Picking by hand, before the sun
Thirteen mornings picking grapes in France, starting at ten to seven in the cold and the fog. It taught me more about harvest than any garden has.
One autumn, years ago now, we picked grapes in France for the harvest. Thirteen mornings, starting at ten to seven, in cold that got into your knuckles and a fog that sat between the rows until the sun burned it off around nine.
By the second day we had learned to despise the word bonjour, because it was the word that meant the day had started and our backs had to bend again. And bend they did — a vine is picked stooped, one bunch at a time, secateurs in one hand and a bucket dragging in the mud behind you.
What it taught me
You cannot rush a harvest. The fruit is ready when it is ready, all at once, and then everything happens by hand and against the weather. I think about those cold mornings every autumn now, in a much smaller way, when the tomatoes all ripen in the same fortnight and I am suddenly up to my elbows in them.
Growing a thing is patient work. Harvesting it is not — it is a scramble, and it is glorious, and then it is over.
I have never tasted wine quite like the young, cloudy stuff they gave us at lunch, straight from that year's pressing. Possibly because we had earned it by half past eleven.
