The face of Champagne has changed over the last few days as the pickers arrive with various sleeping arrangements attached and proceed to fill the landscape with an inordinate amount of white vans, caravans and slow moving tractors laden with coloured bins full of the seasons harvest...
The grapes are hand picked as required by law...and then carried carefully [and often very very slowly!!] off to the press to have the juices extracted that create the areas treasure that is Champagne....
Due to our ridiculously hot Easter and beyond the harvest begins a month earlier than normal. The children are still on holidays and the precious vacation month of August is interrupted by the hardest physical job of the year. They begin in torrential rain and then as the days past the sun came out and they will soon forget the miserable beginnings....so the vineyards are now completely full of vehicles various, bins of grapes aplenty....
The harvest employs numerous pickers pulled from all walks of life...there never seems to be enough hands to go around and the vines become a hive of activity...as one would expect there is also plenty of activity behind the scenes preparing breakfast lunch and dinner for the pickers, drivers and various other workers who work hard out from 4am till 11pm making sure that the juice is carefully extracted, the bins are cleaned and sterile ready for the next day, the slurry of grape skins is removed from the press etc etc
The meals are served at the vineyard at lunchtime and as you pass by you see brightly coloured lightly clad pickers gathered around the plastic easy ups out of the sun tucking into a full on 4 course meal with wine to give them the energy to get through the afternoon...this is repeated at the end of the day at local restaurants and Champagne houses where everyone exchanges tales of the day with humour and hilarity over a glass of bubbly or red wine before crashing exhausted into a makeshift bed somewhere in a hidden corner of Champagne...
The supermarkets specialise in bulk buy over this period and you can buy all of the normal seasonal vegetables, meats, cheeses and desserts on a scale that is hard to imagine...budgets are strictly adhered to so the food is simple, plentiful and fresh...preparation kept to the minimum with roast chicken, cold meats, slow cooked casseroles, potatoes, quiches, pasta, salads and large platters of classic cheeses with fruit or custard tarts washed down with good cheap plentiful red wine or the growers own Champagne....
A special time of the year where all hands work the wheel for 10 days. Every decent sized village in Champagne has a Cooperative Agricole where those who have grapes to press in smaller quantities use a communal press to maximize the facility while minimalising the financial outlay. This Champagne is often labelled and sold but more often left unlabelled and used for one's own families consumption....never legally able to be gifted but only to be drunk whilst a family member is present...unlabelled Champagne is prized in our house and we have fond memories of Madam Paris visiting with newspaper wrapped chilled bottles on many an occasion...Mothers Day, birthdays, Christmas morning to name a few...
Then it all comes to an end and exhausted the pickers move on slowly trailing across the countryside to the next harvest region about to come into season...apples in Normandy, grapes in the Alsace....the rubbish is cleared from the caravan sites, the feilds turn back to their original green grassy selves and the supermarkets start thinking about 'Reentre'. The bulk buy is slowly replaced with 'Back to School' specials...clothing, new shoes,stationary, books, computers and lunch box fillers....
And the sun still continues to shine....long may it continue!!
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