with two sealed holes on the top. The seals are official-looking, because they’re officially sealed. As well as being a precise operation in terms of winemaking, fortification has to be reported in advance to the authorities. You can only buy fortifying spirit through official channels, and only in the precise quantities necessary for the amount of wine you intend to fortify. It’s strictly regulated. Officials can show up on the day you declare you’re going to fortify to confirm you’re actually doing it. It’s never happened on my watch, but the powers that be reserve the right to do so.

It’s unnecessary with us, of course, because we’re all lovely law-abiding citizens. But raw spirit is a potent thing, and in less law-abiding hands can be used to create any sort of hideous moonshine or counterfeit drink that took your fancy. Other regions that fortify often use a slightly softer, brandy-like spirit (Niepoort in Portugal get theirs from an actual Cognac house, or so I’m told). Regardless of where you are, the spirit must be as neutral as possible, meaning that all the depth and complexity comes from the wine itself, rather than what’s added to it. In Portugal they refer to the fortifying spirit as the ‘invisible hand’, as its influence should be as subtle as possible.

The actual act of fortifying is just a manner of getting the pump set up with a hose going into the fermenting tank, and a hose with a long, narrow nozzle attachment like you’d find on the end of a hoover to fit into the blue plastic barrel. Pump the spirit through, let it all settle, and then take the measurements to make sure that the fermentation has been stopped and the alcohol levels are what they should be. If it’s Muscat or Banyuls Blanc, it’s quite simple, because they’re white grapes and have been pressed straight off their skins after picking.

For Banyuls Rouge, it’s a bit more difficult. You need to get as much extraction from the skins both before and during their very brief fermentation as possible. There’s no luxury of several weeks bubbling away under a cap that gets daily showers in juice to get all the nuance and depth from the skins and pips. You’ve got to get your feet wet. When the must pump, which is the daddy pump in the winery, complete with the daddy hose, looking like a cyborg anaconda, finishes pumping the super-ripe Grenache Noir grapes into the tank that either the Galateo or Quintessence Banyuls will ferment in, a lucky couple of winemakers will rinse their legs with water and a bit of sulphur dioxide and get thigh deep into the tank to squish the grapes under foot. Feet are very good for squishing grapes. They tear the skins and release the flesh without tending to damage the pips at all, thus preventing the release of harsher, greener tannins into the wine. They do it this way in Portugal as well, though at this stage the grapes are put in shallow vessels called lagars, which are better suited for foot-pressing, and don’t require ladders on the inside of a tank to get people out.

Up until the 70s, most of the wine from this part of the world was fortified, like Port, Sherry or Madeira. It is not a coincidence that these also happen to be very hot places to grow grapes. Fortification originated in these parts. As far as history knows, it was a physician named Arnaud de Ville-neuve, credited as a Catalan though born in Valencia, who came up with the process. Using Arab texts recovered from the re-conquest of Spain, he is the first known rectifier of spirit, successfully distilling pure alcohol. He worked out that by adding certain quantities of this potent, pure spirit to fermenting wine he could stop the fermentation in its tracks, preserving the sweetness of the wine but also retaining freshness and adding resilience to spoilage. All fortified wines subsequently followed this principle, be it Port, Madeira, Sherry or Marsala.

Villeneuve lived in an interesting time. It was the aftermath of the brutal Albigensian clearances and accusations of heresy on matters of both theology and scholarship were hurled in every direction. Being a heretic was much like being a witch in 17th-century Salem, or a communist during the time of McCarthy. It was the preferred means of undermining a rival’s reputation. Villeneuve’s scholarship made him controversial and a target. Often the accusations of heresy levelled against him would come while he was in service of the church in one way or another. It was, allegedly, the accusations of heresy from the ecclesiasts at the University of Paris that forced him to flee France for Sicily.

And yet in the midst of such controversy and various sentences levelled on his life by reigning clergymen and nobility, Villeneuve managed to achieve remarkable scholarship and practical application of his theories. His book Liber de Vinis was considered to be the definitive tome on the subject of wine; so much so that when the printing press was invented, it was the first book on wine to be printed on a wide scale and translated from the Latin to German. He lends his name to the medical school at the University of Montpellier and to several hospitals in Spain. And, appropriately, to a cave co-operative in the Roussillon (I’ve not tried their wines).

Villeneuve was, first and foremost, a physician. His work with wine, while extensive, was based on a fervent belief in its inherent medicinal properties. This was nothing new. Since the beginnings of winemaking, medics have spoken of its healing properties, millennia before having the ability to explain why it had healing properties. His belief in medicine and science often brought him into conflict with the church, and he was frequently in and out of excommunications, with popes and kings often trading pardons, shelter and notices. That he was held in high regard, even after his death, is indisputable. That it was his work on wine which was the first to be translated and printed using the printing press, in 1478, is testimony to that.

Of course, this being 700 and some change years ago, there’s some doubt as to whether Arnaud is the actual author of the text. Certain mediaevalists like to debate it. As a recovering mediaevalist myself, I can understand the urge to question sources and take certain attributions with a pinch of salt. It’s a driving foundation of the discipline. I nearly fell into it as a career. That first wine job I took was meant to be part-time while I pursued a postgraduate degree in Mediaeval History. I’m often tempted back to that path, and wonder what would have happened if I had not strayed from academia to wine. However, this is not a mediaeval history paper. It’s a story about winemaking, and for the sake of a story about winemaking, I’m going to assume that Arnaud (or Arnau, or Arnaldus) de Villeneuve (or de Vilanova, Ville-Neuve or Villanovanus) both authored the Liber de Vinis and came up with the processes and techniques that he’s credited with. They say history is written by the winners; Villeneuve died in a shipwreck on his way to meet the pope. Make of that what you will.

Fortified wines are not as popular as they once were. In France, Banyuls and Rivesaltes used to be the most popular sweet wines in the country. This entire region’s success and purpose was based on fortified wines. Dry table wines were an afterthought until very recently, and demand for them hasn’t filled the vacuum left by the lack of market for the sweet stuff. The big co-ops don’t really know how to respond to it yet. Whether they work it out or not remains to be seen.

Even as a small producer of high-quality wines, finding a market for fortified wine is difficult. It seems, at the moment at least, to be the territory for enthusiastic wine nerds, gaining little traction among the average consumer. The idea of sweet wine brings connotations of bad 70s Liebfraumilch or your granny’s cream sherry. Simply getting people to give Banyuls a taste can be quite a task, and then there are the different classifications. There’s ‘Rimage’ Banyuls, which would be called ‘Vintage’ Banyuls if the folks in Porto hadn’t trademarked the word ‘Vintage’ with regards to fortified wine exclusively to Port (you can’t make this stuff up). Rimage is an old Catalan word for vintage. Grand Cru Banyuls must spend three years in barrel before it can be referred to as ‘Grand Cru’. This is a more oxidative style of wine, whose closest comparison is probably Tawny Port. There’s a lot of very old Grand Cru Banyuls kicking about, but be warned. Most of the years they put on the bottle are rough guesses at best, and often bear very little connection to the actual year of harvest. Frequently, the barrels will have been topped up with wine from other years. It’s not through any malice or intent to deceive that these questionable years are put on the bottles, it’s just that the wines were made in decades before having a specific harvest year was all that important to anyone, winemaker and punter alike.

Last, but most peculiar, is Rancio Banyuls. This is the dryest style of Banyuls, and comes from ‘cooking’ the wine either by storing it somewhere quite hot, or ageing it in glass bon-bons (a bon-bon is a large, rounded bottle, capable of holding several litres – it gets its name from its round shape, like a round sweet) and keeping it on the roof of the cave, allowing direct sunlight to cook the liquid. The result sits somewhere between Sherry and Madeira, but is still remarkably ‘Banyuls-y’.

All of the styles are unique, and within each one is a remarkable variety between producers and individual cuvées. Here’s hoping the punter’s palate returns to appreciating such wines before they disappear, or are reduced to simple curiosities.