ZZ TOP & ROLLERCOASTERS

On a dusty, sunny day in july, we drove though some vineyards just outside (or in? it’s so hard to tell with Argelès) Argelès. It was what summer days are supposed to be. Crystal clear but for perhaps a dissipating jet trail or two. The Med like topaz. A breeze blew, but there was no Tramontane gale. It was gentle and cooled off the spot where a bit of sweat collected at the back of my neck. You could hear the vines growing around us as we pulled up to the single house sat in the midst of all these ripening grapes. This is where Julien’s dad lives, and he owns the vines that surrounded us. He built the house here himself. It’s not quite high enough to see the sea, but it faces in that direction anyway. We had popped by to pick up a few tools and he cracked open a beer for us, asking us what we expected from the impending harvest. We chatted and then he said something to Andy and motioned towards me, laughing at the eternal joke of me coming here on my holidays. He then moved back to wine, and asked about the vines and how they’re going. He’s grown grapes for decades. He’s a giant, bearded Catalan who used to be a baker and never misses an opportunity to speak whimsically of the misbehaviour of his youth. When he’s with Julien, Julien takes on the look of someone very quickly embarrassed by their dad. I know the look well. I’ve perfected it. But at that moment it was just the man and us talking business and sipping beer – no tales of the whorehouses in Jonquera or whatever other border town he used to visit, just shop chat about when harvest will be and how big it looks. He knew most of it of course, most of the vines are his, or used to be. But he wanted to be kept in the loop; to keep his ear to the ground even as he enjoyed his semi-retirement.

Waiting for grapes to ripen is kind of like a roller coaster. The winter is waiting in the queue, worrying for a minute that you’re not tall enough to get on in the first place (OK, like a roller coaster when you’re a little kid) and that when you finally get to the very front of the line, the gate will close before you while you wait for yet another round until you can get on. Then, you get on, and you’re excited, because this is very, very different from not being on a roller coaster. Bud break is kind of like when they bring down the safety bar in front of you. There’s no going back once the safety bar comes down. There’s also no going back once the buds break because time is linear and only moves in one direction. Spring is very much the inching forward at low altitude. Every loud ‘ka-chung’ of the winch is a shoot shooting or a leaf opening, or the very, very tiny pre-grapes forming. And all of those things bring you a little bit higher up. It takes a few months – it’s a slow roller coaster – but my goodness does it go high up. There are undulations along the way. Heavy downpours, hailstorms and the ridiculous winds that ravage these slopes. Hopefully, if you’re very lucky and have made ample sacrifices to both Dionysus and the weather gods, these will be slight undulations. The sort of undulations that would suit a roller coaster for your bratty kid brother who’s too scared of heights to really tackle the big ones. If it’s a bad growing season, those undulations are crazier than the final slam; the loop where you actually go all the way upside down and around. And then there’s that final slam. That crazy peak that the roller coaster has been inching its way up to all this time? That peak is called veraison. Veraison is when the berries finish their growth and start to ripen. It’s sort of like grape puberty. It’s at this point, if the weather is willing, that the roller coaster begins its plunge towards vintage. If the grapes are red grapes, this is when they begin to develop their colour, changing from the green that all grapes start with. At this point, in this part of the world, and barring hail or some other catastrophe, you really have an idea of how big your harvest is going to be. This is good, because this is when you do the final bits of hiring and preparation for the harvest. If you know it’s going to be a big one, you might look for a few more pickers. If veraison comes early, and the weather looks good, you might ask those pickers to come a week or so earlier than you normally would have. You want warmth and you want sunlight.

One year, in July, veraison set in quite early, and folks were predicting both a bumper harvest and a high quality one that was going to start very, very early. And so everyone readied themselves for such an event. The weather was hot and, strangely for this dry corner of France, quite humid. Veraison set in just about festival season, when the party-loving folks at Château Valmy hold their big ‘Les Déferlantes’ festival. Château Valmy is one of the few wine estates in the region that would look right on a post card. A big, Victorian era château with a similarly large winery surrounded by impeccably manicured vines. They even put flower baskets on the end of their vine rows. To be fair, there is some evidence that this provides some manner of distraction for hungry aphids that might otherwise feast on the vines, but I reckon they’re intention is purely decorative. Of course, the wine isn’t all that great, but at least the place is pretty to look at and they’ve spent bajillions on it, which is good for the region and all that. Personally, I think it would be better for the region if they put all that effort into making amazing wine, but I think that might be a little old fashioned on my part.

However, they do hold a fucking cool music festival every year. That particular year saw both ZZ Top and Arcade Fire headlining. I went the night of Arcade Fire, which was awesome, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want to see ZZ Top that little bit more. The nice thing about this festival is that it’s not an overnight camping thing. It doesn’t have to be. The camping population of Argelès over the summer is ridiculous; it’s like 70,000 people or some small city’s population like that. So once the gigs are over for the night, everyone gets on the ‘Petit Train’ (The Petit Train is not a train. It’s a jeep that’s made up to look like a train, and has several ‘carriages’ that it tows along. Both Argelès and Collioure have a few of these that run for the tourists, taking them around and showing them the sights. The stop for it in Collioure is right by the Sola, and often we’ll sit sipping a beer whilst watching the tourists pile into the train, cameras dangling around their necks.), which takes them back to town and swings by all the campsites, and you don’t have to stand knee-deep in mud. Which is just as well, as the night of the Arcade Fire gig, a storm rocked in off the Mediterranean that behaved as though it had got lost on its way from the Caribbean during hurricane season. You could see it, flashes of lightning in the distance followed by the inevitable echoes of thunder. It started off so far away. Like a storm in a story. But it just kept getting closer, and the thunder got louder, like approaching footsteps. And then something happened that I’d only seen in the movies. There was a bolt of lightning, so bright it was as though a giant paparazzi had taken a group photo of the entire festival-going crowd, thunder like a bomb, and following the thunder, a downpour that fell so hard the drops hurt. Almost instantly, everything was wet. It was like a monsoon. We ran down to the Petit Train, as did most of the other folks. Poor Arcade Fire had to finish the set early for fear of electrocution. They seemed like very nice folks. I think maybe they’re Canadians.

It could have been a disaster, but it wasn’t. There were more than enough trains for everyone and no one panicked. People were wet and had to go home early, but no one was an asshole about it. We dried out and had a dram and it was fine.

But that storm marked the beginning of some weird weather for the post-veraison season. Afterwards it was hot and sunny but hazy, in a way not seen very often in those parts and, unbeknownst to us, it was doing some funny things to the grapes. Without the right amounts of direct sunlight, the bunches were ripening very, very unevenly. Even the random sampling wasn’t showing the extent of this at the time; it was only when harvest came that we realised the bunches had variances of up to five degrees – some grapes at 14% potential alcohol and some at only 9%. It was crazy. It threw the entirety of harvest out of whack, adding an extra three or four weeks to it and nearly breaking many of us involved (I was close to emotionally dead by about three weeks in – it was a huge harvest and seemed never ending). That was a big and unexpected undulation on the roller coaster of ripening. And we didn’t even really notice it as it was happening.

Summer isn’t just a time of ripening. It’s a time of partying. Andy and Kirsten got married in the summer down here and prepared for it in the single greatest way ever. They made a fortified wine for their wedding. They picked some old vine Grenache Noir in 2007 that weighed in at 18.5% potential alcohol, basket pressed it themselves, fortified it to 17% and put it in a 100 litre tank for people to help themselves to at the nuptials. Of course, that wasn’t the only wine at the wedding. There were bottles and magnums of Coume del Mas and Mas Cristine everywhere, as well as 16 magnums of Champagne to kick things off. But having a vat of fortified wine available on tap, well, I don’t think many folks attending, even the locals, had seen that before. The wedding took place up in the hills above town, just down from the Catala vineyard and just above the Consolation vineyard, at an old hermitage (the one that gave the Consolation vines their name). The Petit Train brought us all up. It was a small affair, attended by good friends and family from all over the world. We ate outside, on long picnic tables, with beautiful bouillabaisse, BBQ meat, salad, cheese and charcuterie. The wedding cake was made by local chocolatier genius Olivier Baijard, who sculpted a crown for for it adorned with a chocolate wine bottle, grapes and an artist’s palette and brush. We feasted and danced. The band included the best man, Tim, and Andy himself, with Kirsten on the tambourine with her mate, Hannah, with Broomie on bongos, guitar and vocals and Sheep on guitar and vocals. I got up to sing at one point, confidence boosted by the ‘Vin d’Marriage’. No one threw anything at me or disconnected the mic, so I assume my performance wasn’t too disastrous.

Andy was the first to grab an empty carafe and fill it up. I think people were a little scared to begin with. I followed suit. Soon, everyone was filling them up, and as the meal wore on, the advice to add a bit of water, a perfectly reasonable continental thing to do, was lost utterly. There was no Petit Train to pick us up, even though one had taken us there. Instead we followed, very drunkenly, a path carved through the vines. I found myself nearly falling down many of the same vines that I would nearly fall down a few months later during my first attempt at picking. That walk back took us under the span of the large Viaduct du Douy, the bridge that brings the motorway over the valley and through the mountain; a fast route to Port-Vendres. It was supposed to go on to Banyuls, but construction stopped when the money ran out. So this fast bit of road runs right up until the outline of what should have been another tunnel, and instead breaks into a roundabout that brings you to various exits into the town and another hairpin, sheer-drop, too-narrow for proper traffic really, road that, because it is treacherous and in France, attracts too many cyclists for there to be any comfort whatsoever. I find those roads dangerous enough as it is, without worrying about whether there’s a lycra-clad lunatic about to sneak between me and the short concrete wall that separates me from a long drop through steep cliffs and vines.

Of course, that evening, wandering through down the path through cascading vine leaves with the heavy swagger that fortified wine brings, there was no thought of driving. And the cars on the bridge above couldn’t see the kilt-clad reveller descending below them. At the base of the valley the town meets the vines and overlaps somewhat, with rows in place of what may have been someone’s backyard. Emerging from the vines in kilts earned more than a glance or two from the kids playing football in the street. Drunkenly muttered ‘bonjours’ and the odd attempts at thumbs up and grins brought their incredulous stares quickly to giggles. It was all good. There seemed a bubble of good will surrounding us. We looked ridiculous to them, and were obviously drunk, but there was no shouting or bad behaviour. Just the sheen of a good time that was to continue, apparently, at the Piano Bar, then still in the capable hands of Michel. And still with a remarkable selection of Trappist beers.

Because after an entire day drinking Banyuls, an extraordinarily strong beer brewed by monks in Belgium makes the perfect nightcap. I had to be carried home that night. The next day the sun burned off the hangover of the night before and it was as though the wedding never ended. Everyone just changed into more comfy clothes and kept going. We barbecued in the back garden behind the Sola and drank cold beer slowly. Nobody took their sunglasses off.

Weddings, festivals, parties of all shapes and sizes; there’s a great deal of enjoyment had in the summer here.

In early September the artists of Collioure celebrate their own harvest festival. They lay down proper turf along the Rue de la Fraternité for ‘le déjeuner sur l’herbe’. It’s mostly an ‘end of season’ festival, heralding the end of the summer and celebrating a, hopefully, successful three or four months selling sculptures and canvases, prints and posters. The ateliers and galleries will often pour wine and friends, acquaintances and passers-by will wander along the freshly-turfed lane, marvelling at a street covered in grass, window shopping or actually shopping. They often get bands for the evenings and the music sometimes goes on long past what would be considered reasonable for a quiet seaside town.

It’s another sign of the shifting calendar; the impending rustle of dry leaves and emptying of the region as people leave their holidays and return to whatever form of reality from whence they came.

 

It was the beginning of August, and we sat outside as the sun set over Loch Indaal. The water turned a deep sapphire while the whitewash along the side of the Bowmore distillery glowed in the waning light. A breeze kicked in from the water, raising a bit of chop on that deep sapphire and bringing a bite to the air. The girls’ hair whipped in the wind while I poured the wine for everyone. We started with Folio, the Collioure Blanc from Coume del Mas, and I spoke a few words about the wine. It was a bottle from my first vintage there; they all were. The folks at the table heckled a bit, but without malice. We were all friends.

I talked about the wine and the place it came from. Most of the people there knew Andy as well, and some had tried the wines. We’d fired up the barbecue and the wine flowed. It wasn’t a formal tasting – they’d just asked me to say a few words. It felt odd, stood in the garden of a cottage on a loch, next to a distillery, to be talking about wine and France.

When I’ve these wines around me, the Roussillon is never far. I open a bottle of wine that I’ve helped make and I go back there in my mind. It’s like a reflex. And so sitting with friends on a patio on Islay, off the west coast of Scotland, I was back in the sun of the Roussillon, lifting comportes off the back of Julien’s truck to empty into the de-stemmer, smelling the ferments and the sweet honeysuckle of the Grenache.

I set the empties up on the sea wall and positioned my camera to take in the bottles and the distillery in the background. It was before twilight, but after sunset; the sky’s darkening pastel shades framed in contrast the sea and shadowed hills in the distance. I wanted a record of these two places together, the juice of the grape next to where the juice of the grain came from. It was a strange sensation, to be so perfectly happy and content where I was, in such a beautiful corner of the world, and still to feel an impatience to be elsewhere, and to get started again.