LADDERS & HOSES

The last big winemaking job of vintage is pressing the reds. Once the ferment finishes, without the cushion of CO2, the cap falls back into the wine and sinks. The fermented juice picks up added complexity and depth, but you don’t want to keep it there too long as the stalks and skins can contribute too much, leading to over-extraction and tannins that will never soften. For some reds, we’ll press before the ferment has finished. This leads to a lighter, fresher and more fragrant styled wine.

But for the most part, in the quest to remain true to the grapes that thrive on these terraced hillsides, we make big wines, which means we press after ferment. This is often an adventure.

First off, we strain the free juice off the cap. This will go into either tank or barrel, depending on the grape and cuvée. Usually our Syrah goes into barrel and our Grenache goes into tank. This can be a fairly simple, if careful, process, and quite often gravity does most of the hard work, with the pump only coming into use when absolutely necessary. We need to be careful with the pump, as if solids from the cap make it through the strainer, it can muck up the works. As for the strainer, well, it’s basically a big sieve or tea strainer that holds back the solids of the cap. Once all the free juice is racked into its new home, that’s when the fun begins.

If it’s one of the smaller tanks, 2,000 litres or so, it will be on a pallet, which is good as that means we can get the forklift ready. Before we get the forklift, however, first we have to get a ladder, because someone has to get in the tank. Barefoot, with feet and legs rinsed in a mixture of water and sulphur dioxide, they climb a ladder, usually with a shovel and a length of cut off garden hose to use as a snorkel, just in case there’s any lingering, suffocating, CO2 hiding at the bottom of the tank.

Once in the tank, standing atop the mound of skins and pips and stems and lees (dead yeast cells) that takes up about a third of the volume, the wine-o-naut (frequently me), will give the thumbs up to the forklift operator and up the tank will rise so that it is above the door of the press. With the tank on the pallet on the forklift perfectly positioned above the door of the press, the wine-o-naut begins to push the muck out through the door at the bottom of the tank.

It’s disorienting being the wine-o-naut. Usually the tank is stainless steel, and the acoustics manage to amplify everything, but also absolve it of all direction. Every noise comes from 360 degrees and though it’s loud and echoing, it also seems from a distance. The humming pneumatics of the forklift and the sense of lifting outwith your own power. All you can see is a distorted, curved reflection of yourself atop a mound of grape guts; above you is just the blank ceiling of the winery. The team outside shout at you, making sure you’re ok and not suffocating. You shout back that you’re fine, louder than you really need to, because you think you’re further away than just a few feet. You feel further away.

It’s disarming to see the grapes beneath you suddenly begin to slip away, seemingly into nowhere. It’s like standing atop the sands in an hourglass. The folks outside have opened the door at the base of the tank and so starts the outpouring into the press. Gravity only goes so far, and so you use the shovel to push the sticky mass towards the door. It seems somewhat antithetical to survival instinct, to work so hard to get rid of the ground beneath your feet, but even so, you stick to it. As you go you get more careful. As the weight at the bottom of the tank shifts out, the tank becomes more precarious, and your weight becomes far more influential. Leaning too much to one side or the other could result in a drop and quite a lot of damage. By the end you’re on your hands and knees, grabbing the last handfuls of skins and sliding them out. Afterwards, the forklift lowers you down and someone hands you a ladder so that you can climb out. The sun’s brighter, and people’s voices sound a little clearer.

If it’s a big tank, you still need someone in there, there’s just no mucking around with forklifts. Nope, instead you fill the big red comportes with sticky cap and load them into the press by hand. Very similar, in fact, to how you made the whites about a month ago, but a lot more messy. And no fucking bastard comportes. They’re hole-y, and would waste wine.

Pressing reds is heavy work. Once the press is loaded, the remaining juice is squeezed out from the cap. Press juice is aged separately from the free run, just as with the whites we age the higher pressure pressings separately. Bizarrely, our press juice often tends to be a lighter, more floral and elegant sort of wine than our free juice. In a region like Bordeaux for instance, the opposite is true, and in most wine producing regions it’s the case that the juice from the press is much like the last bit of coffee in a cafètiere: backwards and wince-inducing.

Once the reds are all pressed, which can take a fair few days, and the press is sparkling clean (cleaning the press after the reds sucks, and requires an awful lot of hydrogen peroxide), then it’s time to breathe. The wines are in their élevage stage. Maturing and eventually undergoing their malolactic fermentation. There’s a party, but unlike many wine-regions, there’s no bubble-gummy Nouveau to swig. Instead it’s beer and plentiful wine from the previous year. Julien Grill, one of the partners in Mas Cristine and owner of many vines, knows some guys who do incredible spit-roast lamb, rotisserie style, slowly rotated over hot coals for a good three or so hours and so succulently tender that it just melts in the mouth. José, in charge of keeping the vineyards in beautiful shape, will bring some of the world’s finest cured meats from over the border in Spain and, if everyone’s really lucky, Philippe will be on hand with the Roquefort in the special foil. The weight of the last eight weeks is finally lifted, and while there’s still much to be done, the work now is with wine rather than grapes. But for perhaps a few parcels of late harvest vines, whose rich, sweet, sugary raisins will provide for weird and wonderful dessert wine, the harvest is done for the year.

With the winemaking done comes the cleaning. Cleaning after vintage is sort of like cleaning at the end of the day during harvest at the winery. Some days, during harvest, the pickers at Coume del Mas will work a split shift. The winery crew love it when they do. It means that the pickers head home for a siesta while we in the winery press or de-stem or whatever work the colour of the grapes dictates for that day. And then, as the last press cycle winds down, noisily exhaling the last of its compressed air, or the last comporte full of Grenache Noir is unloaded onto the escalator and dropped into the de-stemmer, the vendangeurs return from their naps and start taking apart the equipment and moving it outside the cave to get it cleaned. These are good days, because they tend to mean that I get out of two or three hours’ worth of cleaning and I get to drink beer sooner than normal. Mas Cristine does not have such luxury of staff, and when the winemaking is done for the day, the cleaning begins, and it’s the winemakers that have to do it. However, usually by the time cleaning starts, Julien, who owns and manages most of the vines for Mas Cristine, has cracked open the beers. Julien loves the beers. He’s a proper, rugby-playing Catalan who looked the proudest I have ever seen anyone when he left the winery early one day to watch his six-year-old son’s first rugby match. His and his father’s vines provide much of the fruit for Mas Cristine, and it was through him the whole resurrection of the label happened. It was Julien that first heard that the lease was becoming available for both the vines and the label itself. He approached Philippe as a winemaker and a third guy (who I never met, as he is Champenois and spent most of his time up north, making wine with bubbles) to form a partnership. It was after their first vintage together in 2006 that Philippe realised they needed a winemaker to run Mas Cristine with their full attention, as Philippe couldn’t do both (the harvests overlap too much). All this coincided with Andy finishing his winemaking course in New Zealand and wanting to make wine in France. So Andy joined the band that Julien had put together in the first place.

Julien’s work is essential and his work ethic is admirable. But most importantly, Julien makes sure there’s always beer at Mas Cristine. I remember one year, a few vintages under my belt, sitting on an upturned comporte at the end of the day and drinking a cold wee bottle of Heineken or red label Kronenberg, and telling Julien the Australian saying, that it takes a lot of beer to make good wine. He loved it. He brings it up every year now. And I love that before I start cleaning up, I can swig on a cold brew.

I can’t begin to express how important cleanliness is in a winery. I’ve mentioned it before, I know. It’s the least glamorous secret ingredient in the world. A filthy winery can do all sorts of terrible things to a wine, be it microbial infection or general contamination. Any winemaker will tell you their job is to express their terroir as honestly as possible – none of them want their wine to taste of something that went wrong in the winery. And so everything gets cleaned.

To be honest, cleaning goes on throughout the winemaking, it just intensifies once the day’s winemaking finishes. Throughout the day, you’re rinsing comportes and cleaning tanks and barrels. Big wineries have a proper barrel cleaning station, where you insert a pressurised water gun into the bunghole and spray it clean. After that you burn a sulphur candle in the barrel to clear out any microscopic bugs that the water cannon may have missed.

Comportes get sprayed at high pressure and then left to dry out in the sun. Cleaning big tanks requires ‘product’. Product is essentially a heavy-duty alkali cleaner, and breaks down to two strengths. Really strong is caustic soda. Less strong is hydrogen peroxide. You have to be super careful. Gloves and goggles, or at least sunglasses. In the new world, after using caustic, they then rinse with citric acid to neutralise the alkali (caustic/citric is the phrase they use). In France, citric acid is strictly regulated in wineries to control use when acidifying wine. Therefore, you can’t really use it as a cleaning product. So instead of using caustic, we use the hydrogen peroxide, we have to rinse it with loads and loads of water to wash it clean. In order to spray with ‘product’, you attach a special jug to the end of the hose, like the sort of thing you’d use if you were fertilising the lawn. These jugs were engineered by the lowest bidder, and as such have the annoying tendency to explode in the face of an unwary winemaker cleaning a tank. It can be very satisfying though, hugging a ladder leant against a two or three storey high fermentation vat, spraying around the sides in a circle and watching as it dislodges the clinging sheets of tartaric acid crystals. They dislodge in massive sheets, which is good, as it means you won’t have to climb into the tank with a scrubbing brush and get it off yourself.

Tanks are easy. The press, the de-stemmer: the machinery that makes wine can be extraordinarily difficult to clean. When the final press cycle comes to a halt, after the shrieks of decompression, you clear away the tray and grab the shovels. There’s about a ton and a half of stems and skins to fling into the back of the truck. This is called the marc. If you go to a wine producing area of France, the local brandy is usually called ‘Marc de (insert name of region here)’. Around these parts, it’s Marc de Banyuls. That’s because all these stems and skins are loaded into a truck and shipped over to the local distillery to be made into spirit. The distillery also weighs how much you bring and compares it to how much wine you produce. If there’s a discrepancy, you get fined.

We get fined a lot. Frequently during harvest, the last press won’t finish until well after the distillery’s shut for the day, and having piles of stems and skins rotting outside the winery isn’t terribly good practice, so we’ll dump it in a field that we own and spread it as fertiliser later in the year.

Then you get ready to go in. It’s always unplugged for cleaning. I take off my boots and socks; some folks strip down to their skivvies. Crawling underneath the stainless steel drum is always awkward. You rise up through the hatch into the drum itself. It smells of grapes and stems and there’s very little light. All you’re armed with is a hose. There seems an endless amount of pips and skins squashed flat surrounding you. As much as possible has been emptied, but there’s always remains. There are folds in the inflatable leather bag that hide large handfuls of detritus. At first you spray hoping to stay dry, but under pressure and encased in steel, the water droplets find you and soon you’re soaked to the bone and now you know why some of them strip down to their underwear to do this. You blast the hose along the seams of metal and leather, through the grate, deep into the hole on one side of the drum that always holds far more than you think. You herd it all to the hatch and push the piles of it out onto the ground. Once every thing is clear, you lift yourself up fully into the drum, so that you’re crouching in it, bent over double, and you slide the hatch door as closed as it will go without slicing the top of the hose off. As it slides, it scrapes against all the pips and skins caught in its tracks. Spray and slide, spray and slide, dislodge and clear out every thing that you can. You won’t get it all, no one ever gets it all, but you have to get everything you can see, and you have to know where to look to see. You double check to make sure, knowing that the first thing the next morning, if you haven’t cleaned it right, that’s when the boss will know. He’ll open the press for the first load in the morning and see a pile of crap that you were meant to clean out, and already your day is off to a shitty start.

If you’ve done reds, there’s the de-stemmer, escalator and sorting table to clean. These are a pain in the ass. There are hatches and valves and gears that need to be double and triple checked. The crazy baton-staff core of the de-stemmer needs to be removed from the machine and seen to separately. It’s time-consuming, meticulous work. But you don’t have to crawl into anything. You don’t have to close yourself into a stainless steel drum and keep the thoughts of the bag inflating accidentally, even though it’s unplugged, at bay. It’s just a massive fucking pain in the ass.

When everything’s clean, then everything gets put away. At Coume del Mas it just all rolls into the winery and is set where it needs to be for the next day. At Mas Cristine, there’s more precision needed, as the press barely fits in the winery. Putting it away properly can be delicate and frustrating, because all you want to do at that point is go to the pub. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle, making sure that the press goes in exactly right, and because it weighs over a ton and only one set of wheels swivels, there’s a lot of trial and error, especially at the beginning of harvest, rolling it back into the winery. By the end of harvest, it tends to come a bit easier. You have to be careful though. An inch or two off mark and one of the press legs has fallen into a drainage channel and you need a car jack to get it out again. But once it’s away, and the refrigerated container is locked, and the large, weathered doors to the winery are sealed tight, you can go to the pub.

We groan as we lift ourselves out of the white Modus. The parking lot sits on a hill that overlooks the centre of Collioure, and splits the town in two. There’s a fortress built on the side of the hill that faces the sea. Part of it is a museum and part of it provides training facilities for the French marines. They train frequently. Like most hills here, it’s a schist outcrop whose bare stone is dusty, whose grassy bits overgrow quickly, but in a straggly way, and whose trees vary. One of the local families grazes donkeys on the grass. It gives the donkeys food and keeps the grass tame. Watching the shepherd herd them from wherever up to the hill is quite a sight, stopping traffic on the main road and attempting to communicate with his flock in fits of comedic, eccentric flails and shouts. I don’t think they listen to him. They only respond to him physically pushing them. Somehow he gets them from the hills by the border of Port-Vendres through the southern part of town and to the patches of grass above the parking lot on the hill. He smiles and laughs along the way, dressed in battered but whole clothing, tanned, deep creases in his face from laughter and squinting against the power of the sun by the sea. There’s something dusty and happy about him.

Andy grabs his laptop bag and I sling my rucksack over my shoulder. We’re filthy. Grape skins and pulp and pips stick to our clothes and flesh. I barely lift my legs, more shuffling than walking, relieved that we’re making our way downhill. I allow gravity and momentum to provide energy as I barely have any. The hairs on my legs are matted in great clumps, stuck with grape must. My arms hang heavily, and I open and close my swollen fingers and feel the rusty creak of their joints as I try to keep them loose. The weight of the comportes will twist them permanently if I’m not careful. Tourists wander up the hill, returning to their cars, and regard us with curious glances. We both look like we’ve jumped on a grape grenade. The must has hardened the leather of my boots so that they barely bend at the toe. The soreness is general and pervading. There might be a cut or a bruise that shrieks to its own tune, but more a cumulative ache. So much of winemaking is cumulative, it’s fitting that so too is the pain that comes with it.

Andy measures vintage by how far into it he starts taking painkillers before he goes to bed and when he wakes up in the morning. At the foot of the hill, we stagger into the Café Sola and Andy heads to the bar to order the beers. His French is better than mine by a factor of about a million. He also gets a local discount. I smile at Laurent, the manager, who sits at his regular table with an empty coffee cup in front of him. He likes asking how I am in English, and smiles broadly at my answer in broken French. The answer is always some flavour of ‘bon’. I used to only order small beers, or ‘un demi’ at bars in France, because I was proud that I knew the word. After a day in the winery, though, it’s ‘distingués’ for us, though if it’s me ordering, Laurent asks if I want a pint.

I’m a beer snob. Always have been. I drink ale and craft beer and rare bottles from small breweries. I like beer with flavour and think the average lager you find on draught in the pub is a hideous abomination.

All that goes out the window in the Sola after a day in the winery. I slurp down Heineken like a drowning man gasping for air, as though it were the very nectar of the gods.

Andy and I chat about the day and the grapes and the wines and the tanks and the barrels and all that has gone on since we woke. Then we’ll notice the sport on the telly or whatever dreadful music they’re playing and laugh about what it reminds us of. Sometimes I drink my pint too quickly and get brain freeze from the chill of the beer.

I could stay there until I fall asleep, pouring cold lager down my throat until I lose consciousness. So much of me wants to do that. But Andy has a family, a family he barely sees over this time. He needs to see his boys before they go to sleep, to eat with his wife and share some moments together before exhaustion takes over. It occurs to me that as the years have gone on, and Philippe has spent more time in the vines during harvest, that it’s because he finishes earlier, and can spend more time with his family. I see Andy when we get home from our beers, high-fiving and hugging his wee boys, asking Kirsten how her day was; calling her darling, and look forward to him being able to pull back a bit himself. Let me or some apprentice run the winery at Mas Cristine while he can see his family more during harvest time.

After dinner Andy and I popped over to the Sola for a beer before bedtime. Collioure was quiet, and a cool breeze bit at my bare legs. I don’t tend to wear long trousers down here, and sometimes I regret it. The Sola was almost empty, and I didn’t recognise the teams playing rugby on the big screen. On one empty table stood a giraffe; a five-litre tube with a tap on the bottom, usually filled with draft lager. It looked like a very tall bong. About an inch of sad-looking lager sat at the bottom of it, fizz-less. There was no sign of the giraffe-drinkers; they’d probably sought livelier surroundings. They’d most likely be disappointed. We sat inside and an older guy, maybe in his early fifties, joined us. Andy knew him. He looked well-groomed and respectable with that permanent tan that comes in these parts. He spoke softly with Andy and I couldn’t quite follow – I knew it was about harvest, but not the specifics. Seeing I was struggling, Andy started to translate for me. The man had vines, passed on through generations from his family. He was talking about how much things had changed at harvest. As recently as 50 years ago, he said, his parents were harvesting with donkeys to carry the grapes back. One vineyard was a problem, however. It sat on the cliff-edge on the end of one of the peninsulas. The only road to reach it wasn’t a road at all. It was a single track, and precarious at that. They could go and pick their grapes, but they couldn’t bring them back. Instead, they needed to use a path down to the water at the base of the vineyard and wait for a boat to come from the co-op and collect the grapes from them. If the Tramontane was in, and the white horses were galloping across the water, it could be tricky for the boat returning with the grapes. Andy relayed the story with respectful amazement, and I listened with wide eyes. I’d seen the old tools of viticulture; my mind wrapped around the basic difficulties of wine-making in the past with little problem or shock. There wasn’t a huge gap between how they used to do things and how they do things now. But the image of manoeuvring baskets full of grapes down a cliff side to a waiting boat threw into sharp relief not only how things had changed, but the lengths, in any era, that folks went through to get the harvest in.

We bought the guy a beer and listened some more. He doesn’t have as many vines these days. Every year it’s more work for less money. He doesn’t trust the co-op anymore. He’s not sure there’s much of a future for small growers in Collioure, Banyuls or anywhere in the Roussillon, really. Andy nodded and said something that sounded commiseratory (not a word but it should be). It was a story Andy had heard quite a bit, and even I knew the narrative somewhat. The wine world down here changed quickly, and there are lots of people unsure of what that change means, or even how it’s changed. What some winemakers find exciting, some grape growers find terrifying. What’s certain though, is that even though people don’t need to carry grapes down cliff sides anymore, it hasn’t really got any easier.

 

The night before, I threw my old boots in the bin across the street from Andy and Kirsten’s flat. The vintages had destroyed them. I needed to buy a new pair before next year. There was going to be a next year. After all that, there was going to be a next year.

Kirsten drops me at the bus stop and it’s still dark. I’ve got ten minutes to spare and the Red Sox are playing their last game of the season. This month that I’ve been making wine, they’ve tanked their season and it’s all come down to this one game against the Orioles. I’m waiting for the Frogbus to take me to Girona, and from there I’ll fly to Prestwick and make my way to St Andrews after a brutal six weeks. I’ve not seen a game since I got here, and everything I’ve read is bad news. My data streaming bill’s outrageous already, but I check my phone anyway. We’re up. Paps is closing. I lose signal. I don’t know what’s happened. The bus pulls up and and I load my kit on, show my ticket and find a seat. My phone flashes back into service. The Sox blew it. The season’s gone. Over. And I’m flying home. This one nearly broke me. It nearly broke me but I wanted to stay longer. It’s not over yet. There’s still wine to make. But it is for me. The Sox are done and I’m done.