TORN LIGAMENTS & VINTAGE HANDS

Spring is not only about partying. With the vines awake, there is much to do. Throughout the winter, time in the vineyards is mostly maintenance and pruning. Once the buds break and the sap is rising, viticulture becomes very much a mixture of both farming and gardening. As soon as the vines have leaves again, they have to be protected. Even organic and biodynamic viticulture allows for the use of what’s called Bordeaux Mixture, a very simple solution of copper and sulphur that helps keep rot away and reduce the threat of nasty things like oidium. Spraying Bordeaux Mixture takes some time. You should work in teams of two – on the terrain that we work, lugging a massive tank full of liquid on your back is ridiculously hazardous.

One spring, José went out to do a quick bit of spraying on his own. Normally, his son, Vincent, would have joined him, but that particular day something came up and José decided to head out alone. He was in one of the vineyards much like Catala, working his way down and then back up again. It wasn’t too hot, but it was getting late. He slipped, and his knee went straight into one of the wooden posts used to train younger vines. José went down like a sack. He was only 20 metres down the hill from the truck but he couldn’t move. He reached for his phone. His pocket was empty. The phone was sat on the dashboard of the truck. The vineyard’s miles away from anywhere. There was no one close by walking a dog or spraying their own vines. It was just José, lying alone on the side of the hill, immobile and with too much dead weight strapped to his back. Somehow he managed to twist his way off of the chemical tank and started making his way back up the slope. With all his mass on the loose topsoil, he started many an avalanche and for every inch or so up, he lost a half inch back down again. Two steps forward, one step back. There was no question of putting any weight at all on the leg. It was too excruciating. José is not of slight build.

It took two hours of slipping, sweating and swearing to crawl the 20 metres up the hill. Eventually, he managed to get back to the truck and pull himself up into the cab. He grabbed his phone. It had no signal. Fuck.

Eventually, Vincent came looking for him. He missed dinner. José would never miss dinner. The doctors told him later that it would have been harder to damage the knee more than he did. He tore his ACL (anterior cruciate ligament) and the rest: all the tendons and muscles around his knee were utterly shredded. The doctor gave strict instructions for José: he was to do absolutely nothing, put no weight on it, for months, perhaps even a year, during his recovery; certainly no picking of grapes or heavy lifting. Even driving the truck was off-limits. Of course, doctor’s orders were not quite the irresistible object coming against the immovable force of Catalan machismo and the needs and requirements of harvest. Later that year, José was driving the truck and grabbing heavy things and wincing at the weight on his knee. He didn’t pick, though, and by the end realised that heavy-lifting was definitely a no-no. His knee’s still in dreadful shape, but he does everything he can, and several things he probably shouldn’t, all year round.

Soon the rains let off and spring gives way to more summer-like weather. You may do some green harvesting if there looks to be quite a lot of grapes. Green harvesting occurs throughout the wine world. Mostly used during large vintages, it’s a practice in which you cut off some of the bunches in order to promote concentration of flavour and vigour among the remaining grapes. This only works if you cut those bunches off before veraison – preferably some time before. There are certain grapes for which this is essential – our Mourvèdre, for instance, is always clipped down to three bunches per vine before harvest. If we don’t do that, there isn’t enough concentration in the juice to counter balance the tannins in the grapes’ thick skins.

As well as green harvesting, it’s the constant tending to the vines, keeping track of growth rates and dealing with any issues that may come up, be it rot, weeds or insects. The heat comes, as do the tourists. Folks begin flocking to the beach and even the standard lunch break might include a dip in the sea.

Bizarrely, the closer vintage gets, the further away it can begin to seem.

 

The pain finally ceased in my right hand. It only took about ten months. I did something to it last vintage, I’m not sure what it was precisely, but I think it came about trying to unscrew the nozzle of a hose as quickly as possible. It felt like a muscle tear, around the bones that eventually become the middle and index finger. I’m at the age now, and have the sort of ailments, that means something is always sore. I never knew the spectrum of sore before, however, and now I can differentiate between things that are just sore (my ankles, knees, neck and right shoulder are just sore, pretty much permanently, in various stages of intensity) and things that are hurt. My hand was hurt. I thought for a while that it might always be hurt (which would lead to it moving from being hurt to being sore). That as my early middle-age gave way to middle middle-age and then late middle-age, I might start referring to it as my ‘bad hand’. It would have been well-situated, being on the same side as my ‘bad shoulder’. All my other bad limbs are not limited by labels such as ‘left’ and ‘right’ and refuse to work in beautiful symmetry.

With that pain gone, so goes the last of the previous vintage’s injuries. Some of scars remain, of course. But for the most part, I’ll be whole when I go back. My hands have gone soft again, smooth to the touch, and bearing the minimal blemishes of someone who spends most days writing with a keyboard. Even the callous by the last joint of my right middle finger, the one that rises and hardens from the way I hold my pen, is merely a minor lump at the moment.

I’ve read that some martial artists punch iron to toughen their hands and prepare them for the rigours of combat. I wonder what manner of routine could be concocted for winemakers, to get their hands vintage-ready before vintage, or if it would even do any good. Vintage hands are both the blessing and curse of winemaking. The few days before the callouses form, the cuticles are shorn down to the quick, leaving nothing left to snag or tear, before the muscles in your hands remember what it’s like to need their own power, not just the hands but the fingers, able to lift and to balance at any angle hanging from a ladder or balancing a comporte demands. It’s not strength that comes from weights or can really be planned for. The fingers take the brunt, because so many things are right on the edge of going wrong. There are so many points where something is about to happen and someone screams ‘wait!’ and all the purchase you have left, the difference between disaster and salvation, is what strength and balance you have in the final knuckles of your middle three fingers.

I don’t think punching iron would help.

It’s why I always think of the whites as tougher than the reds, even though there’s far more red, and so much more work. By the time the reds come, my muscles and hands are ready for it. The friction burns from shovelling the marc of the white stems speeds up the hardening of the palms and pads, as does the relentless speed of those changes and the violence of loading the press compared to the (relatively) gentle nature of loading the de-stemmer.

We don’t use gloves for much in the winery because we build our own. And just to make sure the callouses take, we rinse our hands constantly. We need to. Grape juice is sticky. A spray with the hose, a dip in the ever-present water/SO2 mix, these things happen 20 or 30 times a day. They have to.

Then the reds come in and your hands aren’t just battered and raw, they’re stained. There is an old winery trick that keeps the tannins and dye from building up too quick. It’s genius. Someone explained how it worked to me once, but I’d rather not be reminded. I like the magical logic of the solution. After processing reds, and sorting through the fruit, or hand-punching barrels and that sort thing, with your hands caked in pigment and tannin and the very essence of colour, march your way over to the waste section of the de-stemmer and rub the discarded stems over your hands thoroughly. The result is amazing. It doesn’t get off the deep stuff, the bits that fill the gaps, but it gets enough that by the end of vintage you don’t look like you have circulation problems. Unless, of course, by the end of vintage you really do have circulation problems. In which case, you should see someone.

So by the time the whites are processed and fermenting away, we have our gauntlets. We’ve built the shield around our hands. It’s only leather armour, but it will do. It’s, at times, excruciating to construct. It’s not just the muscle and the callous that contributes, but the scar tissue as well. All the wounds gained in those first weeks, the cuts and the scrapes, they scar quickly and add to the armour. You’ll be grateful for it later. And once the armour is built, you get the reds to give it colour.

I looked at my fingerprints, on both hands, and they weren’t a pretty sight. The pigment of a million or more grape skins stained the grooves between the ridges. Cuts sliced perpendicular to their idiosyncratic patterns. Never parallel. My cuticles ragged and dyed. The nails unintentionally painted. My palms, pads and fingers felt of sandpaper.

I wrote that when I returned from my first harvest. I was working as a sommelier at the time, and my customers were somewhat concerned that, as far as appearances went, my hands didn’t seem fit for service. My boss thought it was hilarious. A simple explanation to the diners as I poured was all that was required.

‘Please pardon the appearance of my hands; I’ve just been making wine in the Roussillon,’ I would say. And they seemed to be fine with that.

Soon, however, the stains and scars faded. I no longer needed to apologise for the appearance of my hands. Without constant battering, they regained their softness. Lifting the occasional case of wine seemed pedestrian. It took only three weeks for all the pigment to disappear. After two months, the scars had faded. And in ten weeks, the last rasping callous had returned to its soft and lazy state.

They’re whole, healthy. Ready to do it all again.